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roadrunnertwice
Hey, let's talk about Howl's Moving Castle. Specifically, let's talk about how bad the Studio Ghibli movie sucks.
Well, no, okay, I certainly had a fun enough time when I first saw it. The castle was perfectly, brilliantly, absolutely right, and they did a great job with Howl's mannerisms, and Calcifer was fantastic. (Much cuter than the book made him out to be, which, oddly, was also absolutely right. Also, good call on Billy Crystal.) And really, who wants to be the dude calling a Miyazaki movie "sucky?" But. It is bad.
The underlying issue here is that the source material, Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle, is not a simple book. It has an intricate and carefully-constructed plot, it's driven by an unreliable POV character who manages to be both over-analytical and totally oblivious, and it has a complicated relationship with the canon tropes of European fairy tales — it subverts gleefully, but it recognizes the power and utility of fairy tales as a grammar. And the thematic material is some delicate stuff, too: identity, sincerity, authenticity (actually, there's a separate essay to be written here about how Howl lacks one and Sophie lacks the other), self-deception, courage, et-cetera.
So anyway, the movie made a whole pile of changes to the plot and the characters: Sophie's missing a sister, separate characters got combined into new hybrids, there's suddenly a war in progress, and so on. No sweat. It's an adaptation, things happen, and stories are resilient; many a movie has survived vast plot deformations without a problem. This one did not, and I think the reason is that there were two changes the story couldn't recover from: de-fanging the Witch of the Waste (demoting her from Saruman to Gollum, as it were), and de-powering Sophie (who was a powerful witch in the book, and is reduced to a normal girl in the screenplay).
The Witch of the Waste, of course, was the organizing pillar of the book; in the movie version, she's basically a MacGuffin, her role as main antagonist usurped by a warmongering Crown Magician. Backgrounding her like that doesn't work, though, because she's central to Howl's and Calcifer's motivations.
See, the chief problem Howl and Calcifer face is that their contract is railroading them both to a bad end. All of the physical threats in the story are frustrating distractions to them; their main danger comes from themselves.
The menace posed by the contract is initially rather abstract. Calcifer's bound by the condition of silence not to go into detail, and Howl (aside from his flip lamentation that he will probably never truly love) is no help at all. Mrs. Pentstimmon claims that Howl has become darker and more heartless, but she really doesn't tell us much, and we readers (along with Sophie) are unable to judge anyhow, since we only get to see Howl post-contract.
Which is where the Witch comes in. She's Howl's dark mirror. She, too, made a contract with a fire demon (under the same terms for each party), and she demonstrates what awaits at the end of the road Howl's on: madness, villainy, and inability to form any but the most superficial connections with other people. Lose your heart, lose your humanity. (Calcifer, for his part, doesn't want to be stuck in Miss Angorian's desperate scramble for fuel once he uses up Howl's heart. And besides, he does care about Howl, however vehemently either of them would deny it.)
That's why the Witch is necessary, and that's why she's scary: even if Howl gets rid of her, there's nothing except Sophie's intervention to keep him from becoming a copy of her. Which is why Calcifer lets Sophie into the castle in the first place, and why Howl keeps her around long enough to start developing feelings for her. Howl and Calcifer need Sophie to save them from themselves, Sophie needs Calcifer to save her from her curse (and is thus stuck helping Howl, too), and bada-bing, we have a plot engine.
In the movie, that's gone. Without her fire demon, the Witch has no status as an object lesson; without that object lesson, there's no tangible threat posed by the Howl/Calcifer contract. And without that tangible threat, there isn't any good reason for Howl to want out of the contract in the first place! So, Calcifer might have allowed Sophie into the castle, but remember, Howl is smart: he recognized Sophie's power and the Witch's curse right off the bat, and didn't say anything about it because he needed her help just as much as Calcifer did. If Howl didn't have a good reason to want out of the contract, he'd have immediately kicked Sophie to the curb.
(Besides, the actual threat to Howl's humanity in the movie comes from being forced into dangerous transformations in either service of or open resistance to the Crown, and Sophie's presence only exacerbates that!* There's no explanation anywhere of what the contract has to do with anything else going on.)
Lesson learned: If you take away the primary thing that reveals your characters' motivations, their actions stop making any damn sense. Don't do that.
If removing the Witch from the villain role breaks the movie's plot, nerfing Sophie breaks its theme.
I think the problem has to be traced back to the story's complicated relationship with the grammar of fairy tales. In a straight-up fantasy story, asking whether a character does or does not have powerful innate magic is akin to asking whether they're good at math or pretty or have perfect pitch; it affects their outlook on life, their history, their relationships with other characters, and the things they can do at a given plot juncture, but it doesn't necessarily say anything about their moral worth. Fairy tales are... different. They're more abstract and rarified. Fantasy is naturalistic, in its own sort of way, but fairy tale is just a few yards nearer to earth than allegory.
So if you set a story up as a fairy tale, you're committing yourself to a sub-narrative (or a set of them) in which various character traits take on an undeserved moral significance. (This is problematic in all the ways it sounds like it ought to be.) The cool thing that Jones does in Howl's Moving Castle is to simultaneously set up a meta-narrative about the flawed and unfair ways in which fairy tales designate certain people as "special." In the book, you'll remember, Sophie is kind of a reverse Don Quixote — afflicted with delusions of inconsequentiality from reading too many fairy tales — and a great deal of the story is about her breaking free from the social messages telling her she's not special in the precise ways that she actually is.
One of the consequences of this structure, though, is that crucial parts of Sophie's character arc are contained in what essentially amounts to a metadata stream, separated from the literal text of the story. What I think happened is that the screenwriters made the mistake of treating Howl's Moving Castle as a fantasy story without compensating for the parts that are embedded within the fairy tale structure. It's like... do you remember, in the days of the "classic" Mac OS, how you would sometimes send a file to a Windows computer and it would come out as total garbage because it had something important stored in the resource fork? That's what's going on here. I think.
Anyway, the result is a garbling of the message underlying Sophie's character arc. The book version is a story about a girl who is intrinsically remarkable (note the fairy tale signifiers: she has powerful innate magic, and she tends to have a lot of fortuitous meetings with beings who come back to help her later), yet unable to recognize her own worth, and her arc is her slow realization that she can, in fact, have the adventures, save the day, and win the affection of the dangerous and sexy antihero. But in the movie version, she really is as plain and unremarkable as she thinks she is. Whereas her own powers are the impetus for most of what happens to her in the book — her magical hats are what attract the baleful attention of the Witch, Calcifer recognizes her magic as his one good chance to break the contract, her inadvertent power boost to the scarecrow winds up saving the damn kingdom, etc. — everything strange entering her life in the movie version stems directly from her relationship with Howl. (Even the way she ends up saving him reduces to fluffy Power Of Wuv crap.)
Do you see what I'm getting at, here? In the book, her worth is absolute, and is ultimately revealed by the way she and Howl come to care for each other; in the movie, her worth is contingent, and is bestowed upon her by Howl. It's not the same story at all. If demoting the Witch of the Waste kills the story on a technical level, de-powering Sophie kills it on a moral one.
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* Can anyone else figure out just what Howl was hoping to accomplish at the end, when he was all acting like he had turned some major corner and was like, "I'll fight for YOU!"? This sort of last-stand-for-love business seems to be one of Miyazaki's narrative kinks, but it's apparently really hard to make it work correctly, because it didn't make any sense in Princess Mononoke, either.
Haha... all right, sorry about that. This was one of those things where I felt like I was on the verge of grasping something really important, and it was somehow vital to my craft that I spend the time obsessively digging it out. You know how it goes.
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Date: 2007-11-14 08:42 am (UTC)I don't really dislike the movie version myself, probably because I view it as a different work entirely, loosely based on some of the characters and situations of the book. It is, however, homologous enough that deficiencies of story don't really bother me, as I can always rely on the canonical version for those needs. I am therefore free to treat it essentially as eye candy and it is decent enough at being that.
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Date: 2007-11-14 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-14 11:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-14 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-14 06:50 pm (UTC)It took me a long time to sort out my feelings for the movie.
I've come to terms with it as it's own beast. Fun to watch because of the great visuals and nods to a book I really love. Obviously it all falls apart but is still fun to watch for some reason. Even though yeah, it missed the entire point of the book.
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Date: 2007-11-14 10:06 pm (UTC)Hrm...
Date: 2007-11-14 11:56 pm (UTC)As to point 1, looking back at his greater body of work I think it's clear that Miyazaki doesn't generally deal with complex plots, and probably wouldn't want to deal with one, given the choice. His real standout films - Kiki, Totoro, and Laputa - all have fairly straightforward plots. There's real power in how he conveys those plots, both in terms of pure visual skill and in visual symbolism, but they're all ultimately no more complex than you'd get in a children's book. The closest we've seen Miyazaki get to narrative density is the Nausicaa manga, and as engrossing as that is, it's also kind of a wreck, both symbolically and plot-wise. But Nausicaa didn't work because of its plot, it worked because of its visuals, and the small world-building details. That being the case, I can't see that we could expect anything better from HMC.
And as to point 2, while a lot of the things you say about how clever and interesting the book is are true, I think you're also overlooking a lot of Jones' weakness. For example, like just about every other book she's ever written, the main character starts off apparently meek, unassuming, and powerless, but by the end turns out to be super-powerful, and the only one capable of saving the day. If someone had only ever read HMC I can see that they might think that it's a clever and subversive thing, but after you've seen Jones pull off the exact same plot in most of the Chrestomanci books, A Tale of Time City, Archer's Goon, Power of Three, etc., it starts to get old. I'll also point out that I think Miyazaki rescued us from certain plot points that would have doomed the movie, like the riddle-poem at the core of the book (comes across ok on paper, can't imagine how it would have worked on screen) and Howl's secret life in the "real" world, which would have completely destroyed the steampunk/magic vibe that the movie pulled off so well.
That said, as much as I liked Miyazaki's adaptation, I gotta admit the ending of the movie was literally laughable, in terms of how random and shoehorned in it was. I can forgive almost everything, but literally telling the audience how the sudden appearance of an almost completely unknown character made everything better was over the line.
Hrm again!
Date: 2007-11-16 09:34 am (UTC)The thing is, I think HMC probably could be reduced to a simple story, with plenty of breathing room for quiet moments and atmosphere.* They probably wouldn't even have to save any kingdoms, which would have fixed the ending right out of the gate. But doing that would require a really steady grip on the story's heart; without that, you wind up removing the wrong complexities and adding even worse ones to compensate. I suppose it's like most flawed work from brilliant people: the real sin is in not being what it could have been.
As for Jones, fair 'nuff. (The only other book of hers I've read was Fire and Hemlock, which was an extremely odd duck, especially as far as Tam Lin remakes go, and I'm not sure I liked it, and what were we talking about again? Anyway, I'm definitely familiar with what serious devotion to the ol' YA Ur-Plot starts to look like after a while.) Still, though, the trick of encoding most of Sophie's development into the fairy tale structure seems pretty specific to HMC's world, and I think the failure to get it made the adaptation a whole lot rougher than it might have been.
110% with you on leaving out Wales and poetry.
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* Although the only way to prove that guess would be to come up with the screenplay. (And, uh, no.)
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Date: 2007-11-17 03:13 pm (UTC)The main critique I have of the movie is Miazaki's insistence on emphasizing the war stuff. Seemed a little silly.
"she really is as plain and unremarkable as she thinks she is."
Em... No, I don't really agree with this statement. Her hats are still magical, and the awesomeness of her character is really teh main point.
Also the book Sophie being "a great and powerful witch" is definitely exagerrating...
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Date: 2007-11-21 05:56 am (UTC)Really? Well, neither did my sister, so you're in good company. I may well have gotten more out of it than was put in there. (Though I'm apparently not alone in doing so.)
Also the book Sophie being "a great and powerful witch" is definitely exagerrating...
Nah, I think my feet are on the ground with this one -- Calcifer even says at the end that she's the only person he knows of with enough power to break the contract and not kill them both. Granting life to the lifeless is pretty high-level stuff, even in fairy tales.