Howl's Moving Castle

The presentation of Howl’s moving castle is actually the centerpiece that the entire film is based around, a point of vision that Miyazaki focused on after having read the Japanese translation of the original novel, where the locomotion of the castle was mentioned, but the method and style of locomotion was never explained or described, leading to him obsessing over the castle’s design. Miyazaki’s films, in comparison to Disney films of equal quality, are actually often based on original stories and ideas of Miyazaki, or adapted from lesser known fantasy rather than famous fairy tales, and are created in a way where the animation for a single scene based off the imagination of Miyazaki that has been focused entirely on a single visual detail

They wait inside the interior of the castle, which has actually been magically transported to the inside of a house in Sophie’s hometown, as Sophie tries to push a little more life into the magical fire Calcifer, a demon whose life is directly connected to the life of Howl and powers the castle, which seems to be magically weakened for unknown reasons. At this point, a war between two kingdoms has been raging on for months, leaving ruins in its wake as towns are destroyed in a combined attack of magic and bombing in a style that is reminiscent of the second world war. Markl, a young boy, remarks that the newspapers report that their kingdom has won the war and the Witch of the Wastes remarks that only fools believe those lies. The Witch smokes a cigar, filling the room with gray billowing smoke, and Sophie asks Markl to open a window to allow fresh air to get in. Just as Markl opens the window, the scene cuts to a battleship above the town, starting to drop its payload of bombs, with a close-up of the bombs dropping from their carrier bay. We witness a high angle view of the town as explosions ravage across it, and inside the house, the explosions cause

After the explosion, as ash rains down through the air, a new atmosphere has suddenly set over the town. Though this town is primarily set by the orchestral music and the flames licking at the building, it is the constant present of ash and embers that set the mood across every frame. Each flake of ash has been individually drawn and directed across the screen, with attention paid to even the changing colors of the ash as embers burn out into dust. These small constant details are present throughout the film, creating a silent atmosphere that’s powerful to our instincts, but invisible to our eyes, formed by the clouds moving in the sky, the small storms of rain or snow that crowd the story, and even in moving grass among the country roads. These individual details, which would normally be elements of the natural environment where the film takes place, show the intense amount of attention that goes into every piece of motion in animation, where the amount of control and dedication that we have over these details could previously only arise in animation before the advent of CGI technology that we have