I watched Howl's Moving Castle the other night. Watching it, I realized I'd forgotten huge chunks of the movie. I've read the book, so I kept getting my plots crossed. The book is waaay different.
I think, of the two, I prefer the movie. They're so different, though, and the movie definitely shows Miyazaki's touch.
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Howl's condition, for example, has a lot in common with Ashitaka's curse from Mononoke-hime. War, as always, is a common theme through his movies. The war angle is intensified for the movie, as compared to the book.
Howl, definitely, is Miyazaki-fied in the movie. I vastly prefer movie-Howl to book-Howl. I wish the book was fresher in my mind as I write this, to pull some examples. Maybe when I get home I'll pull out some selections to back up these points, but suffice to say movie-Howl is awesome.
I haven't seen the dub, but for a while we had the subtitles on closed-captioned, rather than translated, so I got a peak at Billy Crystal's version of Calcifer. It seems like the same problem of Phil Hartman's Jiji in Kiki's Delivery Service -- lots of talking when, in the original movie, there was silence. I don't like that sort of thing, it just exemplifies why I dislike dubs so intensely. I mean, for starters there's that whole aspect of wanting to hear the original emphasis, emotion and just all that stuff that goes into acting. I have yet to hear a dub that even approaches the same level of nuance and emoting that goes into the original Japanese.
I have friends that disagree with me on this point; they prefer the sub. My fiance, for example, always prefers a dub. And not even with anime; even live-action films he wants to hear the dub. I hate to say it, but it's just laziness from not wanting to read. I'm such a fast reader that I barely even have to flick my eyes away to read the subs. I also get that zen-state where I'm not even registering the subtitles -- especially if the dialog is something I can comprehend.
Anyway, that was an unexpected tangent: back to Howl's Moving Castle.
Comparing it to the other Miyazaki films, Mononoke is still my favorite. It's also the first Miyazaki I saw, so there you go. My best friend prefers Nausicaa ----
WE INTERRUPT THIS POST FOR A BREAKING ANNOUNCEMENT!
My google search to double-check the spelling has led me to this wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaa
I have a print of that painting in my house. SPOOKY!
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