I enjoyed this movie, it got a tad preachy at times, but overall it was really good. I really liked the characters. Which it seems most films in general nowadays lack good characters. I could get into the storyline in this film too. I think because it was so different from anything I've ever seen it really grabbed my attention. The animation was really great too. I'd recommend it, especially to anyone who enjoys fantasy films.

First off I would like to say for once the dubbing was top notch, it was far superior to the japanese voices which I didnt think suited the charecters. I especially loved Billy Crystal as Calcifer.

I dont know why but all Ghibli charecters look alike. I mean the older Sophie didnt look much different to Yubaba from Spirited Away that could be just be me though. The castle animation was cool though.

The music was wonderful it really evoked my emotions.

The story was interesting and makes me want to read the book even though the love story was obvious.

Even when he isn't on top of his game, Hayao Miyazaki still delivers quality movies with graceful animation and bizarre, but likable characters (The English dub has great performances by Christian Bale as Howl, and Billy Crystal as Calcifer). Earning a mere $5 million in the US and an additional $230 million elsewhere, this 2005 anime feature tells the story of a young girl / old woman named Sophie and her run-in with the wizard Howl. Howl was nominated for the best animated feature but lost to the also good Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Like his other films, Howl has a stunning flying sequence, a female protagonist and some visually brilliant mechanical devices - in this case a castle with legs, and a magical score.

Early on, the young Sophie crosses paths with the witch of the west (a former flame of Howl) who turns her into an old woman. She runs away looking for magical help and becomes the housekeeper (castle keeper rather) of Howl where she meets the cranky but friendly demon fire Calcifer, and the apprentice to Howl. She also meets the unassuming mute scarecrow dubbed "Turniphead."

The castle has a magical door that opens to houses in rival countries where Howl goes by different aliases (aliasi?). Both kings want to enlist Howl in their war, but he doesnt really want to get involved. Anyways, herein lies the film's weakness. This plot doesn't really go anywhere. So, while I enjoyed spending time with the characters, it didn't seem like their actions really took them anywhere. So, while this may sound like a dumb statement, this movie would be another masterpiece if it weren't for the story. Its not that the story is bad, it just wraps up a little too neatly and pointlessly after a great build up. Fairy talesque "happily ever afters" don't belong in Ghibli movies (though happy endings sometimes do). Howl come is just shy of perfect (see Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke) but still delivers a pretty great movie earning a low for Ghibli but unattainable by the recent efforts of Dreamworks - B+.

A mediocre two-and-a-half for this one. I saw the movie when it came into the theaters, and while I liked it, it fell far short of my expectations. Miyazaki has a bad habit of giving his films far-too-perfect happy endings, in which even the villains abandon everything they were supposed to believe in at the drop of a dime, and this movie was quite possibly the worst case of it.

When the movie starts, the story seems perfectly understandable, and as the viewer you just can't wait to see what fantastic adventure will unfold to reveal the fabulous "Moving Castle" you saw in the previews. Well, the moving castle is revealed all right, and it is one of the most beautiful animated sights I have ever seen, but the story that brings it around is just totally nonsensical. Characters fall under bizarre and random curses for no apparent reason; inanimate objects come to life a la Beauty and the Beast, but seem far more ridiculous; and by the end of the movie, all of the main characters are transforming so much, in their motivations and even their appearances, that you pretty much give up all hope for any consistency and succumb to the idea that you're just watching a carnival of mutating spiritual entities. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly what Miyazaki was trying to show.

That said, it's worth a look for the visuals; and who knows, maybe you can make more sense of this movie than I did. But one watch is enough for me.

With "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away" being two of my favorite animated movies, "Howl's Moving Castle" comes off as a disappointment.

"Howl's Moving Castle" (HMC) is about a girl named, Sophie, who gets turned into an old woman. Not knowing what to do next she sets off into the wilderness, and ends up at the door of Wizard Howl’s (surprise) moving castle.

Let's start off with the original author of HMC. Diana Wynne Jones has written two very good books, and a lot of decent/mediocre ones. HMC falls into the latter. Nonetheless Miyazaki fiddled with some of the better elements of the original story, that would have been better off left alone.

For starters, Sophie is not a self-conscious, timid creature. She is quite a tough heroine, who actually accepts her fate. Also the Witch of the Waste is evil, evil I tell you. In the movie she is just a sweet old disturbed lady. But, more importantly then the characters is how Miyazaki tinkered with the original story line. He replaces a decent story, with a confusing, non-sensical one.

*SPOILER*
At the end of the movie, the main antagonist Wizard Sulliman, just forgets the war. She sees Howl and Sophie being happy and all of sudden its "War, well I guess we better end that stupid thing."
*END SPOILER*

It also lacks what made "Spirited Away" and "Princess Mononoke" so great. HMC lacks a message. In Mononoke and Spirited Away, you have real messages that apply to everyone. The themes of these two movies dealt with the world on whole, the environment and community. HMC just has a simple message "War is bad." This movie could have been so much deeper.

Visually this movie earns four stars. The castle is amazing, and the background and character animation is gorgeous.

Visually this movie gets an A, but plot and characters receives a C-.

It seems that Miyazaki increasingly wants to tell less stories and show more worlds. While his earlier works were more or less coherent, his lastest works seem to be more like glimpses into his rather active imagination. This still makes Disney seem rather trite. The worlds of Miyazaki are all very detailed, imaginative, and colorful, and this movie is no exception. It's a shame it's such a hodge-podge of happenings, with too much backstory and not enough explanations. Howl's Moving Castle combines the mechanical, warlike atmosphere of Castle In The Sky with the whimsy of Spirited Away. It doesn't do either as well as those two.

What a great movie. Like all of Miyazaki's works it was funny, charming, the scenery was beautiful and at times breathtaking. A very visually great film.

I've only seen the English version but the dubbing from what i could tell was great.I recommend this movie to everyone.

I really don't get what's so "confusing" about this movie. I followed the story fine.

4/4 stars, A+

First post!

Personally, I think the film portrayed the Howl's Moving Castle characters from the book well enough - not top quality for Miyazaki, though. One gripe on this is that we don't have Michael, but I guess I can live with that (not even Miyazaki could have stuck all the stuff from the book to the movie!). Contrary to a lot of people, I instantly grasped the plot. It was like second nature to me, and I found the whole movie very interesting indeed.

Characters:

-+ Howl +-
I found him much, much more interesting in the book, and much more human (even though both the book and the movie portrays Howl as a vain character). In the movie, the love between Howl and Sophie is, yes, unexplained, and I think Howl is a pretty thin character if put with the others. I do get what Miyazaki is getting at though.

-+ Sophie +-
I don't get why people don't get Sophie's age changes. (Yes, that's a lot of "don't get"s.) However, I'll just stick to that, since the world disagrees with me.

In the book, Sophie had some human faults. That made her such a lovable, realistic, round character that I very much enjoyed reading about. In the movie, her faults weren't as apparent, or as apparent as I would like it to be. Fine, she's desperate and all, but...? The typical hero(ine). (Notice I don't just say heroine.)

-+ Calcifer +-
Calcifer is good. Very good, nothing to comment.

-+ Michael/Markl +-
I really don't like how Miyazaki changed Michael, a 14-5 year old, into the little kiddie Markl. I really don't.

But seeing other people's reviews, they found the plot complicated enough already...so...adding Martha and Lettie in would, I guess, confuse them even more.

-+ Heen +-
WTF? Just because you want to get a substitute for Prince Justin and Ben Suliman doesn't mean you create a comical character...unless he intended it as comic relief. I don't like it.

-+ Witch of the Waste +-
Actually, the Witch was pretty...original in the change from antagonist to useless-junk-floating-around-in-the-household, Some people felt the movie needed a more...defined antagonist. I don't think so, and I think the Witch turning into a useless heap is quite an original idea.

I hated Turnip. I won't call him Prince Justin, he's Turnip. A pretty rotten one too.

Miyazaki grumblingly comes out of retirement (again), makes a film that looks incredible, doesn't make an incredible amount of sense, falls apart at the end as usual, then he defiantly states that it's ridiculous to expect a story to be told in any particular way. We should be grateful, really.

Someone compared Miyazaki's writing and direction in this film to a child playing with a box of coloured blocks, delighting in what he can create on the spur of the moment. I suspect this analogy is close to the truth. It's already known that Miyazaki simply sits down and writes his films with no idea how they're going to end ('Spirited Away' had to be re-written when the producer told him it would run for four hours). This time he even had a book to work from, and he STILL manages to leave the thing filled with plot-holes, undeveloped characters, and an ending, part of which is so laughably ridiculous that it makes all of his other weak endings look well thought out.

This movie copped a bit of a caning from some critics (just look below), and admittedly it's not up there with his masterpiece 'Spirited Away', or with what should have been his masterpiece, 'Princess Mononoke', but let's face it - could this guy make a bad movie? If you count 'Nausicaa', Ghibli have been making movies for 24 years, and they have still to produce one which I've rated below 3 stars. They're like The Beatles of animation. So maybe this is their 'Magical Mystery Tour'. A bit of a mess, but still filled with amazing material.

The first half of the film is certainly the best. An unexplained Edwardian-era type fantasy setting where magic and turn of the century technology exist side by side with nobody batting an eyelid. Rather than the rather slow start to 'Spirited Away', 'Howl' cuts to the chase within minutes, its young protagonist changing from a young girl to an old woman (becoming far more interesting in the process) and then wandering off into a world of typical Miyazakian weirdness.

The 'moving castle', whch appears in the very first scene, is a huge contrivance which totters around belching steam (either the makers of 'Steamboy' got a look at what Miyazaki was doing, or vica versa. The castle is reminiscent of the floating, steam-powered city in that film).

**** SPOILER ******

In fact towards the end of the film, the castle progressively disintegrates until it's reduced to a table on two legs, and even that eventually collapses. Kind of a metaphor for what Miyazaki's scripts tend to do)

**** END SPOILER *****

There are things I don't particularly like about 'Howl'. The shallowness of some of the characters, particularly the unexplained falling-in-love of the two main ones, which really has almost no development at all. The war scenes and motif never seem to work properly with the rest of the film to me either, and at times in these sequences when Howl is flying about it starts to look a little like a typical anime series. But I can't help but forgive these faults when the movie is oozing at the seems with all those completely natural feeling but utterly fantastic touches, gadgets and tableaus which Miyazaki has been creating ever since 'Nausicaa'.

Character-wise the film really only has two strong members. Sophie (old Sophie anyway, and no, you're not imagining it, she does change age seemingly at random in the latter parts of the movie) and the sentient fireplace, Calcifer. Voiced by Billy Crystal he comes across a little like a cross between the cat in 'Kiki' and the dragon in 'Mulan', but it works. Between them they pretty well carry the film, because nobody else has much depth.

And of course we can check of the list of Miyazaki must-haves. Young heroine, sassy old lady (this time they manage to be the one character), horrible bloated old woman, flying machines, yucky, bubbling black things, bad characters who become good, etc.

I agree with much of the negative things that have been said about this film. I think it's probably his weakest along with 'Castle in the Sky', but come on - look at it. I know you can drive a truck through the writing holes, but the thing transports you to another fully realised fantasy setting, and it's a trip.

I wanred to give this movie three and a half stars (in fact I did for a couple of hours), but finally I couldn't ignore its faults and it was dragged down to a 3. Why would I like to give it more? Perhaps for no other reason than this. In a sea of increasingly bad 3D, Ghibli is stubbornly sticking with 2D . Where else am I going to see anything like this anymore? Besides, it's not just a sentimental vote for 2D. Despite whatever problems this film might have, sit it beside 'Shark Tale' or even 'Madagasgar' or any other CG film of the last 12 months, and tell me they're more inspired or unique.

Hello everybody, i just finished watching Howl's moving castle and i really like it. I'm eager to read the book but i'm afraid to get dissapointed by it. Not because of the book's content but of what was cut on the film from the book.
Sophie as a girl was boring, i guess sophie as an old lady should have just stayed with Howl that way. I'm just kidding, i just think that maybe that is how exactly she was suppose to be. Boring and dull. Calcifer is the best in this film, Billy Crystal just brings him more to life. The witch of the waste seemed so powerfull and on the last minute she just completely collapse when Sulliman took away her powers. That really was disapointing, i guess i wanted some one on one between the witch and Sophie. Howl was super charming but he needed more emotions! I guess it was the heart curse that made him so unsensitive. I'm a girl i wanted more romanticism!
Heen and the scarecrow (prince) were just so adorable!