I’ve wanted to see Howl’s Moving Castle for some time. When I did, I’m not sure what I saw.
Original, bizarre, a wonderful mishmash of ideas and cultures, harkening especially to The Difference Engine, where William Gibson and Bruce Sterling looked at computers as they might have existed in Victorian England if Charles Babbage had been successful. (Good book, by the way.) Hayao Miyazaki doesn’t restrain himself to those threads, though.
I couldn’t imagine where the various ideas came from and how it ended up in a Japanese animated movie, with voices from Billy Crystal, Lauren Bacall, Christian Bale, and others for the American release. But it’s all from a book…Diana Wynne Jones wrote the novel.
Whoa.
An 80 from Metacritic for the film, by the way, with several glowing reviews.