Howl's Moving Castle

MOVIE #1,827 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 07.19.24 宮崎駿監督のフォーカス How do you follow-up what is widely considered a masterpiece and your most famous movie? Well, you double-down on the weirdness, naturally. As a Miyazaki/anime-in-general newbie, I’m still in awe at just how strange these films are (even when the one thing I knew about them going in was that they were very strange). We are dropped into a world without warning: it almost feels like the middle of a story already in progress. Miyazaki doesn’t feel the need to explain who’s who and what’s what in this place. It isn’t about all that jazz, and the film is better for it. This also features what I felt was his strongest animation yet. The design of the moving castle alone is worth the price of admission (MAX subscription)...

Also, Disney totally stole the design for the Elemental characters from the fire demon, Calcifier…


I honestly have no idea how to rank the Top 3 movies on this list. They are all amazing and different in so many ways.

PS. I watched the original Japanese voice version, but I kinda wish I had checked out the English dub so I could have heard Billy Crystal do Calcifier.

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⫷ MOVIE #1,826 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,828 ⫸

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Howl's Moving Castle (Japanese: ハウルの動く城, Hepburn: Hauru no Ugoku Shiro) is a 2004 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is loosely based on the 1986 novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones. The film was produced by Toshio Suzuki, animated by Studio Ghibli and distributed by Toho. The Japanese voice cast featured Chieko Baisho and Takuya Kimura, while the English dub version starred Jean Simmons, Emily Mortimer, Lauren Bacall, Christian Bale, Josh Hutcherson and Billy Crystal. The film is set in a fictional kingdom where both magic and early twentieth-century technology are prevalent, against the backdrop of a war with another kingdom. It tells the story of Sophie, a young milliner who is turned into an elderly woman by a witch who enters her shop and curses her. She encounters a wizard named Howl and gets caught up in his resistance to fighting for the king. It was released on September 5, 2004.