Howl's Moving Castle: Book Vs Movie

Today we're not just comparing the differences between the book and the film of Howl's Moving Castle, but the psychological differences and the childhood influences of both creators (Diana Wynne Jones and Hayao Miyazaki) to see how that impacts the ideas both stories contain. How can a story with an identical premise and create two vastly different outcomes?

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References:
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/anime/miyazakis-quiet-protest-15318.html 

Rudd, D. (2010). Building Castles in the Air: (De)Construction in “Howl’s Moving Castle.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 21(2 (79)), 257–270. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24352209

https://www.newsweek.com/positive-pessimist-119801 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BbhWrjIImg

http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interviews/m_speech.html

http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/interviews/m_speech.html 

Diana Wynne Jones' autobiography

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Greeks and Geeks the podcast which takes us on a persnickity but fun journey deep diving into the lore behind our favourite stories. Today we’re going to be discussing Howls Moving Castle but we’re not going to compare the book and the movie in the more traditional sense, that being the similarities and the differences of the plot and the character. Instead I wanted to look at the main brains behind the book and the movie and see how the themes they chose can affect the final product.

I’ve been thinking a lot about creative people in general and how we, whether we’re writers, artists, musicians, animators, can sometimes be really afraid of repeating ideas. When I was about fifteen or so, I wrote an original book about Vampires and humans being mortal enemies due to an ancient grudge between two kings. The Vampires are cursed to never see the sun and the descendent of the ancient vampire king is tasked with killing the descendent of the ancient human king in order to break the curse. But of course they fall in love instead. It’s long lost on an old discarded laptop now, so I can’t attest to its quality except to say it was probably horrific. Still I think of it fondly despite the fact that I never finished the novel. And why not? Well a little story called Twilight happened and suddenly everyone and their mother was publishing paranormal romances. I kid you not there were whole bookshelves dedicated to the sub-genre. And for some reason, 15 year old me decided to stop writing it because now that everyone was writing a vampire romance, everyone would think I was a dumb teenager copying a novel I didn’t even like. Why did I feel so embarrassed about a story I was only sharing with a handful of my best friends, friends who used to chase me through the school for new chapters? Why was I so afraid of the idea that someone, somewhere, might dare accuse me of copying?

I know I’m not alone in this feeling. And so today we’re going to look at two stories. The exact same premise, one even being an adaptation- a literal copy of the other- but in different fonts so to speak. So let’s get into it and discuss the premise of the book and film.

Howls Moving Castle originally started as a book by novelist Diana Wynne Jones and we’ll talk about her more in later sections. The book was published in 1986, eighteen years before its movie counterpart. It tells the story of Sophie Hatter, a young girl who lives in a magical world but who believes herself to be plain and ordinary. She has low self confidence and doesn’t expect much from her life. However when a witch, The Witch of the Waste, curses her to turn into an old woman, she ventures off to find the mysterious wizard Howl, who’s romantic reputation is notorious and who is in possession of a mysterious moving castle. Whilst there she finds the little fire demon, Calcifer who is bound to Howl. Calcifer and Sophie make a deal that if she can break Howls bond with Calcifer, then Calcifer will restore her youth. When Howl returns to his castle, Sophie says that she is his new cleaning lady and he rolls with it. From there we discover if Sophie can truly break her curse, just how Calcifer and Howl are bonded, a bit about war in general, and we get to see a love story play out although in…in very different ways (lol).

I won’t harp on about the plot too much, just the basic premise, considering the plots do diverge quite a bit between the book and the film and like I mentioned before, this isn’t really about the story. Though one of my favourite memes from the bookish spheres of the internet is that the book is told from Sophie’s perspective and the movie is told from Howl’s point of view. Two characters with two very different ways of looking at the world. It always makes me chuckle and I will refer back to it later when I discuss the differences between the romance of the book and the film. For now, though, I wanted to discuss the author of Howl’s Moving Castle in more detail, Diana Wynne Jones.

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Diana Wynne Jones was born on the 16th August 1934. At a young age, she went to stay with family in Wales for a brief time due to the onset of second world war, but family arguments made them move back to London, only to move AGAIN to the North of England to escape the bombings. Here she was intoxicated by the absolute beauty of northern England and I’m absolutely sure, as someone who herself was so inspired by the Lake District that I’m currently writing a novel based there, it absolutely had an impact on her writing. These moves set the tone for her frequently moving throughout her life along with a more strained relationship with her family, particularly her mother.

She also grew up in the days where boys and girls were much more segregated in terms of their schooling, and she struggled with the things she was taught such as sewing and being left handed made knitting tricky. She actually told her mother that she wouldn’t grow up to be a woman and wanted to do drawing with the boys, which she was punished for. 

Diana also had two other sister and, from her own writing, this is how she writes about the way her mother described them all.

My mother decided that Ursula was going to be an actress. Isobel, she told us, was beautiful but not otherwise gifted. As for me, she said, I was ugly, semi-delinquent, but bright. She had the nuns put me in a class with nine-year-olds. This was the first I knew that I was supposed to be clever. I did my best, but everything the class did was two years beyond me.

She was often put in charge of her younger sisters and was worried she wasn’t very good at it. As Diana grew up, she got into a few misadventures and whilst some were harmless, others were rather dangerous, such as learning morse code and using it to signal to friends who lived outside her village at night. You know. During the WW2 air raids. She was also underestimated and bullied at other schools, her own headmaster telling her that she wouldn’t pass the exams to get into grammar school- but she absolutely did and we love this for her.

However, this is the part I always find really exciting. She studied at Oxford and was a student of both C. S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien! Hilariously, she had some quite differing opinions of both of them and I need to just quote the author herself here, because I just find it so funny:

[C. S. Lewis] was just a marvelous lecturer: he made the dullest topics absolutely shine. He lectured in the very largest of lecture halls, which was a huge “L” shape, and it was packed, with people standing in the aisles, even early in the morning. Everybody drank it in. Obviously a whole lot of people took this away and thought about it, and began writing - mostly for children because in those days you couldn’t write fantasy for anyone else.

    Tolkien was a different matter. He was just a kind of eminence grise and a legend. You couldn’t hear him lecture. He worked at not letting you hear, because he wanted to go away and finish writing The Lord of the Rings. So he had the very smallest lecture room. First of all it was packed out, so he spoke with his back to the audience and mumbling. Unfortunately he was talking about - meditating on, really - what a plot is like and how it mutates into other plots, and this I found so fascinating that I went back the next week as did one other person. And this meant that he couldn’t stop lecturing and still get the money, which apparently in those days you could if no one turned up - it was a dreadful racket, really. He could have given just the one lecture and then been paid for a term if we’d all stayed away. But this other person and I attended diligently week after week, so he was forced to go on meditating about plots mutating, and what I could hear was fascinating, because he was busy with the really large orchestration of the latter part of The Lord of the Rings at the time. But all I retain is a sense of how marvellous the way plots work is. That was all I got out of it, but I kept going in case I might understand a bit more next week - let alone hear a bit more.   

I absolutely loved this tidbit, it’s one of my favourite facts ever and honestly this is the answer to one of my questions of where I’d travel back in time. I’d go to Oxford to see C.S Lewis lecture brilliantly, and join Diana Wynne Jones in winding Tolkien right up by attending one of his mumbling lectures. Sure we’re delaying the progress of Lord of the Rings, but I already know he finished it so it’s fine. Utterly hilarious.

And oh my god I think that the most nerdy teacher thing I’ve ever admitted on this podcast. That I’d go back in time and go to SCHOOL. But this isn’t about me, this is about Diana Wynne Jones and from this little fact from her life we’re starting to put an imagine on someone who was affected by war at a young age, but not too directly. We’re also seeing that this person has a funny, if slightly rebellious streak. If you can call it rebellious to spite your professor by…well…turning up to their lectures.

I’m not going to go over her whole life, just these parts of her life that I find the most interesting and most relevant to the stories she tells. So what picture are we seeing here? We’re seeing a girl who’s life was affected by one of the biggest, most horrific wars the world has ever known. A Brit, so subjected to the hardships of food scarcity, aka rationing, a girl who moved around constantly. And also one who grew up with a highly critical, emotionally distant, dare I even say abusive parents? The eldest daughter of three sisters, and considered the “ugly but clever one.” And a “semi-delinquent.” A message she got all her life. But even her smarts were underestimated by the adults in her life.

What does that experience do to a creative? How does it shape their stories? Well in her own words, Diana Wynne Jones explicitly says: “I think I write the kind of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old.”

And focusing on Howls Moving Castle we can see the influences of World War Two though very subtly. And we see it from Sophie’s perspective, as an ordinary girl trying to get by. In the book, war is talked about as a potential threat. Whilst it isn’t mentioned out right and very briefly, it’s there in the background as a potential threat. This is how Jones experienced the war, as something that was brewing when she first moved to Wales with her family, and then eventually it did come. But she was never near the action, apart from one time where a German fighter pilot was struck down, survived, and stole food from her village, scaring all the mothers senseless. So, what was Wynne Jones experiences of war? Constantly moving around. And Howl’s castle doesn’t just move, it also transports itself to different places instantly, even different realms. The war itself, doesn’t affect the plot of the book at all. It’s a mere implication, and I want you to hold on to that because we’re going to discuss that idea later. If you’ve watched the film, you might even be brewing some ideas and comparisons here yourself and I find it so unbelievably fascinating the reasons the creators have made the decisions we do so stick with me, I’m going somewhere here.

If you know the book well, or even the movie, you’ll know that Sophie is an older sister. In the movie this isn’t as important, but the magical land of Ingary, where Wynne Jones sets her novel, it very much is. The land runs on a sort of fairy-tale-esque logic. And so Sophie believes as the eldest of three sisters, that she is plain, that she is ordinary and boring and that she’s not to expect much out of life. I want you to think about the fairytales you’ve heard with sisters in them now, even the older Disney movies for example. Cinderella had two ugly step sisters, who in some versions of the tale are blinded for their cruelty towards her. Beauty had two greedy older siblings though that was written out of the Disney version but their cruelty can sometimes get them turned into statues. A more obscure fairytale, The Three Sisters, is a tale about two eldest unlucky sisters and one very lucky younger sister. Her good fortune causes the two eldest to act out jealousy and pettiness and, in the end, they are thrown into an oven for their crimes. There are other stories with kind sisters who love each other, such as Snow White and Rose Red, or the Twelve Dancing Princesses, but the prevailing theme of three sisters is one of opposites, cruelty vs kindness, luck vs misfortune, punishment vs reward. We’ve actually been conditioned to think this way by the narrative structures of fairytales, which even affects more modern story tellers, such as Jane Austen’s Persuasion where Anne Elliott is the middle child of three sisters, the other two being vain and narcissistic, or the booktok darling A Court of Thorns and Roses, where the debate over how much punishment or reward the three sisters deserve rages on. That debate wouldn’t really be there in the first place if we didn’t have those cultural expectations handed to us during our formative years.

So we have Wynne Jones, she herself the eldest of three sisters, she herself constantly described as the “ugly” one by her own mother AND using the conventions of three sisters in fairytales to build her story. It makes sense that her Sophie, again the eldest of three sisters, believes herself unlucky, believes she is destined for that a life of fairytale logic. And not only that, but Sophie is resigned to it. But what Wynne Jones does expertly here is that she subverts those conventions, surprising the readers and Sophie herself. The Article “Building Castles in the Air: (De)Construction in “Howls Moving Castle” by David Rudd states the following:

In Howl's Moving Castle (1986), Diana Wynne Jones is particularly adept at demonstrating how what we think of as solid ground is always prone to dissolution. Taking our modern notions of the fairy tale, deriving from male collectors like the Brothers Grimm, later to be consolidated in Disney's popular film adaptations, Jones shows us how easy it is to become enslaved by the narrative conventions these tales represent, and to interpret our lived experience accordingly.

Sophie expresses that being turned into an old lady by the Witch of the Waste is actually freeing for her. Once she is free of the conventions of fairy tales, and of age, she is fully able to express herself and set a course for her own happiness. Once she steps out of the box society, fairytales and her own mind puts her in, only then does her journey truly begin. Being old gives her the freedom to speak and act in a way her younger self would have balked at. But there’s more to it than even that. Sophie has her own magic, being able to speak life into objects, though she doesn’t realise it whilst she’s still young at the start of the novel. And her powerful, domestic magic as a cleaning lady is a comical reversal of the servile nature of someone like Cinderella, going as far to come right up against Howl’s wizardry.

The subject of Dianna Wynne Jones’ fairytale deconstructions in Howls Moving Castle could honestly be a topic for another podcast episode in and of itself so if you do want an episode on it, please let me know in the comments.

I hope I’ve been able to convey my belief that Wynne Jones’ childhood experiences definitely had a role to play with her crafting of the plot and her emphasis that certain destinies can be subverted in the story itself. But what about Miyazaki? How did his experiences help shape what the movie version of Howls Moving Castle became? Let get into but before we do, if you’re enjoying this episode please don’t forget to share this podcast with friends or family or anyone you think might enjoy it. Word of mouth is the number one way a podcast grows and I’m so thankful for all of you who are here listening, and who continue to comment, review and share with people you know. You guys are the best.

For now lets get into Howls Moving Castle, the film.

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Hayao Miyazaki was born in 1941, and so was a baby during the second world war. His father was a director of a company that made parts for Zero Fighter Planes. These were the planes mainly used by Japanese pilots during the war. They were in fact the same types of planes used during the attack on Pearl Harbour. 

His family did very well and, whilst they did share a bit of the suffering during and at the end of the war, Miyazaki admitted that it was nothing in comparison to other people. When he was four, his town was bombed horrifically and his family had to flee in the night. They took a petrol car (a rarity in those days) and raced to a nearby safe town, his parents ignoring the cries of their neighbours and their children to help and bring them along. This had a profound effect on him, and here’s a direct quote from him about the memory:

The fact that I grew up comfortably under parents who were making money in the munitions industry when others were suffering during the war, and the fact that we ran away riding a rare gasoline truck while others were dying, deserting even those who were asking us to take them with us, those facts remained as a very strong memory even for a four years old child. That was very difficult to bear, when you think about what people say about living right or being considerate toward others. And as a small child, you want to believe that your parents are good people, the best in the world. So, I suppressed this memory inside of me for a long time.[4] So I forgot about it, and I was forced to deal with this memory once again when I became an adolescent.

 So here we have a man, also deeply influenced by the second world war but with different experiences. Where Wynne Jones experienced the war through moving constantly from place to place and having it in the periphery, Miyazaki was able to see how society and class affects how people experience war and this had a profound affect on him, so much so that he buried the memories for years. But then he went on to say that he wanted to create stories where children are able to speak up, to have courage to say “stop the car” and help.

You can see this in Howls Moving Castle the film. In the film, the world is at war and you can see the effects greatly. Soldiers walking the streets harassing people, military machines interrupting scenes of idyllic, natural scenes, whole towns are on fire. Unlike in Wynne Jones’ novel, where the idea/threat of war is on the periphery, here it is blatant, glaring and horribly, horribly present. As Howl participates in the war, he begins to lose his humanity almost like a curse. Though he wants to avoid war, and even sends Sophie to stand up to the kings chief sorceress and state that Howl isn’t interested in fighting for him, in the end he has no choice but to take part in order to save those he loves. But almost at a terrible cost, losing his castle and almost his life in the process. You often find this in his movies, the idea that the protagonists aren’t fighting for any particular side but are rather caught up in the war, trying desperately to diffuse the fighting and keep the people and things they hold dear to them. The war in Howl’s moving Castle is pointless, senseless and it fills Howl with a sense of depression and nihilism.

With this knowledge in hand, we also have to discuss the timing of the movie. The movie was announced in September 2001 and I’m sure many of you might’ve pulled some time of face at that. But production truly began in 2003 with a 2004 release scheduled. I’m sure many of you will be aware that on the morning of September 11th 2001, a major terrorist attack occurred in America where two commercial planes were hijacked and deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers, leading to their collapse. Thousands of people lost their lives on the day and many others have since passed away due to health issues. It was an inexplicable tragedy and there was of course, far more to it than that but what I want to concentrate on is the American government’s response to the attack, as this is what had a huge affect on Miyazaki.

Shortly after the attacks, the American government announced the “War on Terror.” This involved campaigns in Iraq, which was invaded in 2003, and Afghanistan in order to defeat terrorist organisations. This was an incredibly controversial war world wide, with many protests against it. For example, on 15th February 2003, 600 cities across to world protested the war, millions of people took part and some protests even ended up in the Guiness World Records.

Miyazaki himself was furious at the war in Iraq and the anti-war themes he placed in Howls Moving Castle grew due to his anger at the American governments decisions to start a war in the first place. He’s gone on record as having deliberately made a movie that he believed Americans would be angry at, as it was so anti-war. He even went as far and not attending the Oscars to accept the award for Spirited Away.

This is what he had to say more recently about that: “The reason I wasn’t here for the Academy Award was because I didn’t want to visit a country that was bombing Iraq. At the time, my producer shut me up and did not allow me to say that, but I don’t see him around today. By the way, my producer also shared in that feeling.”

We’ve talked a lot about the idea of war having a massive effect on Miyazaki and I know it’s a bit of a downer to say the least, so I’m going to discuss something a bit more positive. That of Miyazaki’s passion to depict women and older characters. About that, he says: Many of my movies have strong female leads- brave, self-sufficient girls that don't think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They'll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a saviour. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man. 

His views about feminism really seem to come from his mother who, whilst not necessarily being a feminist herself at least I haven’t found any information about it, she has been described as intelligent and strong by Miyazaki. Even when she became ill, she didn’t show any sort of pessimism whilst her children were around. What I like about his movies is that they depict a range of strong female characters of all sorts of ages. In modern western media, I feel like writers can fall into a trap whereby the only way a female character can be strong is if they reject femininity in it’s entirety. The “I’m not like the other girls” trope, which has faced significant backlash recently. But being strong by rejecting stereotypically feminine things is also a form of misogyny. We are all victims to this because society mocks things that are feminine typically. I’m sure I’m not the only millennial women who went through a phase of hating pink. When I was 14 I went through a phase where I thought anything pink was gross and girly. I have no idea how this got in my head and let me make it very clear, I WAS LYIIIING. Lying through my teeth. Why on earth did I feel the need to pretend I hated pink? I love pink. One of my most recent favourite purchases is a pink cardigan with hearts on it, which you’ve probably seen in my tiktok videos because I wear that thing to death and even bought one for my bestie who recently had twins because she deserves a pretty pink cardigan even more than I do…

Ok I went to a weird place there sorry. But yes, as I was saying, Miyazaki’s portrayal of women and girls is often lauded. Even his villains are characters who show some form of humanity. I could go off on such a tangent about this and if you want me to do an episode on Miyazaki’s portrayals of women please let me know in the comments of this episode on the Greeks and Geeks discord or on my socials, which are linked in the episode description.

We’ll keep it focused on Howls Moving Castle. In the book, Sophie and the other female characters can’t be put in boxes. Her sisters swap identities to try and escape the roles society and their mother has attempted to place them in, and even Sophie, despite fully being resigned to her fate, discovers a new way of thinking through the curse. And whilst the Witch of the Waste in the book is, in my opinion, quite a bit more villainous than the one of the film, we still see that she is one of Howl’s many jilted exes, trying to fashion a perfect men out of many. And hey, who among us girls haven’t thought about that, even if it’s more of a metaphorical sense than literal like oh my ideal Disney Prince would look like Prince Naveen but have the personality of Flynn Rider and the Kingdom of Prince Eric, and I am NOT going to admit how long I spent debating that sentence because actually there are many combinations I could pick none of whom include John Smith and you all know why aaaand I’m getting off topic again.

I just wanted to point out that strong female characters and a sense of age being freeing is something that both works share equally. Miyazaki wrote: I made this film so that I could show it to a young girl of 60. [Laughs] What's wonderful about the story is that the happy ending isn't that the spell is broken and the girl is young again. It's that she forgets her age. He said that was part of what attracted him to the story to begin with, besides the pure unadulterated inspiration that the idea of a moving castle can bring anyway. I think we see this idea of age being freeing in a sense from Miyazaki himself and why that might have attracted him to the idea. The sense of guilty, possibly even shame, that came from his parent’s actions during the second world war, caused him to suppress those memories, but with age he was able to confront those emotions and memories, and felt free enough to even talk about them publicly.

Sophie in the movie is brave even in the face of her lack of confidence, she drives the story forward and helps save Howl from himself. She finds her voice and her inner strength throughout the novel and the movie. The movie does this in such an interesting way, showing her morph from her younger self to her older self at various points in the film, her appearance and curse are affected by how she speaks about herself. But in the film too, she has a sense of freedom when she’s old, prone to more outbursts and telling Howl off for his vanity, compared to at the start of the movie when she’s too scared to tell off the soldiers trying to harass her.

So here we have it, two great artists with two different projects, one inspired by another. Lets get into my final thoughts but before we do, don’t forget to leave me a comment on this episode! I always love reading your comments so please do share them.

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It’s safe to say that Howl’s Moving Castle the book and movie are two very different stories revolving around similar ideas. Some people prefer one over the other, but I’ve never been able to decide which one I prefer the most because they are so different. But I think the most interesting thing to take away from this episode is that, even if you share the exact same idea, the exact same premise, as another creative, it is your experiences, your personality, your beliefs that will ultimately shape the story. If I asked you to write a story about the moon, for example, what would you write (I’m actually curious about this so this could be something you comment on). The first idea that sprang to my mind was about a lonely moon goddess. But some of you might have wanted to write a story about the moon landing, or aliens, or what happened if the moon some day vanished. We all will write something different because we are all different, as shocking as that revelation is.

I wish I could talk to my past self, little writer Sabrina who gave up on her story because she thought nobody would take her seriously and think she was ripping off a book who got popular. But can’t go back in time and tell little writer Sabrina to keep writing that story, so maybe I can get through to you. If this episode teaches you anything, then hopefully it teaches you this. Diana Wynne Jones and Haoyo Miyazaki are two brilliant writers who came up with equally great stories based on the same idea, and both of them have millions of devoted fans who love their ideas. Could you imagine if Miyazaki had refused to adapt Howls Moving Castle because he didn’t want to copy Diana Wynne Jones’ story, even though what he came up with was totally different? What I’m saying is in saying “no” or saying “it’s been done” in dismissing creative ideas before you’ve even begun, you’re only stifling yourself and your own joy. No two stories are ever going to be completely the same.

Unless you use AI or something to write your story, but don’t do that please!

Thank you for listening to this weeks episode of Greeks and Geeks…