Other times it propels itself through the sky, juddering like an unsteady balloon. All of this comes to a head in Howl’s castle, a ramshackle mashup of small huts, trees and stones, supported by a chicken-like pair of legs, reminiscent of the mobile hut of the Slavic witch Baba Yaga. This duality remains a fixation in Miyazaki’s work, and the twinned connection between escape and servitude in his films - a fitting concern for an artist whose chosen form involves the painstaking creation of thousands of hand drawn pieces - further explains the endless amalgamations of organic matter and mechanical contraptions, as well as devices that seem to fuse the industrial with the pastoral. In the world of Howl’s Moving Castle, the tools that provide the foundation for a life of relative autonomy still leave one bound to unsavory demands from holders of unscrupulous authority. Part of this confusion at least seems intentional, as protagonist Sophie (Chieko Baisho) remains on the fringes of the actual conflict, attempting to navigate a nascent relationship with the mysterious sorcerer Howl (Takuya Kimura) and his coterie of weird assistants. This is all conveyed via an opaque plot that borders on incoherence, its tangled machinations falling a distant second to the weighty power of the visuals. Here the conduit through which possibility and reality are commingled isn’t just flight, but magic, a practice whose secrets are dispensed by agents of an unseen king, with the proviso that certain favors may one day be called in, those having mastered it eventually needing to serve at his whim. Depicting a similar march toward conflict within a fantastical world packed with the usual wizardry and gadgets, it maintains a focus on defilement and corruption that provides a darker undertone than in much of Miyazaki’s work, offering a grim, somber edge that also makes use of all of his manifold skills as an animator. Produced in the run-up to America’s invasion of Iraq, as the Bush administration attempted to strong-arm its allies into helping grant legitimacy to a misdirected, illegal incursion, its disgust at this perversion of power is palpable. This dialectic comes to a head in Howl’s Moving Castle, a cri de coeur against rampant militarism whose intensity ends up diminishing the usual light touch. As demonstrated most fully in his near-valedictory pinnacle The Wind Rises, such flying crafts tend to have a dual use, outfitted for the dispensation of broad-scaled, mechanized violence upon those who remain earthbound.
While characters frequently tumble from great heights without consequence, or find brief moments of ecstasy hurtling through the air, they’re more often forced to ascend with the help of machines. Yet in most cases, the ascent to the skies doesn’t provide for instances of pure escapist freedom, forgetting the few movies in which conflict is dialed down to a minimum in favor of an overall untroubled ambience. Flight is a constant fixation for Hayao Miyazaki, a director for whom part of the power of animation is the ability to open up new avenues of movement across azure, cloud-dappled canvasses.
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