• Howls Moving Castle
• Legend
• Secrets of Midde Earth - Inside Tolkien's "The Hobbit"
• The Princess Bride
• Kingdom of Heaven
• Constantine
• Primer
• The Ring Two
• Empires - Holy Warriors: Richard the Lionheart & Saladin -Review
• The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Labyrinth

Howl's Moving Castle - Review

I am not a big fan of animation and rarely watch any of it. I have a particular aversion to Japanese style animations. I am always put off by the characters. They tend toward over exaggeration in both look and emotion. But I read something about this animation being the third biggest grossing film in Japanese history so I thought I would give it a try.

A mixed review: Some of this film is extraordinary. There are scenes that are simply magic. I don't know how to describe it. Some things transcend the delicate border between fantasy and reality and this film dances along that border.

Howl's moving castle itself is a work of sheer genius and Howl's bedroom is something that evokes a sense of wonder. I have seen very few scenes in any animation or movie that evoke the feel that is evoked here.

The artists move through a wide variety of animation techniques. Some of it feels like watercolor, some of it feels like oil paints, some of it feels like traditional animation and some of it has a feel of its own. And there is a sheer joy that can be felt in the simple motion of things. There are simple scenes with something like a dog walking, or two elderly ladies walking up a flight of stairs that you would consider to be nothing special but this animation makes it special. It just revels in the motion of things. For example there is a haunted scarecrow that moves around like a big pogo stick and this is simply terrific to watch.

Now for the criticism: The film was built with all of these various scenes meticulously drawn and lovingly made and they are phenomenal. They evoke a feeling of delight and you are truly transported to another world but....

But pasted onto the top of all these beautiful scenes are the cartoon like characters that always turn me off to this kind of stuff. All of the main characters are drawn in traditional animation, simply, and in basic colors, with the typical enormous eyes and I swear they have a set of twelve different mouths that they paste on these characters to over express whatever emotion they are currently going through. THis reminds me of the old Speed Racer cartoons I used to watch as a kid (Speed Racer The Movie).

The whole effect for me was mixed. Let's put it in terms of movie making. It felt like a movie company managed to hop on a rocket ship and literally film a movie on location on another planet (that's how good this is). But they got a bunch of b-movie actors that overacted just didn't look real in the scenes.

Conclusion - Awesome for kids but not for adults except for the beauty of the backgrounds and motion.