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This article refers to the English-dubbed Disney release.
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Howl's Moving Castle (2004) is loosely based on Diana Wynne Jones' fantasy novel of the same name. Miyazaki has taken and reinterpreted a number of elements from the source text, such as the eponymous castle, the vain wizard, and the young female protagonist who has a spell cast on her that turns her into an elderly woman. Most notably, however, in response to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, he decided to construct the film narrative around the novel's passing reference to an imminent war.1 Rather like the slug-like henchmen, the war infiltrates every part of the film's story, complicating and intensifying the relationships being developed and explored. According to the film's producer Toshio Suzuki, the war theme gave Miyazaki the opportunity to explore 'the qualities that make people human and enable them to retain their humanity in a world brutalized by bloodshed and greed'.2 In Howl's Moving Castle, this idea is communicated through the strange but mostly functional community that the protagonist, Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer as the young version of the character and Jean Simmons as the elderly version), creates out of the disparate collection of characters she meets after arriving at the castle.
In the English-dubbed Disney version of Howl's Moving Castle, most of the characters are voiced by well-known actors with distinctive and recognisable voices, most notably Lauren Bacall as the Witch of the Waste and Billy Crystal as Calcifer. When asked about the American dub, Miyazaki pointed out that, whether subtitled or revoiced, any work in translation will lose the nuances of the original, but he also suggested that Bacall's characterisation of the Witch of the Waste brought an extra dimension to the character.3 Regardless of the relative strengths of the two casts, the English-language version of the film highlights - for English-speaking viewers - the pieced-together eclecticism of the film's cultural and physical landscape.
Apparently inspired by the Alsace region of France, the film's towns and the surrounding alpine landscape draw on the associations attached to the European fairytale tradition: half-timbered houses, grand palaces, enchanted natural landscapes. However, these conventionally timeless associations are unsettled by timebased references to the impact of industrialisation. For...