Borrowed Howl's Moving Castle from the video shop. It's my first Japanese film (though I have a faint far off memory of watching part of one as a kid - might have been Spirited Away - nightmares ahoy!) and I... loved it! The animation is so different from anything I've ever seen before - and there are scenes so beautifully drawn that they are almost literally breathtaking. The story's pretty damn bizarre and wanders about a bit, but I found the unpredictability refreshing. Particularly the fact that the female protagonist spends most of the movie as an old woman - that's a direction you don't normally see filmmakers take!
The casting of the English dub was... odd. I don't think Christian Bale was a good choice for Howl. I kept hearing Batman. The actual character of Howl I found incredibly irritating the first time I watched the film - for some reason I loved him the second time. The steampunkiness was also pretty cool :-)
I enjoyed the film so much that I immediately downloaded Diana Wynne Jones's book on Amazon. Also amazing, though rather different.Peoples! Go watch this movie/read this book!
(Oh, that reminds me - when I hear Florence and the Machine's song 'Howl' I always hear them chanting 'hot potato' instead of 'hunter' in the bridge. Funniness.)
No comments:
Post a Comment