Howl's Moving Castle (2004)
★★★★ — Howl's Moving Castle (2004)
Try explaining the plot of Howl's Moving Castle to someone who hasn't seen it. Go on. Watch their face. Somewhere around the fire demon living in the hearth, or the scarecrow with a turnip for a head, or the cursed old woman who used to be a young girl but is now slowly becoming herself again, they'll start edging towards the door. And yet sit them down in front of the film, and within twenty minutes they'll be completely, helplessly in. That's the alchemy Miyazaki works. It shouldn't make sense, and it does, because it's operating on dream logic rather than plot logic, and dream logic, when handled with this much care and imagination, is its own kind of truth.
Howl's Moving Castle is one of the finest animated films ever made. I'll say it plainly and I'll stand behind it. Visually, it's breathtaking from the first frame to the last. Every shot is painted with an almost overwhelming generosity of detail: cobbled streets, rooftop markets, fields of wildflowers, and above it all, that lurching, wheezing, magnificent castle itself, a clunking mass of metal and magic that somehow, improbably, feels like home. The animators have given it a personality before anyone inside it even speaks. That's a remarkable thing to pull off.
Sophie's arc is the emotional spine of the whole thing. She begins the film folded in on herself, apologetic about the space she takes up, and watches herself transformed, literally, by a witch's curse into an old woman. And here's the strange beauty of it: the curse seems to free her. She stops shrinking. She starts speaking her mind. Her journey from that shy, hunched girl to a confident, compassionate force is done with such subtlety and warmth that you almost don't clock how much she's changed until you look back at where she started. It's beautifully done.
And then there's Howl. Vain, dramatic, powerful, prone to turning his bathroom into a catastrophe over a change in hair colour. Miyazaki's most compelling male lead, I'd argue. He's the kind of character who initially seems to be all surface, all flourish, and then keeps revealing depths at exactly the moments you need him to. The film's central relationship earns its emotional weight without ever being sentimental about it.
Joe Hisaishi's score deserves its own paragraph, honestly. It carries the whole film on waves of warmth and melancholy, the main theme cycling back again and again like a memory you can't quite shake. I've had it stuck in my head for days after every single watch, and I'm never annoyed about it. That's the mark of a truly great film score.
Now, fair warning: if you come in demanding a tightly structured three-act plot, you might find yourself at sea. The story unfolds the way a dream does, following its own internal logic rather than the rules of conventional narrative. Things happen because they feel right, because they're strange and human and true, not necessarily because they've been carefully set up in act one. I've heard people call this a weakness, and I genuinely think they're wrong. It's part of the charm. The film is layered and poetic and slightly surreal in all the best ways, and it trusts you to keep up. I'd rather a film that expects something of me than one that explains itself to death.
Plot-wise, it may not be as rigorously constructed as Spirited Away. Emotionally, it soars to exactly the same heights, and there are individual moments here that hit me harder than almost anything else in Miyazaki's catalogue. If you loved Kiki's Delivery Service for its quieter, character-led warmth, or Castle in the Sky for its sense of adventure and wonder, this sits beautifully alongside both and goes further still.
Four and a half stars. A true triumph, and one of those films that reminds you what animation, at its most ambitious and most human, can actually do.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2025-04-06
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Kids · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · HBO Max
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Hayao Miyazaki: Castle in the Sky (1986) · Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) · Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) · My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
More from Japan: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Blue (1993) · The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
