Howl’s Moving Castle (ハウルの動く城, 2004) by Miyazaki Hayao

Post By: Annika Champenois

Howl’s Moving Castle is an especially interesting film in that it is based on a British novel and does not take place in Japan but in a fictional world similar to England or perhaps Wales—and yet, with Hayao Miyazaki as the director, the movie is made in a decidedly Japanese style. It has a focus on the avoidance of Shinto kegare on which comparison with the film Princess Mononoke by the same director sheds light.  The film sends a message about living in harmony with others rather than fighting them.

At the beginning of Howl’s Moving Castle, we get to know the protagonist Sophie as a quiet, withdrawn girl who seems old and faded next to her vivacious sister. After she has a quick encounter with Howl the Wizard without knowing his true identity, the jealous Witch of the Waste visits her hat-shop and puts a spell on her, making her a physically old, bent-over lady. 

Unable to tell anyone about the spell, Sophie leaves the city and ventures into the countryside. She appoints herself the cleaning lady in Howl’s castle, where she befriends the fire-demon Calcifer and, though at first afraid of Howl, she ends up falling in love with the young wizard in spite of his comical immaturity. Howl has been recruited by Madame Suliman to fight in the war in the form of a beast, though he does not feel justified in fighting and bringing about death, and he has a harder time changing back into a human with each transformation. He and Sophie try to evade the nasty blob-men of the dangerous Madame Suliman and even have to deal with Howl’s own impurities in the form of selfishness and temper tantrums. Sophie’s spell wears off as she engages in all these activities and stops feeling so old. Finally, Sophie is able to end the contract between Howl and Calcifer and give Howl back his heart, which Calcifer had had in his hold, and the story ends happily with her, young again, together with Howl.

The sources of kegare which both Howl and Sophie evade throughout the film are negative, consuming feelings such as hate, or the desire to harm and to destroy. There are humans, wizards and demons and an ongoing war in this story, but none of them are inherently bad as a group, and Howl realizes this. This can be compared with Princess Mononoke, in which there were humans, animals and spirits, none of which were bad as a group, and yet the humans and the spirits ganged up against each other. In their anger, hate and growing desire to destroy the other race, the spirits became demons and forgot reason and who they were. This same principle of Shinto impurity eventually making monsters of once reasonable creatures has found its way into Howl’s story: When Howl speaks of being attacked by his own kind, that is, by other wizards transformed into monsters, he says soberly, “After the war, they won’t recall they ever were human.” This, coupled with Calcifer’s repeated warnings throughout the film of Howl not being able to change back if he continues fighting in the form of a beast, emphasizes the source of impurity in the movie. Those who take sides and become swallowed up in defending only their own group and in destroying the other are the ones who may forget who they are and become something wild and without reason (like the spirits turned demons in Princess Mononoke). The monsters that they turn into when they fight are a physical manifestation of the impurity of their actions.

Howl is like Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke, who saw clearly enough to want everyone to coexist in peace instead of wanting one race to triumph. When Sophie sees battleships overhead and asks whose side they are on, Howl bitterly responds, “What difference does it make?”, and he calls them murderers, not caring whether they are “his kind” or the “enemy”. He is not against one side in particular, but against war in general. After he speaks, some amazing cinematography makes a further statement about the ships. The camera stands still as one battleship moves closer and closer, at a slanted angle, and then it cuts to a scene in which we see the battleship still moving from another angle, and finally we have a low angle shot of the moving battleship. This series of differently-angled shots emphasize the threat of this impure instrument of war, which is invading the peaceful countryside and what is essentially Howl’s furusato.

Sophie, like Howl, is untouched by the impurity of choosing sides and hating the others. Her purity is emphasized in the scene in which, after cleaning the house (which in itself is an act of physical purity) and putting out laundry, she sits with Markl looking out over the sea, before the camera pans across the quiet ocean. She is as clean as the house she took care of and as the natural water of the sea. Significantly, in this scene, she agrees with Markl’s speculation that the scarecrow probably is a demon, but since he helped her, “he must be the good kind.” She does not worry about him being bad just because he is a demon. Later, though she grumbles comically at the Witch of the Waste and at the dog who turns out to be Suliman’s spy instead of Howl in disguise, she takes them under her wing, brings them back to Howl’s castle, and takes care of them, even going so far as to ask Markl to watch over “grandma”, the Wicked Witch who put the curse on her earlier. She does not see these two as enemies, and neither she nor Howl show any interest in trying to kill or bring down Suliman, who turns out to be the real threat. In the end, even Suliman decides to leave them be and to call off “this idiotic war”. By not becoming blinded by hatred and wanting to return fire for fire, Howl and Sophie helped Suliman decide to make peace.

The impurity that we do see visually in the film is characterized by dark, slug-like blobs or by nasty-looking liquid. Interestingly enough, both the Witch of the Waste—before she is turned into a mostly harmless elderly lady—and Madame Suliman use blob-men as their retainers. These black blobs mark the powerful magicians who are more or less evil, and so, impure. As seen in this shot of Howl and Sophie escaping some of the blob-men, Howl and Sophie rise above the blobs and find a way out of the narrow streets with its confining framework. The impure blobs, on the other hand, are hierarchically and physically lower and have just run themselves into a dead end where they are trapped by the frames, just as they are symbolically trapped by their own impurity, unable to do anything more than what their mistress orders them to.

Howl does have his impurities, too, though. As Suliman says, “If he stays selfish, I’m afraid he will end up just like the Witch of the Waste.” Though selfishness and immaturity are not necessarily impurity in a Shinto sense, the movie links them with impurity. We see the selfishness of which Suliman speaks when Howl throws a tantrum because his magical hair dyes got mixed up. “I give up. I see no point in living if I can’t be beautiful,” he complains, and spirits of darkness somewhat similar to the blobs appear at the cracks and corners of the castle while Howl’s skin turns into nasty, green slime. The cinematic close-up that shows green Howl sitting folded up into himself in his own self-pity, dripping unclean liquids, with one of the spirits of darkness in the background, masterfully shows how there is room for no one else when he is being this self-centered. The image also makes it obvious that he is in an unclean state. Fortunately, Sophie, Markl and Calcifer can give Howl a hot bath and wash off the impurity, just as Howl likes to take hot baths after he returns from the battlefield, another place of impurity because of death.

Howl’s Moving Castle shows cinematically and through unclean images the Shinto impurities that pervade the story. Blob-men retainers, spirits of darkness and nasty slime marks the cases of kegare, which are the Witch and Madame Suliman when they are doing evil deeds, Howl’s self-centeredness and the monsters into which wizards turn themselves in order to fight. A bird’s eye shot of the framed blob-men below Sophie and Howl shows how sources of kegare are underneath others, and different angles of a moving battleship of death emphasizes its threat and “wrongness”. In contrast, peaceful scenes such as the panning of the lake’s landscape where Sophie and Markl picnic show the purity of those who are untouched by hate and impure motives. Howl and Sophie are trying to escape war, which is a source of impurity because of the deaths it causes, and to not judge anyone to be evil or wrong. Just as in Princess Mononoke, the enemy is not the other side, or race, or person, but rather war and conflict themselves, and the characters must learn to live in harmony with each other so that they do not lose reason and become something monstrous.