HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE (Japanese title: Hauru No Ugoku Shiro [2004]). Hayao Miyazaki, dir., script, with Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald H. Hewitt, loosely based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones (1986). Japan. USA: Disney, 2005 for English dubbing. See IMDb for highly complex details of production and distribution, and for voicing.

Anime fantasy. According to Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice (with some clarifications here by Michele Fry), "The titular castle is a groaning, ramshackle house on mechanical chicken legs, held together by a griping spirit [more exactly a fire demon …] and home to a petulant, mysterious wizard named Howl […]" (rev. 6 June 2005 in The Village Voice), 6 May 2006.

Online critic Richard Scheib draws attention to the "Steampunk" in CASTLE and notes "[…] a sublime and uniquely original imagination to the film—the eccentric image of the title moving castle [as imaged by Miyazaki], which sort of looks like an ambulatory potbelly stove, anthropomorphized with a mouth and tongue, clockwork cogs and even ramshackle cottages hanging off its body; the door that opens into different parts of the world depending on which setting the dial is turned [an idea, as Farah Mendelsohn notes, from Jones's novel] and each emerging out of a perfectly natural doorway where Howl advertises as a different magician; Howl's bedroom, which is a marvel of dangling lenses and ornate jewellery and clockwork devices" ( 6 May 2006).

See for combination of mechanical and magical, and for Steampunk.

Kelly Searsmith of JFA adds concerning the house: "the mechanical wizbang of a portal switching system; the fish-like appearance of the front of the moving castle, with its huge opening mouth and socketed eyes […]. [T]he castle’s patchwork appearance, as if made from discards and remnants, which is often but not necessary for steampunk mechanicals and may suggest something of the marginalized status of its owner – the movement being originally designed to evade capture and eventually to fight a guerilla war against war itself [….] [T]owers rise up like industrial refuse (two steam on each upper side like dark smoking horns) and various stacks project like guns from a battleship or tank (as a defensive machine, and a war machine, it must be destroyed as the fight itself and the reason for it are undone during the course of the narrative). […] the creature that powers the castle (Calcifer, resonates with Lucifer) is actually the captured essence of a star […].

(RDE, FarahM, Michele Fry, 09/05/06) RDE, Title, 22Aug19