In the English-dubbed Disney version of Howl's Moving Castle, most of the characters are voiced by well-known actors with distinctive and recognisable voices, most notably Lauren Bacall as the Witch of the Waste and Billy Crystal as Calcifer. According to the film's producer Toshio Suzuki, the war theme gave Miyazaki the opportunity to explore 'the qualities that make people human and enable them to retain their humanity in a world brutalized by bloodshed and greed'.2 In Howl's Moving Castle, this idea is communicated through the strange but mostly functional community that the protagonist, Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer as the young version of the character and Jean Simmons as the elderly version), creates out of the disparate collection of characters she meets after arriving at the castle. Most notably, however, in response to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, he decided to construct the film narrative around the novel's passing reference to an imminent war.1 Rather like the slug-like henchmen, the war infiltrates every part of the film's story, complicating and intensifying the relationships being developed and explored. Miyazaki has taken and reinterpreted a number of elements from the source text, such as the eponymous castle, the vain wizard, and the young female protagonist who has a spell cast on her that turns her into an elderly woman. This article refers to the English-dubbed Disney release.ĭirected by Hayao Miyazaki, Howl's Moving Castle (2004) is loosely based on Diana Wynne Jones' fantasy novel of the same name.
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