Tor.com

We often see Asian stories adapted for a Western, English-speaking market, but Howl’s Moving Castle is one of the most famous cases of the reverse. Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 film is a loose adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 novel, which Jones described as “rich and strange, full of the most beautiful animation,” by someone who “understood my books in a way that nobody else has ever done.” Miyazaki deeply understands the work the novel does: using popular fantasy tropes to interrogate and disprove dominant social narratives, and thus deprive them of their power.

In adapting and translating the novel to a visual medium for a different time and for a different, primarily Japanese audience, Miyazaki took a fascinating approach: he focused not on faithfully replicating each detail of the novel, but preserving its work. The novel Howl’s Moving Castle uses fairy tale tropes as a means to examine societal roles and restrictions that hold people into certain positions as well as holding them back, and the magical power of language to break people out of them. Miyazaki, who began working on Howl’s Moving Castle with “a great deal of rage” about the US invasion of Iraq, approaches a standard war plot at angles and strange intersections, using fantasy tropes to show the ridiculousness and pointlessness of war and the magical power of human affection, connection, and compassion to transform.

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