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From
the September/October 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine From Page to Screen by Anita L. Burkam Although movies have been made from children’s tales and books ever since Snow White trilled into her well and Dorothy clicked her heels three times, lately the trend is intensifying, especially with the advent of the Harry Potter movie franchise, Walden Media (Holes; Because of Winn-Dixie), and YA chick lit flicks like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Movie companies are mining publishers’ lists for ready-to-go stories that can be presented as family entertainment, an exciting development for the children’s book community seeking to escape from the “kiddie lit” ghetto. And yet, who didn’t groan at the Disney bowdlerization of our beloved Tuck Everlasting? The successful adaptation of even a great book to movie form is far from guaranteed. To make the leap from page to screen, a book’s dense verbal information must be translated almost entirely into visual information, with only limited narration and dialogue to help viewers make sense of it. What gets lost in this translation, and what gets added? In the case of Hayao Miyazaki’s version of Diana Wynne Jones’s rollicking fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle, what gets lost are quite a number of subplots, and possibly the entire original theme. What gets added is the storytelling imagination of the creative genius behind Japanese anime films Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. The resulting hybrid is gorgeous if frequently perplexing. Visually, Miyazaki’s film is a knockout. The moving castle stalking over the foothills on mechanical chicken legs, the creaks and groans as the towers and oddments shift, the hiss and clang and roar of the engines and flywheels spinning, the steam and smoke billowing, the gun-turret iguana eyes and boat-like mouth riding in front, with the steps and front door trailing behind like a stubby tail—it’s an amazing sight, and worth the price of admission. The filmmaker glories in vistas of pristine valleys and white-capped mountains, in minutely detailed surfaces in towns and interiors. He achieves different values and textures of colors and light that bring an almost hyperrealism to the animation. A movie’s prime advantage over a book is that things we see with our own eyes take precedence in our minds over things we read about. What we see is more real and more “true” than what we can imagine. But while the Harry Potter films set out to be a very literal translation of how the story’s events looked and sounded, Miyazaki aims for a looser interpretation, starting with the plot itself. Casual viewers might be forgiven for thinking it’s not even the same story. In both versions, mousy milliner Sophie gets changed into an old woman by the Witch of the Waste. Happening into the wizard Howl’s castle, elderly Sophie makes a deal with the fire demon Calcifer that she will try to break his contract with Howl if he will remove the Witch’s enchantment and make her young again. While cleaning Howl’s castle and spying for clues, Sophie becomes involved in Howl’s affairs, falls in love with him, and rescues him from his enchantment so that everyone lives happily ever after. But while the book hints at and then reveals Sophie’s own magic abilities (she talks charms into her hats, which is what gets her in trouble with the Witch, and she talks an old scarecrow into life, among other things), the movie portrays her as a normal girl turned by a curse into an old woman, reacting to strange events around her, more the object of the plot’s action than its protagonist. In the movie, the focus falls on Howl, beautiful but distant, threatened by a war that firebombs cities and demands wizard conscripts, threatened by his own potentially irreversible transformation into a hawklike creature, in which form he surveys the war’s damage. Sophie’s intervention with the King’s sorcerer could save Howl from conscription, but it’s her love that will reclaim him from his hawk shape. She even gets younger at moments of extreme devotion. That Miyazaki expanded the book’s single sentence about war into a major subplot seems understandable, if not entirely kosher; he has his own story to tell, with his own themes. But the movie’s taming of Sophie and Howl’s eccentric romance into a more conventional love story, though it raises the story’s universal archetype quotient, obscures the quirky individualism of the characters we love so well. That, of course, is only an impression of the plot; the actual details get less and less discernable as the movie progresses. Whereas readers get the sense that Jones ultimately ties everything together, the movie version may be more random by design. Miyazaki employs a technique of cascading images both delightful and disturbing to keep viewers off-balance and unsure of their ground, overwhelmed and filled with wonder. He used the same technique in Spirited Away, a breathless whirlwind of sights, to rather enjoyable effect, although in both cases the plot is obscured in the flurry. In an opening scene of Howl’s Moving Castle, Howl rescues mousy Sophie from some soldiers, then endangers her anew by attracting the notice of his own pursuers, the Witch’s creatures. As the two race through the streets of Market Chipping, bulgy black tar-monsters in straw boaters ooze out of cracks and crannies to give chase, nearly enveloping our heroes until Howl takes to the air. Things move so quickly that viewers barely have time to think, “What are those things?” before the scene shifts and there’s more to take in, leaving the question “...and why are they wearing straw boaters?” hanging in the air, unanswered. Relevant and irrelevant visual information continues to pelt viewers, who must sort out what advances the plot from what is merely window dressing. In the book, the scarecrow’s repeated appearances are spooky yet make sense in the end; in the movie, the reasons why such a gamely helpful scarecrow is following Sophie around are never made clear. Even if Miyazaki’s love of astonishing images and puzzling juxtapositions weren’t an inherent part of his filmmaking, it would still be a good stylistic choice for an interpretation of Jones’s writing. Acclaimed for her fertile imagination and dizzyingly complex plots, Jones supplies plenty of material for Miyazaki’s visual elaboration. For instance, the bizarre scene in which Howl’s hair dye goes wrong and he pitches a tantrum and covers himself in green slime is straight from Jones, for all that it comes across in the movie as a peculiarly alien complication. Describing the tantrum, Jones writes, “The room turned dim. Huge, cloudy, human-looking shapes bellied up in all four corners and advanced on Sophie...howling as they came.” And in a virtuoso display of pace and framing, Miyazaki obliges with darkening colors, shifting walls, encroaching bulbous figures, and a flutter of half-glimpsed images that give the sense that the wheels are coming off reality. Like Miyazaki, Jones has always employed rapid-fire, incongruous visuals to keep readers off-balance and create a feeling that something out-of-control and out-of-the-ordinary is happening. But whereas verbal information is relatively easy to sort through for clues as to which narrative events anchor the story and which are merely distractions, the images on screen are lifted into a different context, shaken up, made strange. Which brings us to a further point of complexity that has been the subtext for this entire discussion: in addition to translating from a verbal medium to a visual one, the director of Howl’s Moving Castle is taking a story from the British-English folktale universe and placing it in the realm of Japanese anime. Although Americans are more sophisticated about anime than they were a few years back, most won’t understand the set of expectations that help Japanese viewers navigate Miyazaki’s visual mode of storytelling, and the folktale context of Jones’s story that would have guided them is gone. When Jones begins her story, “In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three,” her readers immediately understand what kind of story she intends to tell and what the ground rules are going to be. Rather than run this essence of Grimm and Perrault through a Japanese cultural filter, with uncertain results, Miyazaki substitutes his own idiom. He establishes the setting with images of Market Chipping as an early-industrial-era town, its idyllic beauty marred by the choking smoke pouring from factories and from a steam locomotive, while menacing airships hover on the horizon. A beginning like that seems aimed at the struggle of post-industrial society not to be irreversibly polluted and dehumanized by its new technological wizardry; and, in fact, both the horrors of industrialized war and the dangers of losing oneself through an irreversible transformation play a role in the movie. And yet, what are American viewers to make of it? Are those common themes in anime? If Howl’s glossy, remote portrayal is actually a character type—bishonen, or “beautiful boy”—what connotations does that bring to the role? Is Sophie’s ability to save her man through love alone a cherished anime tale type? I get the sense throughout that clues on how to “read” the movie are zipping past, from the un-Disney-esque facial features of the secondary characters to the Hello Kitty smile on the mouth of the scarecrow. It’s fine to feel a bit dazzled by all these missed clues, although it would be nice to catch a bit more of the context. In the end, I liked the movie version of Howl’s Moving Castle for the same reason I like looking at contemporary art—because it unsettles my expectations and feeds me uncommon images and associations. Miyazaki’s is not the slavishly literal translation of Jones’s work that the Harry Potter movies are of Rowling’s. No one who reads the book is going to think the movie shows what “really” happened in the story. Nor will most Americans pick up on the subtleties of Miyazaki’s presentation. But for sheer overwhelming spectacle, the movie delivers.
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