A Moving Story
posted in General |
Last week, I rented Howl’s Moving Castle. It was directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away These stories are interesting- they’re an easy vector for Anime to be accepted by American “mainstream” viewers. Disney jas brought them to the big screens here.
I really liked Spirited Away,. Howl’s Moving Castle is similar; Sophie Hatter ( the girl on the cover ) befriends an odd assortment of characters, from the Witch of the West to Turniphead the Scarecrow, and they all tie together before the end of the story. What I really liked about the story, however, was that Sophie’s (I’m not spoiling anything, really) curse is explained but the removal of it isn’t. We see how the curse is lifted and we can surmise the underlying cause, but it’s not as obvious as “being kissed by your true love” or anything. It’d be interesting to watch this with my daughters and find out how they think it’s lifted. Miss B, for instance, has a very solid grounding in Magic and how it works- she’d be the expert witness.
And Miyazaki has optioned to bring Ursala Le Guin’s Earthsea books to the screen too! All the Earthsea novels in one arc of one movie; I’m not sure how well it’ll translate. But I’ve been waiting a long time to see someone’s interpretation of the novels. So long, in fact, that I once wrote a college admissions essay on a quote from one of the novels. It didn’t help me get into Stanford, though; I guess I was a little full of myself, writing that I was a “man, above Nature.”
According to that link, I totally missed the point of A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin is a Taoist — which I didn’t even pick up on during my high school reading of the novels, probably because I didn’t know what Taoism was. But the stories are a circle of balances, of the dichotomy between light and dark. Read the link for more info. 
