So, like an apprentice?
I saw it 15+ years ago, so the details aren’t exactly fresh in my mind.
So you don’t really know, you’re just guessing.
So you have no idea.
Only if you want it to make sense.
It’s better when they do.
You keep offering “explanations” that don’t really explain anything.
No, because an apprentice, should at least occasionally be learning what he’s supposed to be learning.
No, because an apprentice should at least occasionally be learning what he’s supposed to be learning.
There are no explanations that will satisfy you, and that’s ok. Different people understand different things in different ways.
The movie made sense to me.
I enjoyed it. Yeah, I found parts of it confusing. But it was charming and beautiful and sometimes funny.
As is anyone who isn’t directly quoting Ghibli or the script on the matter…
No, I have an informed opinion.
The story makes perfect sense to me without the specifics. It is not Turniphead/Justin’s story, his circumstances are completely incidental. Even the war is just background.
To you.
To me, “pointless” characters just flesh out the world.
They explained enough for me.
I’m conveying what I thought after watching the film. That they’re not sufficient for you is *your *lack, not mine. At no time in the movie was I confused as to what was going on. Whether my interpretations were “correct” or “explained everything” is irrelevant to whether they were sufficient for me.
It’s one of my favourite Studio Ghibli movies. If you prefer a simple linear plot and boring one-dimensional characters, I’m sure there are plenty of other movies you can watch.
And it seems that the majority of people disagree with you.
Howl’s Moving Castle is the 3rd highest grossing anime of all time, after Your Name and Spirited Away.
The only two I like are Howl’s Moving Castle and “Kiki’s delivery service”.
Reading the objections here, I realize again that I don’t expect my movies to have everything spelled out. I like it when they leave room for imagination. I like it when there is an implied missing back story.
And actually, given the success of the movie, perhaps I am not the only person in the world who characteristically opens books in the middle 
The way I Think about it is that Ghibli makes Adult movies from a child’s perspective, to a child’s gaining of understanding. A child who is about 5 before a war breaks out.
They find the peace before the war as a baseline. The the war happens and is all chaos and confusion. Then as the years pass there is some understanding, some misunderstanding, and a lot of not-understanding.
Fireflies is the bleakest forcing of the understanding on the child,and the most real and dark .Spirited away is an example of the the very minor side where the “war” may have not happened at all, maybe it was just a child’s panic.
Howl’s is a war that happened, and the broad strokes are presented, but what exactly happened is all through a child-like filter, and very vague.
All versions of events presented in an animated format that creates the world for the story.
Chalk me up as another for whom Howl’s is a favorite. Phenomenal movie, an amazing journey from start to finish.
It perfectly fits with Howl’s character that he’s not making much of an organised effort to teach Markl though. Presumably Howl has occasional phases of actual teaching, hence the beard trick, but it would fit that he basically just likes having a someone around to be impressed when he does something.
There are plenty of confusing bits in the story, but Howl half-arsing having an apprentice isn’t one of them.
One of the reasons I love Miyazaki’s stuff because he doesn’t give shit about telling stories in the “western” fashion that most of us have been indoctrinated with. I have always felt that, to truly appreciate his work I needed to put my cultural beliefs and expectations on hold and go live in his world for a little while.
Dude has a story in his head and a vision he is looking to achieve and that’s what he’s going to put on film. He’s inviting you into his world for a few hours at time and he has neither the desire nor intention to change his story so that it better suites the expectations of westerners.
If the story doesn’t make sense to you it’s not his fault.
I re-watched the whole film and I while enjoyed its visual splendor; the castle itself is a truly glorious creation, I still think it’s a poorly crafted story and Miyazaki’s weakest film. It’s just full of opaque characters with unclear motivations doing random stuff: Turniphead, Suliman, her dog, the witch who suddenly becomes a harmless old woman and Howl himself. I think the difference with his other films is that they generally have a main story which makes sense and a protagonist with fairly clear motivations though there may also be other characters and plotlines which are more confusing. Howl is just incoherence and randomness pretty much from the first scene to the last.
You realise the protaganist is Sophie, not Howl, right? What doesn’t make sense about her arc? She’s cursed, she wants to get uncursed, she also falls for Howl, she ends up uncursed and with Howl… what’s unclear about her motivations?
Sophie has a clear motivation but she doesn’t really do anything coherent towards achieving it. She wanders around aimlessly, gets helped by a random character she meets, becomes a housekeeper and through a series of random events becomes uncursed. It’s honestly not a very satisfying story.
I think you’re missing the point that it’s Sophie’s warmth, integrity, determination, love, and compassion that wins in the end.
On a tangentially related note, Studio Ghibli is making a movie of DYJ’s final book.
Really? I thought she fled the city explicitly looking for Howl, to get the curse lifted. It’s apparent that everyone is familiar with the perambulations of the Castle in the hills.
Nothing aimless about that.
You mean the one she helped first? Or are you talking about her encountering him in the first place? Along the path from the city to the hills where the Castle roams? There was nothing random about Turniphead being near Howl’s Castle, IMO. Note how he follows it, after.
I can see how it might be if you view all the events as random. But they’re not. Sophie is cursed because of Howl, Turniphead is hanging around the path of Howl’s Castle for the same reason Sophie ends up there, Sophie doesn’t *randomly *become the housekeeper, she assertively takes the role on, in order to stay near Calcifer, who recognized her curse and offered to break it, and Howl, who is also an option for breaking it (and she’s infatuated with him).
That all seems like a clear sequence to me.
And **GreenWyvern **has it right, about Sophie’s qualities being important.
I think some people don’t quite get that fairy tale is not quite the same as adventure fantasy. ***HMC ***is way more the former than the latter. Or, at least, is playing with its tropes.