Reading The Stars Dispose, Adventures of a Simpleton
Watching Arrested Development, Kitchen Confidential, House, Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars
Playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, We Love Katamari, Okage: Shadow King, Phantom Brave, Katamari Damacy, Curse of Monkey Island, Final Fantasy VI, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Pretty Barbie Dressup Party Final Fantasy X-2(group gaming)
Back-burner Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, Star Ocean: The Second Story, Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance, Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast, Planescape: Torment, Final Fantasy VII
Obsessing Ivan Vorpatril, Erik and Ray, Impulse/Bart Allen, Bruno and Boots, Gilmore Girls (Doyle and Paris and Logan).
Upcoming Things of Importance October 21 Canadian politics paper due October 25 Canadian lit paper due
layout
Meimi has apparently decided to make herself my awesome layout fairy. Behold my twenty-first birthday present: A layout of pants!Logan, from Gilmore Girls (and, you know, that girl who's always hanging around him, what's her name . . .).
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Howl's Moving Giant . . . Shamling . . . Machine . . . Legs . . . Thing
10/12/2005 12:18:00 PM
"The reality is that we may never know who baked your PSP into this flaky crust." - Gabe, Penny Arcade.
It's been a while, several months, in fact, since last we had a wacky adventure here on Fuuma's Shoes, and there's a reason for that.
I'm lazy.
. . . Wait.
I actually stopped blogging about stuff that was going on this summer because a lot of bad shit was going down in my life and I didn't want to talk about it. Still don't. This got me in the habit of not-blogging, which I'm trying to correct.
Although having a very random post fangirling Ivan Vorpatril up is certainly -nice-.
So! Let's talk about Miyazki's Howl's Moving Castle, which I had the pleasure to watch bootlegged, with horrible subtitles in the past week.
This is nothing like an official review, which is why it's not on Logic and Chaos. I want to wait until I see the official release, to give it the chance to impress me with actual, coherent, grammatically correct subtitles (and I'd rather like to hear the dub, too, because, my word, Lauren Becall!)
This is, instead, the dreaded "Well, in the book" mumblings that I think I want to have off my chest when I actually review the movie, since, uh, it's not really fair to compare two hours or so of animation to two hundred pages of incredible prose.
Some of this is shallow, some of this is . . . shallow, but in a different way.
Spoilers.
Sort of.
But mainly for the book.
Okay, and for the movie too.
Sophie - where is your red hair, girl? WHERE IS THE RED HAIR?! Gingerish. Orange. Something. Not brown. I mean, /yes/ plain, mousey girl. But mousey doesn't mean brown, it's more the way of dress, of carrying herself, things like that. The scene where Howl accidentally dyes his hair red after Sophie's meddling is just a different level of special when you know Howl's hair is the same colour Sophie's is supposed to be.
Could someone explain why they even bothered to give Sophie one sister if that sister was never going to be seen again? I'd rather they cut her out entirely, if they couldn't find a way to work in both Martha and Lettie. Martha and Lettie are part of what make Sophie who she is - as is I could see no real reason for Sophie's resignation to her situation, to her conviction tha she was unattractive, all those things. It also takes away the fairy tale aspect somewhat. The fairy tale in Sophie's situation long before the Witch and Howl come into things. Plus, I liked the subplot with the sisters and their subverting of Fanny's plans for them and their romances and even their concern for their older sister. This, of course, means that the characters they were romantically involved with are now considered superfluous.
Which, I suppose, explains Michael's abrupt reduction from teenager to small child. Because we can't have an animated movie without at least one small child running around? Even without the romantic subplot, it would have been nice if they'd left Michael as a young teenager, if only because it seemed more believable that he was there as a student of Howl's and not just some random kid that hung out in Howl's home.
Where was Sophie's magic? There was none of the talking to the hats, I thought there might have been something with the scarecrow, but that was never addressed, and, of course, it ends up that she doesn't even have the power to save herself from the curse, although the way her character design is constantly fluctuating (which I really did like) seems to -imply- that she does . . .
Holy crap there was a lot of emphasis placed on the war. Not saying whether that's good or bad, but I sort of have memories of, uh not so much the war.
I MISS WALES. Seriously. I suppose they couldn't have included it in a Japanese movie but . . . I still miss it. I miss that normalacy, that thing that actually made Howl more human, easier to understand, seeing where he came from, his family, all those simple things . . . I miss Wales.
What the fuck was with Howl turning into that hideous monster thing? I swear, at times he looked like a damn flying monkey.
Howl, Howl, Howl. Why did they have to go and give you courage and a spine and morals? One of the things I loved about you was the way you stayed a shameless coward until the very end, how you could get to the end of the novel and Howl was -still- the same person he had been before, just in love with Sophie.
Sophie was too nice, too. There wasn't nearly as much of that merciless old woman in her, particularly not with Howl. There was no ruthless cutting up of his magic suits. WOE.
Really, as nice as it all was, the very typical way things wrapped up for Howl and Sophie took a lot of the bite out of their relationship. He was -too- nice and sweet to her.
One non-spoilery comment is that it strikes me that whatever else, there is a very consistant depiction of Calcier. In -everything-. The Calcifer on my cover of the book looks quite like the Calcifer on the cover of the first copy of the book I read and at a certain point in the movie animated Calcifer looks just like that was well. It's weird but I like that.
. . . I think I need to reread Howl's Moving Castle now, just to remind myself of how awesome it is.
The books are always better, Almighty Ingrid, Signing Off
