Sophie is a milliner, the eldest of three sisters, and she does not expect much from her life. Then the Witch of the Waste walks into her shop and turns her into an old woman. That is the engine of Howl’s Moving Castle, Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 film, and it is still one of the strangest and most generous premises in animation.
Trailer, via Crunchyroll Store Australia.
Sophie Leaves Home
Miyazaki wrote and directed the film, adapting Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 novel. Studio Ghibli animated it, Toshio Suzuki produced it, and Toho distributed it. It runs 119 minutes. The cast is led by Chieko Baisho as Sophie, Takuya Kimura as Howl, and Akihiro Miwa as the Witch of the Waste. Tatsuya Gashuin voices Calcifer, Ryunosuke Kamiki voices the apprentice Markl, and Akio Otsuka voices the King of Ingary.
The curse matters because Sophie cannot tell anyone about it. She is unable to reveal it. She leaves home and walks into the countryside, where she meets a living scarecrow she names Turnip Head. He leads her to Howl’s castle, which she enters without invitation. Inside she finds Markl and Calcifer, a fire demon who powers the castle’s magic and movement. Calcifer offers a deal: he will break her curse if she breaks his link to Howl. When Howl appears, Sophie tells him Calcifer hired her as a cleaning lady. It is a small lie, and it holds the household together.
Howl Refuses to Fight
The setting is a fictional kingdom where magic and early 20th-century technology sit side by side, and it is at war with a neighboring kingdom. That kingdom is searching for its missing prince. The King summons Howl to fight. Howl refuses to fight for the King, and sends Sophie to the palace under the pretense that she is his mother, to tell the King that Howl is too much of a coward to serve.
Before she goes, he gives her a charmed ring that leads her to Calcifer and guarantees her safety. At the palace she meets Suliman, the King’s head sorceress, and the Witch of the Waste. Suliman drains the Witch of all her power and reverts her to her true age, leaving her harmless and very old. Then she warns Sophie: Howl will meet the same fate if he does not fight for the King.
Howl arrives to rescue Sophie. Suliman tries to trap him by turning him into a monster. With Sophie’s help he remembers himself and barely escapes. The pair flee with the Witch of the Waste and Suliman’s dog, Heen.
Old Age as a Kind of Freedom
Miyazaki made Howl’s Moving Castle in opposition to the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the anti-war theme is not buried. He said he “had a great deal of rage” about the Iraq War, which led him to make a film he felt would be poorly received in the United States. The war in the film is not a backdrop for adventure. It is the thing Howl is running from, and the thing Sophie keeps walking toward.
had a great deal of rage
The film also depicts age positively, as something that grants the protagonist freedom. Sophie’s curse opens room she did not have as a young milliner — the room to be blunt, to leave, to matter to people who need her, at least as the film frames it. The film has feminist elements and carries messages about the value of compassion. It differs sharply from the novel, which focuses on class and gender norms; the film focuses on love, personal loyalty, and the destructive effects of war.
That is a real divergence, and it is worth naming plainly. Jones wrote a book about a girl learning the rules of a world that wants to keep her small. Miyazaki made a film about a girl who stops waiting for permission. Both work. They are not the same story.
The Household Inside the Castle
What holds the film together is the household. Consider what Sophie inherits when she walks through that door:
- Calcifer, the fire demon who moves the castle and wants out of his bargain
- Markl, the young apprentice who runs errands and keeps the place standing
- Turnip Head, the scarecrow who leads Sophie to the castle and stays
- Heen, Suliman’s dog, who leaves with them
- The Witch of the Waste, stripped of her power and reduced to an old woman in the same house
None of them are family. All of them become one. The film’s tagline is “Love Comes First,” and for once the tagline is not marketing noise — it describes the actual argument of the movie.
The animation is the other argument. The castle is a lurching pile of scrap that moves because a fire demon lives in its hearth, and Miyazaki lets you feel its weight every time it shifts. The palace scenes with Suliman are colder and cleaner, and the contrast does the work that dialogue would do in a lesser film. Kimura’s Howl is vain and dramatic and genuinely frightened, which is more interesting than a hero who is only brave. Baisho plays Sophie at two ages without ever letting the performance split in two.
What More Than Two Decades Have Not Fixed
Howl’s Moving Castle premiered at the 61st Venice International Film Festival on 5 September 2004. It has held up for more than two decades because it refuses the easy version of its own story. The war does not resolve into a clean victory. The curse does not lift because Sophie deserves it. In this paper’s reading, Howl does not become brave; he becomes known, which is harder.
The film is not Miyazaki’s tightest. The plot sprawls, the political thread is stated more than it is dramatized, and the third act moves faster than the ideas inside it can carry. Sophie’s sisters appear and then fade, and the missing prince subplot resolves with a shrug — our judgment on the writing, not a fact the film announces. These are real costs, and they keep Howl’s Moving Castle below the director’s best.
But the parts that work are the parts nobody else was making. A heroine who gets older and freer at the same time. A wizard whose cowardice is treated as a wound rather than a joke. A house full of strangers who decide, without saying so, that they belong to each other. That is worth more than a tidy ending.
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