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| My respect for Miyazaki and studio Ghibli increases with each movie I watch, like wow. This is literally visual therapy now lol they never miss with the nature scenes. Not much plot but I loved it nevertheless. |
| Joe, Joe Forever.... |
| Finally got to see this in theaters, it was beautiful! |
| This looks beautiful, as all Ghibli films do, but the plot felt really weird. A lot of things are brought up, but many of them are left unanswered. |
| even better than the first time around <3 rewatched after reading the book, i highly recommend :) |
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| Alright I know this is a children's movie and all that but wtf was that honestly? >Sophie got accustomed to being a grandma way too fucking fast, there's no process to grief and then acceptance and all that? nothing? >She felt no hostility towards the witch that cursed her. Because of that, there's no need for forgiveness or anything of the sort. Witch lost her powers and turned really really old, Sophie takes care of her like it's the most common thing to do for someone who ruined your life. Common sense thrown out the window for the sake of feel-good >Sophie sounds like a grandma even when she's on her younger form. They didn't have budget to hire two voice actors? >Sophie and Howl's romance is rushed. It's shallow. All of a sudden they both decided they're in love. Again, there's no process. >Suliman all of a sudden decided to end the war? Just cause she's seen a "happy end"? like what? what about the politics of it? Surely there's a good reason why there was a war in the first place but we don't need to know that do we Whatever, I'd give it a generous 6 cause of the OSTs. I feel like if they made this into a series, it would've been way better. |
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| Nuance, emotional maturity and character storytelling take centre stage in a rapid paced turismo of breaking down adulthood with seemingly odd, nonsensical story beats woven together by cinema's greatest pastures and a second rate engineering degree. So yeah, art. |
| reached into my soul and violently enhanced my perspective on life and love while all the while being visually immaculate. masterpiece and favorited. |
| Another of Studio Ghibli's masterpieces. A really great movie with a nice portion of romance. After watching this movie I believe I have watched all of Hayao Miyazaki's top masterpieces. |
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| After watching half of it when I was younger, and hearing so much about this movie, I finally decided to watch Howl's Moving Castle. And I must say, I surely understand the hype around this movie. This movie is just beautiful, the animation is in another complete tier comparing to your standard anime, and the OST that accompanies it makes the experience of watching this marvelous piece of art even better. The characters are all really unique in their own ways, and you quickly become attached to them, and the movie has a whole gives you such a warm feeling, you just see yourself enjoying it without much to go for it. The movie doesn't present any strong premise besides the idea of the moving castle, but you see yourself just hooked to the movie. The way they showcase the magic of this world just feels right. When watching this movie, you get swallowed by this magical world, and you truly forget about all of the problems and stress of your own life, and just live in a magic world for 2 hours, simply a magicl experience really. However, after so much hype, and such good early memories from this movie, after watching it fully and older, I do have to say that it wasn't able to reach my expectations for it. Although everything I said before makes the movie standout from your normal anime, there's a really big problem with this movie, that is the whole plot. The story in this film is honestly a bit all over the place. As I said, the movie doesn't really present a strong premise, and that ends up hurting the movie in the end, there are a lot of stuff that are never explained throughout the movie. While it is true that the movie does explain some stuff more visually than verbably, there are things that aren't explained either way, or were just way to quick and confusing to make anything off it. One example of a good visual explanation the movie does is the whole curse of Sophie, where you can understand that the whole curse thing was really affected by the way she saw herself, as she said herself in the beginning of the movie that she felt like a old ugly woman, and later in the movie, in the moments she's not worrying about her looks (like when she's sleeping, or when she's worried about Howl), the curse disappears, and by the end of the movie, with the love of Howl, she's able to finally accept herself. However, some proper closure to this would have been appreciated. But this instance is the best explanation they gave in the whole movie. For a bad example of movie handled explanations, look at Sophie and her mother's relationship, we really never get explained what happened between them, what Sophie thinks of her mother, and what her mother thinks of her, since it's shown she "sold" her own child to the kingdom by delievering a present with a trap. The movie doesn't give any info about that. The same can be said about the war: why did it star, and why did they end it? Just because of the "happy ending"? And why did Sophie destroyed the castle by taking Calcifer out, to then just rearrange the castle again. This last one is said to be explained in the movie, but reality is we really don't see it, because it was supposedly to stop Howl from fighting, but did it really made him stop? It's just a confusing way to put things honestly, and could have been handled better in my opinion. The movie certainly was made to make us think about these loose ends, but we are given so little, that it's hard to understand the symbolism behind so many scenes, and while I love movies with symbolism behind it, this one just doesn't give us anything to make out our own symbolism to it. As many said, the final part, where the war starts, the story just becomes a lot messier, and a lot of mysteries start getting "resolved" without any explanation or development actually. When Sophie goes back to Howl's past, and sees him and Calcifer, they don't point to anything explaining why Howl made that pact with Calcifer, with my only theory being that he felt alone. My biggest gripe with the story itself is how Sophie becomes so attached to them in like 2 days, just doesn't feel that genuine honestly. I do know the movie is based of a novel, that most likely can answer most of my answers, but I wanted to write this before getting more info about the story, because even if it's an adaptation, I feel like the anime should have been able to explain the story by itself, even if not fully, beeing this it's own piece of art, and not needing a whole novel to make sense. Enough with my rant, the movie still makes you feel in a way not many movies can, and I might be a bit blinded with nostalgia too, but I just can't give this movie any lower than a 9. I just can't give it the 10, because the plot really makes little sense in many parts, but the whole experience it's still magical. Overall, a 9/10 for me, an experience that will never forget! |
| shed a tear of how amazing this movie was |
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| guess it should be fine for kids (5/10 i guess) |
| i wonder when i last watched this :D got the finnish bluray and was immediately sad that the good old dvd menu was just a boring static picture :( i should watch this with the original dub sometime. the finnish dub for this happens to be one of the better ones. calcifer's finnish va especially did a great job. sometimes the translation seems a bit weird though. the movie honestly starts off kinda ok/meh but gets more interesting towards the end. i do not like the "witch of the waste" (as mal says her name is) she looks so disgusting but i guess thats the point. i do though like her finnish translation name "Turhamaisuuden Noita". i dont think ive previously noticed how sophie's age keeps "fluctuating" constantly :D though now thinking about it, it must have been like 7 years minimum since i watched this last. turnip head's inclusion is kinda weird, he only seems to serve the purpose to lead sophie to hauru otherwise he kinda exists until the end where he apparently can stop the war. also why did sophie suddenly kiss everyone under the sun :D? |
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| Sophie is honestly the best part of this movie. She's such a sweetheart. |
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