To plume the lake of sleep/ With dreams.*

My son-in-law and I were just talking about The Boy and The Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in a decade as he and my daughter wait to see it. They both share a love for the movies Miyazaki has produced and love Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic. In my halcyon days, when my son and daughter were small, there was a time when we rotated through various magical and wonderful stories, The Iron Giant, The Bed Book, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and, from Ghibli, My Neighbor Totoro. These were watched and rewatched or reread until we could recite every scene. Now that my son is gone and my daughter is definitely full grown I approach Ghibli with some hesitation. The beauty and gentleness I find in these stories are juxtaposed with a pang of personal sadness. In Howl’s Moving Castle, my breath caught as the castle walked across the landscape. This would have been a loved scene and a frequent thing to recreate with whatever art scraps were lying about. 

    I turned my focus on Sophie as I feel at times I too am under a spell wanting to return to normalcy. Sophie (voiced as the old woman by Jean Simmons and the younger woman by Emily Mortimer) is the serious and responsible one in her family. She accidentally gets involved with a wizard, Howl, (Christian Bale), and subsequently has a curse placed upon her by the Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) who is jealous of Sophie’s connection to Howl. The witch turns Sophie into an old woman, and Sophie adapts quite well. She’s already not seen, her mother is certainly more flamboyant, and her sister is so beautiful she can hardly get her work done as men buzz about her. Turning Sophie into an old woman gives her an invisibility cloak. She’s free to move about the countryside with no one very concerned with what she is doing. She has the freedom then to find Howl who she hopes can reverse the curse.

    The background to the film is the buildup to war that is happening in the kingdoms and Howl’s refusal to serve either side. When he returns to the castle after a particularly brutal attack he and the fire demon, Calcifer (wonderfully voiced by Billy Crystal), discuss the danger of the powers being harnessed:

Calcifer: “Soon you won’t be able to turn back into a human.”
Howl: “My own kind attacked me today. Hack wizards who turned themselves into monsters for the king.”
Calcifer: “Those wizards are going to regret doing that. They’ll never change back into humans.”
Howl: “After the war, they won’t recall they ever were human.”

    A commentary about all wars' inhumanity. Especially apt right now. A war that isn’t just left to kings and wizards and witches as the whole country is being destroyed. Here again, Miyazaki uses the dreamlike world to show horror and how power’s goal is to gain more power regardless of the destruction.

    Sophie works through Howl’s eccentricities (literally) as she poses as a housekeeper. She sees him in all his weakness and whining, And she comes to understand how the Witch of the Waste and Howl and Calcifer are bound. Sophie has a key though, she can accept who she is as long as she has an aim, all she knows is to work toward becoming her young self. Her old life is a model for everything she must work through. She simply sets about getting it done. The magic of the connections she makes, her acceptance of those she encounters, and her courage change the fire demon, the Witch, and especially Howl. It’s that lovely embrace of the fairylike world that charms the characters and the audience.

    Often a movie can pull a person in in such a way that a side story runs parallel to their own life. Though I haven’t lived with wizards or witches or places where castles move I have lived with children and moved through their understanding of how life works. Sometimes the everyday and the mundane blur out the wonder of things they are seeing for the first time, the ideas they are forming and the power they find through their language and imagination. There is a moment in this film where Sophie watches the young Howl save a star by swallowing it and then giving his heart up. This mirrors something my son and I talked about many times when we used to watch the Leonid Shower, “what if you could catch one, what would it feel like?”. This sacrifice and the creation of the bond between Howl and Calcifer tells me something about the boy Howl was, a tremendously moving moment. A pang of pain and sadness too, but the sadness was placated by the surprise of Howl’s sacrifice. Then at the end the return of the heart, the realization of love, and the hope of peace. A good ending for those of all ages.


* Benediction by Stanley Kunitz