Howl’s Moving Castle is perhaps Miyazaki’s most phantasmagorical film filled with astonishing imagery and supernatural logic. But will Americans get it? All images © 2004 Nibariki. GNDDT. All rights reserved.

For Hayao Miyazaki, it is a return to a land he knows very well. For everyone else, it is a visit to a world of marvels.

Howl’s Moving Castle, like several of Miyazaki’s other films, takes place in a world where magic is commonplace and Edwardian-era technology has spawned massive aerial warships. And like those films, it centers on a young woman who resolutely faces a challenge that might leave a conventional movie hero dazed and confused.

Howl’s North American premiere at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art on June 6, 2005, was an opportunity for its creators and American adaptors to run a media gauntlet of microphones, video cameras and tape recorders. First in line was Miyazaki himself, followed closely by his translator and his producer Toshio Suzuki.

The Japanese media had the edge in sharing the director’s language, and were rewarded with longer and presumably more nuanced answers to their questions. His (or his interpreter’s) English-language responses were concise and tended on occasion towards the tongue-in-cheek. (An aspiring animator was advised to “be poor, be young and have no name. That’s the best way to become a great creator — that’s what Mao Tse-tung said.”) When asked if he was surprised by the acceptance and acclaim his work has garnered in the U.S., Miyazaki replied “they may change their minds when they see this film.”

Howl’s Moving Castle is perhaps Miyazaki’s most phantasmagorical film yet, surpassing even Spirited Away in its astonishing imagery and supernatural logic. In the film’s first few minutes, blobby tar baby demons — wearing straw hats — bubble out from beneath paving stones and retreat en masse into a tiny teapot… a wizard rescues a damsel in distress by taking her for a stroll in mid-air… the eponymous construction, a haphazard heap of cottages, turrets and decrepit machinery is glimpsed through misty clouds, striding on a quartet of gigantic mechanical bird legs… and a goiter-necked witch transforms a young girl into a wizened old woman.

Transformation is a recurring theme in Studio Ghibli’s films, from Spirited Away’s piggish parents and The Cat Returns’ whisker-sprouting heroine, to Porco Rosso’s pig-headed aviator. Miyazaki adapted Diana Wynne Jones’ English-language fantasy novel “because I thought the idea of young protagonist turning into a grandmother a very compelling idea for a narrative. When you’re 60 you feel the same inside as you did when you were 18. Eighty-year-old grandmothers feel the same as an 18 year old. It’s something I’ve finally been able to learn at my age.”

Hayao Miyazaki returns time and again to the theme of transformation in his films. In Howl, he was compelled by the idea of a young woman changing into a grandmother. Photo credit: Eric Charbonneau, Berliner Studios.

Miyazaki transformed Wynne’s novel into a Japanese-language screenplay imbued with Japanese cultural values; the task of changing it into English and clarifying those cultural subtleties fell to Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald Hewitt. The husband and wife writing team had already done the same for Spirited Away, The Cat Returns and numerous other Studio Ghibli releases.

“We started out with a direct translation of the script and we also had subtitles on the film,” explained Cindy. “They were different so we cross-referenced them. Then we did a draft taking our best guess of what’s happening and presented it to Studio Ghibli and let them tell us where we went too far.” “We’re watching it as a viewer,” Don continued. “Am I understanding this?’ I don’t want to know Japanese because I’ll get too many clues an American audience won’t know. So we just sit there and watch the movie — do the words tell me the story? Do the pictures tell me the story? We watch it over and over again and get more understanding of it as we go along.

“The film’s love story was very Japanese, it was the hardest thing for us to do. They portray a love story thru subtle language differences: you speak more formally that kind of implies ‘I might like you.’ You can’t get that kind of thing across in English, you have to say it out loud and we weren’t allowed to change the dialog to incorporate stuff like that. What we did was direct the actress [to bring out the emotion in her reading]: ‘okay, you’re in love with Howl in this scene.’”

“We try to go as far as we think we need to make it make sense,” Cindy added. “What comes up all the time is, is this a cultural difference or are we changing the plot?”

One of the Hewitt’s challenges involved a plot twist that occurs at the very end of the film; those wishing to avoid spoilers may want to skip the next two paragraphs.