What is the reason to believe that Sophie is specifically searching for Howl ? I just re-watched the scene where she first comes across the castle it’s clear she is astonished and tells Turniphead that this is not what she wanted. How is Turniphead connected to the Castle anyway?
She’s searching for someone to take the spell off her, whether Howl or someone else. That’s the only reason to go to the wastes.
She’s scared when she sees the castle unexpectedly coming straight at her. She had asked Turniphead to look for a place for her to stay (as a way of getting rid of him), and she tells him that was not what she had in mind for a place to stay. But it’s not clear that she’s right in thinking that he brought the castle. He’s following it, not leading it.
Turniphead is obviously also looking for some way to get the spell taken off him.
Don’t expect every detail to be spelled out. Viewers are supposed to think for themselves and try to piece things together based on incomplete knowledge, like the characters. Our knowledge is never complete. We get an impression of a complex world in which all kinds of things are going on ‘outside the frame’, and we have to judge characters and motivations and guess or deduce what’s going on for ourselves.
That’s a large part of the enjoyment of it.
Yes, basically what **GreenWyvern **said.
I think she’s specifically looking for Howl because of everything that happened right at the beginning. Then when she sees the Castle itself, she has second thoughts. But just for a short time.
OK. So you have two characters walking randomly looking for someone who will reverse their spell. And then they randomly come across the castle which for reasons which are not clear allows Sophie to enter. The problem is pretty much the whole film is like this. It’s just one random incident after another without much logic. Along with characters behaving randomly. Like for example Heen the dog. Why on earth do they keep a dog which belongs to Suliman? And why does the dog not report to Suliman for so long?
Yea, I was always told how Spirited Away was the most bestest animated feature of all time, so I rented it.
WTF? I couldn’t figure out if it was so weird and random because that is just how it was supposed to be or I was just not used to Japanese storytelling. I just had to assume that a lot was being lost in translation.
If someone had warned me ahead of time and set my expectations, I think I could have enjoyed it more.
I think the difference with Spirited Away is that it has a clear and classic character arc as Chihiro starts off as sullen and passive and learns to become self-reliant and courageous. This alone gives the plot more structure than Howl. Also the focus is very much on Chihiro whereas in Howl, he is a co-protagonist and a fairly incoherent one. Spirited Away also has a clear antagonist ,Yubaba who is introduced early. In Howl the Witch appears to be the antagonist but she suddenly becomes a harmless old woman and you get a new antagonist, Suliman. The whole thing is just more confusing.
Agreed. I think people are basically fanwanking motivations and reasons why people do things and why events happen. Sure it’s possible to do this, but it’s clear that they are guessing and making up their own story rather than basing it on elements present in the movie itself.
No.
Everyone knows where the Castle perambulates, and where the Waste is.
I find it genuinely weird that there are people who don’t understand or appreciate this kind of storytelling. But there’s no accounting for taste.
Well… so much for the second and third top-grossing anime movies of all time! Better not watch Your Name, or you may freak out. 
Seriously, what kind of stories did you read, and what kind of movies did you watch as a child? Not fairy tales / children’s fantasy, anyway.
Do you find also find Disney movies like Frozen ‘random’?
What do you think of non-fantasy anime, like Makoto Shinkai’s brilliant short film The Garden of Words?
Please, give us break, and don’t be so condescending. Comparing the storytelling in Howl to Frozen is absurd. I enjoy complex storytelling, and as I said I enjoy other Miyazaki movies including Spirited Away, which has plenty of WTF elements. But the plot of Howl is particularly opaque. We don’t find it so because were stupid or unsophisticated, it’s because it is.
I haven’t seen that one, but I’m fine with fantasy anime in general, as well as non fantasy. However, I recently saw Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, a realistic (except for some dream sequences) biopic of the designer of the Japanese Zero fighter plane. It had the opposite problem. Again it was beautiful, but excruciatingly slow and pretty trite. And in contrast to Miyazaki’s anti-war theme in Howl, here he glorified someone whose creation would be used to kill many thousands of people, while barely touching on the moral issues involved.
Are you sure you want to make the commercial argument regarding whether a movie is good or not?:dubious:
So you say. The audience doesn’t.
Was I not an audience member?
More precisely, The Wind Rises is a biography of the designer of the Zero planes stitched together with the plot of a novel having nothing to do with that designer:
You said “everyone.” In what sense did you mean that?
Kind of like making a sentimental love story about J. Robert Oppenheimer based on Love Story.
Horoshiki was opposed to the war himself, but as I said the film only superficially addressed any moral qualms he might have had. The best part of the film for me was Werner Herzog’s cameo as a German man of mystery.
In the sense of “everyone in the town…”
The characters in the movie obviously.
Just because some people could understand and enjoy the movie it doesn’t make them fanwankers anymore than it makes people who didn’t enjoy it and were confused unsophisticated rubes.
A short film about the secret relationship between a (male) 15-year old who is really into feet and a hard-drinking (female) 27-year old.
Okay, it is much duller than it sounds, but the art is top-notch.
As for The Wind Rises, Miyazaki loves him some aircraft, and the Zero was arguably one of Japan’s greatest technological innovations, so it isn’t really that surprising that he tackled the topic. (This is a pretty good book on the history of the Zero–I read it before seenig TWR and they both touch on some of the same points.)
It’s clear in the movie itself. Honestly, I’m confused by these sorts of comments. It’s clearly spelled out in the movie, no real ambiguity at all- Howl, the extremely powerful wizard, is to be found in the waste. I am almost positive it is clearly stated within the first 10 minutes or so of the film.