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vaguely-concerned · 5 months

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Random Assortment of Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle Thoughts

Because I rewatched it today for the first time in many years and it’s one of those miraculous works that not only remaine as magical as I remembered it through childhood eyes, but if anything was even more magical as an adult and in more complex ways. I’ve finally got words for at least some of the things I was processing only subconsciously as a kid, so here we go.

- The sneaky underlying theme of deeply flawed mother figures in this movie. Drives me nuts. The narrative doesn’t go out of its way to condemn these characters, it takes a characteristically phlegmatic nonjudgemental view of them, but it feels like this is low-key a stealth Mommy Issues story. (Making it go 🤝 with Dragon Age 2 in my head lol) Sophie’s mother does not seem to be consciously malicious but is intensely smotheringly self-absorbed and immature to the point where it has clearly been neglectful, and on the other side of the ‘Overly Permissive/Neglectful to Overly Authoritarian/Controlling’ scale of shitty parenting Suliman is controlling and invasive and heedless of boundaries. (Notice that her real complaint about Howl entering the contract with Calcifer and thus losing his heart seems to be that it means she can no longer control him and his grasp on magic, more than actual worry for him as a person. Her presence in his life is largely, ironically, paternalistic. She even frames it as something he blundered into incompetently — phrasing as him having had his heart stolen, rather than the mutual agreement we see Howl and Calcifer make even if they couldn’t know all the consequences it would have.) In the end Sophie breaks the circle by managing to be an engaged and responsive mother figure to Markl and making an actual home with the people closest to her.

Interestingly Howl at his worst seems to be much more like Sophie’s mother than like Suliman — he leaves Markl to handle things he really shouldn’t have to alone all the time and is noted to barely be home anyway, in the beginning especially he’s flighty and vivacious and evasive (not to mention aggressively blond haha) in some of the same patterns we see her mom exhibit. Since Lettie is quite like their mother in terms of looks and sociability, we might infer that Sophie takes more after their father (including in choice of spouse lol). But crucially when the chips are down Howl is ready to protect Sophie and their home with his life rather than abandon her, in sharp contrast with her mother. I like that the movie doesn’t vilify Sophie’s mom for what she does, as such, it’s a pretty impossible position to be in for anyone… but it is just an extension of what she’s apparently been doing for a long time anyway, privileging other parts of her life and her own comfort over her daughter’s wellbeing and happiness. (Adds a certain spice and heartache to how scared Sophie is that Howl is going to leave them, too. And her fear that it would be because she’s fundamentally not good enough, beautiful enough, clever enough for anyone to choose her and stay with her. Ooof. Girl he’s been looking for you everywhere girl he thinks you’re the most beautiful thing in the world girl it’ll be okay)

- Relatedly: the unspeakably sinister vibes and implications of Suliman’s fucking… army of little Ersatz Howl page boys. When I was younger I sort of bought that he was just being a coward in refusing to go back, but honestly looking at all those kids with smiling empty eyes like painted marbles — you know what maybe it was good he got out of there when he did and in whatever way he could, huh. I don’t feel like there were wonderful things ahead here. Between that and the Witch of the Waste — who must have been much, much older than him when they seem to have sort of had a thing, since he seems to be like… mid-twenties-ish? at the time of the movie — there’s some really uncomfortable subtext going on if you want to read into it that way. I don’t think it’s the only way to read it by any means, but there’s something icky and clandestine sticking to Suliman’s whole deal that makes some form of grooming feel potentially relevant, especially taken along with the shame and fear that seems to cling to Howl around it and the recurring symbolism of him being stuck at a child state beneath it all — he slipped away from Suliman one day but never really grew up. (I’ll readily admit this is some fully Vibes based ramblings on my part, so YMMV on how convincingly you find this present in the text vs. how much is conjecture in my overthinking overheating noggin lmao)

- The fact that the first thing that allows Sophie to heal is to get to be angry — to finally get to say ‘this is all such absolute fucking bullshit *aggressively scrubs all the shit away about it*’. So much of her arc is about reclaiming the full spectrum of her emotions instead of having to make herself small, to prioritize her own inner experience and expressiveness above the need to be acceptable or pleasing to someone else's gaze. It’s not doing quite the same thing as the book in this regard (which if memory serves does more complex work around societal dynamics around gender and sexuality and aging vs. the more internal personal approach the film takes), but what it is doing is very interesting in its own right. The castle being a space (a home!!!) where all the inhabitants can eventually express themselves freely, including Howl dropping the uncannily imperturbable smiling facade to show the sad wet pathetic drama queen beneath (deeply affectionate) and Markl just getting to be a kid running around having fun. And Sophie makes that home for everyone possible by being herself unfiltered for the first time in her life. What the fuck I’m not crying don’t look at me —

- The little one-room cottage in the fields being the forerunner to the castle…

- Something so pleasing about the irony that Howl is said to eat hearts when really he seems to have basically had to tear his own heart out and set it on fire to keep it safe. And then after people have tried to get their hands on it to possess it (the Witch) or dictate how he uses it and who he gives it to (Suliman) for the whole movie, Sophie gives it back to him without a thought at the end; it’s more important to her for him to be whole than to own his heart. Hmnngh. (also so funny that the first thing he does upon waking up is plaintively whining about it fhdasj. Yeah having feelings again can take a person like that)

- Howl’s bad dye job freakout is still very funny and silly, of course, never change you giant drama queen slime the place down, but there’s something about the fact that he’s apparently been dyeing his hair the colour Suliman seems to favor/uses to mark ‘her people’ all this time even when he hasn’t been able to face her, especially since the flashback shows black is his natural hair colour, and how badly it freaks him out to not meet that standard anymore… Huh. Hm.Hah.

(This time I actually wondered to myself if part of the reason he made the deal with Calcifer was to be able to get away from her and the plans she had for his life (and that he clearly would have hated, if their fundamental philosophical disagreement about warfare is any indication!). I think it says some very sad things that his happiest childhood memory is of a secret place where he got to be entirely alone because it was the only place he felt safe. Howl’s Moving Giant Coping Mechanism Metaphor. You see the castle is the Flight response made. Well not flesh. Timber, I guess. The Flight response made timber. In this essay I will etc.)

- It hurts me that Howl brings Sophie’s old bedroom into the castle. He wanted so badly to make her happy and he seems to assume that because his memory of childhood solitude is a… if not happy then comforting thing to him, it would be for her too. But to her that’s just a reminder of the stagnancy and loneliness and… indignity? of her life before, and makes her feel like he’s treating her like a housekeeper, relegating her to that tiny room all over again, unwanted and ignored. Augh. At least she seems to understand what he meant to do for her when he shows her the meadow, though, and he doesn’t stop trying to communicate it to her even though his gesture didn’t land the way he’d hoped at first. This movie is so quietly kind about people trying to learn how to understand and love each other. Everyone is allowed to stay at the castle in all their imperfections, even the Witch.

- Something something the Witch curses Sophie with not being able to tell anyone what’s happened to her… and in the end that doesn’t even really matter because the people around her either grow to understand without having to be told by actually paying attention to her (like Howl) or just accept her exactly as she is anyway, age yo-yoing and all, no questions asked (like Markl). And in the same way Sophie immediately recognizes Howl in his monster form and isn’t afraid of him even when he tells her it’s too late. Suliman warning her about ‘what he really is’ and Sophie immediately hugging him in his full monster form because he came home and that’s all that matters to her. Howl thinks her white hair is the most beautiful thing in the world and worth coming back to the world fully for. Sobbing.

- The implication that part of the reason Calcifer wants out of the contract (other than just being stuck in the hearth of a place slowly falling into depressing disrepair and neglect around him) is that he’s genuinely terrified of what Howl is doing to himself. There’s something kind of sad and very funny about that. What if you went into a deal with a demon and the demon had to keep telling you ‘uh. Uh bro that’s kind of fucked up you know that right. Hey are you listening to me you’re molting monster feathers onto the carpet Sophie is gonna LOSE IT and don’t come crying to me when she does’. I wonder what would have happened to Howl’s heart if he turned completely — it seems that their contract has kept it safe and unchanged in every other way, if frozen in time, so presumably it would just… keep going the same way? (Calcifer telling Sophie that ‘it’s still the heart of a child’ got me so bad this time around. Bawling all over the place haha.) The idea of being stuck burning around a homeless heart forever is — well Calcifer I guess I get where you’re coming from here

- Of interest only to a very few people, I suppose, but the Norwegian dub of this movie fucking rules, I’m glad to find my childhood self was right about that. Calcifer is so cute in it it almost makes me dizzy sometimes, Aksel Hennie went ham on this one. Also an incredibly calming and charming performance for Howl — whenever I hear the English dub I just start laughing b/c like uh okay that’s Batman, takes me right out every time, that is not my lil guy fhsakjd. (I suspect his characterization is a bit different and softer in Norwegian too, just from the differences in translation I’ve seen?)

- The first time Howl takes Sophie flying he holds her hand through it the entire time and guides her, the second time he takes her flying he lets her steer the flying machine for a while under his supervision before he goes off to make the distraction (there’s something so sweet about it as much as he’s being a little shit about it, honestly, he believes in her in such a quiet undramatic way even as she’s freaking out), and then after walking away from Howl’s childhood memory she walk-flies confidently on her own exactly like he showed her at the beginning. At the end the whole castle flies, with all of them safe and comfortable within it. Thoughts. Feels. Agony.

- There’s something so… weirdly achingly beautiful about the non-linearity of love in this movie. To properly meet each other as themselves here and now, Sophie and Howl have to flicker through polar opposite ends of life where they’re both stuck: old age and calcified (ahaha) childhood, resigned depression and overwhelmed fear. The promise Sophie makes at the end that is the beginning for Howl and probably kept him going in the meantime — love and a feeling of home that echoes even through the part of your life when it wasn’t there yet, love as hope. He finds her in the future, she finds him in the past, their hearts call to each other across time and space and they both work so hard to be able to actually meet in the now. The castle is kind of a wheezing overwrought monstrosity, the result of having to keep your heart outside of yourself and be constantly running from everything… but how can you begrudge it for it, when it works so doggedly to keep you and all you love safe while you look for that home? (To me Calcifer is basically a metaphor for dissociation, for what it’s worth, and he always has been)

TL;DR One of my fave movies of all times and touches me to the soul, I can't help but be distressingly earnest about it

#howl's moving castle #studio ghibli #sophie hatter #howl jenkins pendragon #calcifer #this is entirely about the movie and not the book b/c as far as I'm concerned those are like. two completely different stories haha #both alike in dignity etc. but doing very different things ultimately #not even touching on all the anti-war stuff here all the interpersonal stuff overwhelmed me with its sincerity and I must cry #meta

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years

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For each of the Animoprhs, which book would you consider the best for showing their characterization? Best book for understanding Jake's character, best for Rachel, etc.

If I can give a very me answer (i.e. verbose and bad at choosing things), I’m not sure there are any books that don’t advance the character arc of the narrator in a meaningful way. Going down the list:

Jake: Starts the series as a somewhat naïve, privileged kid who wants to save his big brother but isn’t sure why he’s in charge. Ends the series as a highly competent but also ruthless general who defeats the Yeerk Empire at the expense of his big brother.

#1: Establishes his antebellum family life, and his casual certainty that everything’s going to work out once the andalites come to help.

#6: Forces Jake to confront the simultaneous realities of the controllers’ helplessness in the face of trauma and the dangerous realities of their bodies becoming weapons, cementing his convictions about the war.

#11: Features Jake’s first real crisis as a leader and forms much of the basis for his incessant rumination on alternative outcomes.

#16: Establishes Jake’s biggest Achilles heel as a leader: that he consistently fails to secure his own oxygen mask before helping others. The plot also punishes indecisiveness and rewards recklessness.

#21: Causes Jake to have to define his role as a leader in response to David presenting the first real challenge to Jake’s authority.

#26: Gives Jake the chance to be his most awesome and competent as a leader, from managing Ax’s emotions and skillfully deploying Rachel and Erek to the Gordian-knot-cutting gambit that makes Crayak himself sit up and take notice.

#31: Confronts Jake with the slow-burning crisis he’s been struggling to ignore within his own family, causing him to (largely unsuccessfully) deal with the threat presented by Tom’s continued existence.

#36: Gives us some heartwarming moments of Jake expressing his love for his team while throwing himself between them and danger.

#41: Features Jake grappling with the realization that he can’t — and shouldn’t — save his own loved ones at the expense of someone else’s.

#47: Largely inconsequential, but does involve the only instance of Jake leading an army against invading forces in a “traditional” battle.

#53: In which Jake applies everything he’s learned to take over the U.S. Air Force, recruit the taxxons, manipulate multiple yeerk vissers, and strategically use all his allies in ways that are effective but brutal. Also, he FINALLY does something about Tom — and it comes at the expense of Rachel’s life.

Tobias: Starts the series as a dreamy-eyed idealist with no clear-cut identity who eagerly commits himself to the first cause that comes along. Ends the series as a pragmatic survivalist who values self-sufficiency but also his connections to his hawk and human and andalite and hork-bajir sides.

#3: Acts as the comedown of Tobias’s idealism following his somewhat-impulsive, somewhat-forced decision, as the reality of predation and nothlitization sinks in.

#13: Establishes Tobias as the kind of guy who (literally) looks higher powers in the eye and calls “bull,” but also the eyes in the sky for the team.

#23: Further complexifies Tobias’s already-complex species identity, but also gives him the chacne to be badass and self-reliant in a world that used to stuff his head in toilet bowls.

#33: Puts Tobias through the kind of pressure test that allows him to realize what’s really important to him, from his andalite family to his love for Rachel.

#43: Gives power back to Tobias through showing him — both in flashbacks and in the present conflict with Taylor — embracing the power not to decide (X).

#49: Leads Tobias to the realization that he may never have a nuclear family like Jake’s or Cassie’s, but that his crappy upbringing imbued him with a level of resiliency that Jake frankly lacks.

Ax: Starts the series as a kid who knows exactly who he is (a proud aristh in The Greatest Military in the galaxy) and where he’s from (andalite culture) and just wants to get home. Ends the series identified as “Aximili of Earth,” with a relentless wanderlust and a reputation for undercutting traditional andalite power structures.

#8: Establishes Ax as a lonely kid under enormous pressure to conform to two different cultures in two different ways, and sets him on the path to balancing those conflicting demands.

#18: Probably the apex of Ax’s embracing andaliteness at the expense of humanity, forcing him to realize that people are people and there’s no rank-ordering entire groups.

#28: Confronts Ax with the nastiest sides of humanity — animal testing and factory farming — to cast him as a witness to whom his human friends must justify themselves.

#38: Allows Ax to measure himself and his team against the andalites’ standards for competency and morality alike, and to find it is the andalites who are wanting.

#46: Probably the nadir of Ax’s embracing andaliteness, with all his prior experience culminating in deep longing to be human in light of the Air Force’s unflinching nobility and the craven imperialism of the Andalite Electorate.

#52: Culminates the conflict between Ax’s cultures through leading him to conclude that his friends specifically and humans as a whole don’t have to be perfect to have fundamental rights and dignity.

Cassie: Starts the war deeply uncomfortable with major decisions but nevertheless convinced that there’s a single “right” answer to every situation, largely only involved at all for love of her friends. Ends the war as a “one woman army” (emphasis on one) with a nuanced morality system and a willingness to go her own way rather than setting herself on fire to keep others warm.

#4: Forces her out of her comfort zone and into making decisions for the entire team, causing her to discover that she’s braver and stronger than she ever realized.

#9: Crystalizes Cassie’s willingness to embrace and protect the Earth in spite of fully recognizing its inherent brutality.

#14: Undeniably inane, but gets some great humor out of Cassie being a sweet straightforward kid and a terrible liar.

#19: Establishes Cassie’s Achilles heel: that she functions brilliantly with no one to watch out for but herself, but doesn’t play well with others. Also knocks her off her high horse through forcing her to realize that many enemy soldiers are just as clueless as she is.

#24: Acts as a check-in after the events of the David trilogy, showing just how jaded the kids have become that Cassie and Marco find violent alien abduction to be little more than a minor annoyance.

#29: Plays to Cassie’s strengths — working alone, developing her unusual allies, taking care of her friends, remaining focused under fire — to show her at her most awesome and draw out her competencies.

#34: Gives Cassie a glimpse of what it means to be a compassionate but still powerful leader.

#39: Sets up the end of the series through using the wolf morph to show Cassie’s ability to keep running and changing and being many things at once (both figuratively and literally) after all her friends have fallen behind.

#44: Foreshadows Cassie’s breakup with Jake through contrasting her ability to get by alone in Australia with his “zombielike” state of lost dependence while she’s gone.

#50: Drives a wedge between Cassie and her team, with the consolation prize that she makes a compassionate and discerning move which ultimately sets the Animorphs up to win the war.

Rachel: Starts the series as a restless “mall rat” who enjoys risk and challenge for their own sake, and has casually absolute faith in her own abilities. Ends the series by telling the reader outright that she’s scared, but that she must do what’s right for her team; uses her last minutes to apologize to Tom for killing him and to seek reassurance from the Ellimist that she made a difference.

#2: Establishes that she’s cocky and fun-loving even after being confronted with the realities of war, but also that she’ll gladly die for love of her friends, from Tobias to Melissa.

#7: Brings out Rachel’s truly reckless side through backing her into a corner — which is when she’s most dangerous. Also serves as maybe the biggest blow the Animorphs ever inflict on the yeerks with minimal loss of life, crystalizing Rachel’s sense of self-righteousness.

#12: Shows the struggle hidden under her role as “the strong one,” both for her team and for her sisters.

#17: Involves Rachel interrogating how her friends see her, including her awareness that this team would never be able to talk itself into continuously reentering the hell of war without her.

#22: Confronts Rachel with the darkest depths of her own brutality, but also establishes that she’s willing to be the one to do the hard jobs of the war if it keeps the others from having to listen to David’s pleas for help.

#27: Fully cements Rachel’s relationship with Tobias through allowing her to realize what’s really important to her.

#32: Uses one of those awesome SF identity premises to give Rachel the chance to literally argue with herself, and — by showing how much each of her halves relies on the other — shows how all the facets of her identity, ugly and pretty alike, make her who she is.

#37: Contains a couple different truly awesome moments with Rachel realizing that her strengths are not Jake’s, nor are they Marco’s, but that the team will carry her through at the end of the day.

#42: A little silly, but gives Rachel the chance to out-bluster even helmacrons and to force the hard decision that Jake hesitates to make — that they need to sacrifice Marco to save their own lives.

#48: Frustratingly inconsequential, but brings together the disparate threads of her conflict with Crayak, her conflict with David, and her conflict with Jake, and culminates with Rachel confronting Cassie with the reality that if Rachel herself doesn’t do the awful things (kill David, kill Tom) then no one else will.

Marco: Starts the war as a never-serious kid who is nevertheless familiar enough with the reality of death to try and hit the brakes before inevitable tragedy gets too close to his loved ones. Ends the war as a ruthlessly machiavellian strategist who believes in the necessity of matricide and even war crimes to keep the planet spinning on its axis.

#5: Contains the hilarity of Ax-wrangling and the utter horror of Marco realizing that Visser One thoughtlessly destroyed the lives of his entire family as an incidental aside on her rise to power, establishing early that he’s willing to burn down the world to protect his family.

#10: Gives Marco the chance to call bullshit on the chee’s moralizing about their own nonintervention in the face of massive injustice, delineating his own code of ethics.

#15: Forces Marco to confront his own trauma and becomes the first time that he must make a major ethical choice with no good solutions — and, by no coincidence, is all about him turning into a shark.

#20: Brings out the worst in Marco through emphasizing his mistrust (and lack of compassion) for strangers, his possessiveness of his friends, and his willingness to be a bully when David fails to see the big picture.

#25: Becomes the book where Marco calls himself “Mr. Ruthless” and also sees himself in a motherless pair of baby seals, where he expresses admiration for Jake’s growing manipulativeness and successfully distracts everyone from waiting around for their own deaths with really bad “dumb blond” jokes.

#30: Involves Marco giving an account of himself (as Cates would say) through justifying his decision to the reader as he plans his mom’s execution.

#35: Acts as some much-needed comic relief because of Marco’s refusal to take himself seriously, while continuing arc of his coming apart at the seams when he can’t define himself by his family.

#40: Has a deeply troubling after-school special vibe that culminates in Marco discovering that *gasp* disabled people are people too, and... Sorry, I can’t come up with anything nice to say about this book.

#45: Shows that (unlike Jake) Marco can find the balance between protecting his family and protecting the planet, and also that Marco’s brilliance has a very very dark side when it comes to manipulating Peter.

#51: Again acts as much-needed comic relief during one of the bleakest points in the war, while also showing that Marco may have overcome his intial mutual hostility with Tobias but that he’s also whistling as the world burns at a time when Jake and Rachel could both really use fewer jokes and more emotional support.

Anon, I promise I will do my best to narrow this list down, but your ask sent me off into rapturous enumerations about the tightly-woven character arcs in this series and the fact that even the ghostwritten books are remarkably consistent in light of the big picture for each of the six kids.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #animorphs spoilers #long post #asks #jake berenson #tobias fangor #rachel berenson #aximili esgarrouth isthill #i am bad at choosing things #Anonymous

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