Quiet Bubble

Harold Lloyd goes to Japan: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

Before Hayao Miyazaki reached far into the past for his material, or into dream worlds of his own devising for sustenance, he made movies entirely of their time. In the early 1970s, and again at the end of the decade, Miyazaki directed episodes of the Japanese TV show Lupin III, which consisted of the adventures of a stylish, roguish thief and his cohorts. (The episodes were themselves based on the comics by Monkey Punch.) Lupin, the grandson of the famous (fictional) thief Arsene Lupin, plots a heist in each 30-minute episode, all the while sidestepping the Interpol detective Inspector Zenigata, who’s always hot on his tail.

The episodes have that breezy 1970s flair. The haircuts are feathered; the fashions are loud and colorful; the soundtrack features funky synthesizers, cool vibraphone-centric jazz, and disco; the settings are Italian casinos and the French Riviera; the banter is quick-witted, noirish, and ever-so-slightly risqué. Lupin himself is a cross between the suave James Bond—already ready with a bon mot and a secret plan—and the moody, existential Jean Gabin of 1940s French cinema.

Of course, the low-budget production values mean that the backgrounds are often wispy and under-designed, and the character animation is herky-jerky. There are lots of still frames. Lupin III is fun, mostly, because it shows how influential Western pop culture was to Japan in the 1970s. The episodes are time capsules—fun, sure, but not built to last.

(It is worth noting, however, that the show’s laconic, witty loner hero has become an archetype for recent Japanese anime. For example, Spike—the hero of Cowboy Bebop—is just a futuristic version of Lupin III, down to the rumpled suit.)

So, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro doesn’t look that promising on paper. It’s the first feature film of a TV animator, based upon a derivative but admittedly diverting TV show. To make matters worse, the show and its source material were both very popular. Fun but weak material + first-time director + great popular demand = stakes is high.

Miyazaki, like Lupin, doesn’t show his sweat. The Castle of Cagliostro is frenetic, footloose, and funny as hell. Unlike the show on which it’s based, the movie doesn’t seem dated at all—okay, okay, the hairstyles are ridiculous—and is the closest thing to a comic masterpiece the filmmaker would direct until 1992’s Porco Rosso. It begins at breakneck speed—a helter-skelter car chase sets things in motion within the first five minutes—and doesn’t let up until the credits roll.

Beautiful wasteland: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

Japanese animation often takes on the apocalypse. Akira, Metropolis, Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, and practically every sci-fi feature of the 1980s ends with the world on fire. Even naturalist Hayao Miyazaki flirts with nuclear winter. Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle and to a lesser degree Castle in the Sky all dance on the edge of worldwide annihilation.

It’s no surprise. Japan’s the only world superpower that’s actually been hit by the Bomb. For the Japanese not to reflect Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their art, directly or indirectly, would be the equivalent of post-WWII Jews not addressing the Holocaust. But it does make for tiresome viewing. With every epic anime storyline, you keep waiting for the first shoe to drop. You know it’s coming.

Only Miyazaki, however, would find glorious beauty in the post-apocalypse. And only he would find perverse pleasure in imagining a world in which another apocalypse could land right on top of the first one.

In Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the second shoe dangles mighty precariously. A thousand years previously, seven giant warriors—blood-red, fiery, voiceless—laid waste to the planet. We only glimpse them in flashbacks and their destruction has been elevated to folktale, but their presence looms large. Their rampage triggered the release of pollution created by humans—who created the warriors as well—which has spread across the Earth. Poisonous spores are blown across the planet. They latch on trees and animals, mutating and killing them. The characters refer to the encroaching wasteland as the Sea of Decay. It’s a rich irony—very little water is seen in the film; the only potable kind comes from wells dug so deep that the Decay hasn’t found it yet.

Humans are dying out. They exist in outposts and isolated enclaves, desperately trying to stave off the Sea and find a place where they’ll be protected. Good land is scarce and, instead of banding together to cultivate it, tribes instead fight over it. Somehow, Miyazaki finds hope in this bleakness.

His heroine is Nausicaa, the redheaded princess of a village that’s protected from the spores by the wind. She’s revered, and rightly so, by everyone in the village. Resourceful, smart, a gifted flyer and a forceful leader, she’s led the community towards a strong agricultural economy and a beautiful town. She’s also the only one in the movie’s who not afraid of the Sea of Decay. In fact, she explores it at will, collecting spores and growing them in a secret garden. With pure soil and water—in order, with ingredients uncontaminated by human presence—she finds that the plants she grows aren’t poisonous and may indeed be beneficial.

As the audience, we’re initially as frightened of the overgrown insects as the villagers. In particular, the Sea is dominated by huge, many-eyed, doodlebug-like creatures called the Ohmu. In the film’s first five minutes, one of these bugs attacks one of the movie’s heroes. Instead of killing it, Nausicaa instead calms it down and leads it away. She respects its right to live.

More than that, she thinks it’s beautiful. Painted in rich greens and animated in sliding sections, it is majestic in a monstrous way. The decayed world she explores and knows intimately is gorgeous, filled with oversized planets, menacing insects (some as large as tanks), and lush, muted colors. The Sea of Decay is a growing ecosystem that astonishes with its horticultural variety. At the movie’s beginning, we see this world the way most of the characters see it—as something horrible and nightmarish. By the midpoint, Miyazaki makes us identify with Nausicaa, who wants to save both the humans and the lovely, polluted world around her.

20,000 leagues above the sea: Castle in the Sky (1986)

We fade into a dark sky, immersed in moonlight. A large blimp is dwarfed by the thick, billowing clouds. Another dirigible, this time a gigantic zeppelin, slides into view. Other than the whirring of machinery, the scene is silent. Suddenly, small mosquito-like aircraft burst out of the blimp; they carry air pirates. The pirates raid the zeppelin, popping up rounds of tear gas and shooting up the joint.

It’s no free-for-all, though. The pirates want a jewel necklace owned by a frightened girl. The girl is a passenger but an unwilling one. As soon as the raid starts, she clunks a guy on the head with a bottle, grabs her jewel from him, darts out the window, and carefully feels her way along the outside of the zeppelin. The pirates see her. Cheeta’s grip slips, and then she falls, screaming, into the clouds below her.

And then come the opening credits.

Castle in the Sky opens like gangbusters and doesn’t let up for the next two hours. The movie is a Jules Verne novel come to life. The opening credits and the flashbacks even evoke the pages of old, browned, illustrated adventure books. The lines are thinner here than the rest of the movie, and the colors are faded, almost as if they’d been bleached out by years of lying in the sun. The animation is slightly less fluid in the flashbacks, conjuring up the herky-jerkiness of silent cinema. Castle brims over with a 19th-century person’s notion of the future—it’s full of dirigibles, floating islands that hover on propellers, primitive photographs, Model T’s, mechanical birds, and bronze robots that are clunky and pre-modern in design. One of the heroes gasps when he says “a real automobile”; it’s his first time seeing one. The steam-driven technology and the meticulously detailed engineering—some of it true to life, some of it magical—provides many of the film’s pleasures.

Like Verne, Miyazaki wants to explore above and under the ground; the movie doesn’t stay earthbound for long. It’s a rip-roaring adventure that shames Jerry Bruckheimer’s shallow productions simply because Castle dares to be beautiful. From the detailed rock quarries and underground mines to the sun-drenched clouds above, and including the green rolling hills between the two, it’s gorgeous to behold.

I’ve written it before but it’s always worth noting how tactile Miyazaki and company seem to make his drawn world. As is often the case with him, this wonderful, subtly rendered world is created, and then is wrecked savagely by humans. The specter of apocalypse looms over the film’s final third and, at every turn, the movie shows how what happens above the earth affects what happens down below it, and vice versa.

The sky metaphorically falls on Earth when Cheeta—the girl with the jewel—lands in a mining town. That jewel slows her descent and lights her up like a shooting star. She’s caught by Pazu, a miner’s apprentice who sees her as he returns from break. They become friends but quickly discover that the jewel has even more powers in store. Pirates and a shadow government lust for it, and the army soon joins the fray. The jewel’s existence confirms the existence of a floating city (Laputa) that Pazu’s father once photographed, and Pazu sees it as his salvation.

The only one who understands its potential for destruction is Cheeta, who knows little about it as the movie begins. She’s a frightened innocent but she’s no dupe. She cracks a bottle over the head of a villain; she knocks down two brutes with a shovel during a terrific train chase; she braves a windy, cold night in a less-than-sturdy glider. When the time comes, she knows what to do to avoid apocalypse. She’s fearful, and with good reason, but she’s also strong enough to remain uncorrupted by the jewel’s power and its legacy.

The jewel is fashioned from a rare, unstable mineral. Only Laputans, the mythical engineers who created a hovering empire, could have done it. It’s magic that has been shaped by industry. The industrial world of Castle in the Sky—smokestacks are omnipresent; so are gears and pulleys—allowed for the crystal’s creation. But industrial progress is leaving nature, from which the minerals came, behind. The movie is ultimately a lament. In a mad rush for technological progress and the power it brings, the characters are in danger of losing their roots to the earth. Miyazaki seems unsure that we can recover what we’ve lost.

Laputa, when we finally see it, is so advanced that even top scientists can’t figure out how it operates; imagine it as a skybound Atlantis. It integrates mechanism with nature. Roots grow through metal. Robots are covered with algae, and birds perch on them. The organic and industrial worlds work side by side, and intertwine. It’s an humbling, gorgeous, perfect vision of the world. So it’s telling that the city’s absent of humans—such perfection can’t last in our presence. Indeed, when people finally do find the city, things go to pot pretty quickly.

While it has high-flying hijinks, pratfalls, fast pacing, and lots of explosions, Castle in the Sky is somber. Laputa’s vibrancy uplifts us but its necessary destruction wrecks us. Miyazaki wants to see nature and human industry act harmonically, but the movie leaves us unsure that it’s possible.

Good neighbors: My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Delightful, playful, with just a dash of anxiety thrown in to anchor it to the real world, My Neighbor Totoro is Miyazaki’s most accessible movie. Although I was recently reminded that it’s clearly set in midcentury Japan, it could be an enchanted fairyland in any country. Though the Totoro is referenced by the movie’s characters as if it’s a traditional Japanese spirit, it’s actually one of Miyazaki’s inventions—you won’t find it in folklore. So the movie’s appeal is universal.

The first shot is of a bucolic, near-silent rural landscape. After years of seeing Studio Ghibli’s production values, I always think I’ll no longer be surprised by such vistas. I’m always wrong. Miyazaki treats the natural world as holy ground. Here, rice paddies and clear ponds reflect the billowing clouds. We see minnows at the bottom of a stream, along with a discarded soda bottle. The vista is cut into, gently like a knife through butter, by a rattling, hiccupping truck laden with furniture. A young man and his two girls are moving into the village.

The man, a professor, is clearly a city slicker. When he helps the movers unpack his huge radio and boxes of books, it’s clear that he’s in the way more than anything. He’s a nature lover, though, and he’s respectful of his new environment. His girls, Satsuki and Mei, take to the new place even better than he does, and it’s their story that we follow.

Satsuki’s about ten, and Mei’s about half of that. They’re very close. Totoro tracks their relationship exquisitely, from their squabbles to their happy adventures. They don’t move with the same mind but they could finish each other’s sentences.

Almost as soon as they walk into their spacious new home, they see an acorn drop from the ceiling. There’s no rafters or cabinets from which it could have fallen. A rustle fills the air. Satsuki opens a door, and packs of dust bunnies—with eyes, they move in coordinated groups—rush out of the room.

In any other movie, soot sprites—as a kindly old neighbor calls them—would be cause for concern. Miyazaki, however, sees spirits as part of the natural order of things. The father might believe his daughters are making up imaginary creatures; he might believe the sprites are real—Miyazaki leaves this tantalizingly unclear. In any case, he respects the tales Satsuki and Mei tells him. “I’ve always wanted to live in a haunted house,” he says. “It’s been a dream of mine since I was very young.” It’s hard to imagine any other filmmaker writing that line without irony.

Indeed, ghosts run throughout the house and grounds. They turn out to be totoros—furry creatures that look like crosses between flying squirrels and bears, with the mannerisms of middle-aged cats. The smaller ones carry bags of acorns and can turn invisible. The largest one flies on a spinning top and roars with joy. The creatures never speak but their movements give a full sense of their shy, funny personalities. They’re sneaky imps—you get the feeling that they delight in good pranks against humans—but are ultimately sweet.

Whenever Satsuki and Mei runs into one, they tell the adults. The adults take it in stride, and the movie’s charm works whether you believe the totoros exists or are figments of fretful imaginations seeking comfort. Or perhaps because of this. In this sense, they remind me of Calvin’s relationship to pet tiger/stuffed animal Hobbes—the totoros are real enough to us to matter, but disappear whenever adults draw nearer. They leave enough clues of their existences—the big one gives Satsuki a wrapped bundle of acorns; another totoro, a cat bus (exactly as weird and wonderful as it sounds) helps her find Mei in a moment of crisis—for us to believe.

Then again, there’s good reason for the girls to seek solace in imaginary friends.

Working girl: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

When Kiki flies into town on her broomstick, black cat in tow, what’s surprising is that the city isn’t particularly surprised. In fact, she’s considered passé. She’s clad in a plain black dress and wears a big red bow. She’s a country bumpkin unused to city life. Her entrance into town backs up traffic and nearly causes several wrecks, simply because she doesn’t know how to navigate the streets. (It’s possible that she’s never seen a stoplight before.) City social codes elude her as well—she doesn’t talk to boys unless they’ve been properly introduced to her. The girls her age (she’s thirteen) talk with the latest slang, wear the coolest clothes, and ride around in convertibles. Kiki, meanwhile, is so unhip that she could be your grandmother.

No one in the big city—a dream-world vision of a European city, with German architecture rubbing up next to French bakeries and pastry shops, all overlooking a sea that feels more Mediterranean than anything in the interior—is shocked by the arrival of a witch-in-training. (It’s the offhand bemusement that New Yorkers and Angelenos have—“Seen it all, wrote the TV special.”) She’s considered antiquated, part of a folklore and lineage that’s centuries out of date. She’s not special to them. Witches exists. Magic exists. Talking black cats exists. These things are part of daily life, like the aroma of fresh bread in the early morning, or the ebullient yells of garbagemen making their daily rounds, or newspaper pages whipping around on the sidewalks, or a bee alighting on a blooming flower. No big deal.

As a result, the heroine of Kiki’s Delivery Service has to adjust and do the unthinkable—get a regular job, find an apartment, pay the bills. She sets up a delivery service above a bakery. It’s the perfect job, as it allows Kiki—no, forces her—to learn the city. And that’s really it for the plot.

A pig’s gotta fly: Porco Rosso (1992)

Hayao Miyazaki’s movies are so often timeless and allegorical, and seem to take place in such enchanted fairylands that Porco Rosso is a shock. It’s the early 1930s along the Adriatic Sea. The Depression has hit the Mediterranean hard. Fascism from Italy is beginning to spread. Another world war looms.

The movie’s grounded in our world. Well, not quite. Evidently, during these days, the skies are ruled by air pirates. All the pilots, pirate or not, fly seaplanes; everyone’s inextricably linked to both ocean and air. The filmmaker has grafted England’s 17th- and 18th-century pirate folktales and sea shanties into post-WWI Italy. The world is so well-rendered that you accept Porco Rosso is a construction of our actual past. In fact, it’s nostalgia for a world that almost existed.

The first shot shows us a beach hidden in the interior of an island, surrounded by sheer cliffside that encircles the little beach. A thin slit between the 30-foot-tall rock provides the only way in and out, short of dropping onto the beach by parachute. The radio plays. A sleek, gorgeous red seaplane floats on the shore. A man dozes in a chair, shaded by a weather-beaten umbrella, face covered by aforementioned magazine, feet resting on a table that holds a half-empty bottle of red wine.

Here’s our hero, Porco Rosso (Crimson Pig). He’s the Ace of the Adriatic, a decorated war hero of World War I who makes his living as a bounty hunter. He’s also literally a pig. At least, his face has a snout and his ears are pointy. When a phone ring rudely awakens him, he answers it with world-weary humor. Another day, another band of pirates to round up for hard cash. And we’re off.

Miyazaki Fest is off and running!

Check back here periodically for updates. If directing others to the blog-a-thon, please link to this post and to this one.

Over at Tuwa's Shanty and the Roots Canal (and, no, I can't think of a better blog title, even if I don't quite know what it means), Tuwa has written a lovely post--with music and screenshots--on perennial favorite My Neighbor Totoro. There are links to an interview with the filmmaker, a Roger Ebert appreciation, and more. Go read it.

Saturday morning update: Noel Vera writes terrifically on Howl’s, noting its commonalities and departures with Miyazaki’s previous films. (He’s also written about Miyazaki’s early TV work on Sherlock Hound, Panda Go Panda!, and other Miyazaki work. Scroll to the bottom of his page.)

Saturday evening: The kind folks at Cinemarati mention the blog-a-thon but, more importantly, link to one of Miyazaki's most obscure creations--a music video called "On Your Mark."

Sunday update: Michael at CultureSpace has joined the fun, with a great post on Spirited Away.

Rip it up and start again: Princess Mononoke (1997)

Start your engines. Today marks the official beginning of the Hayao Miyazaki blog-a-thon. Read, write, link, and enjoy.

Every frame of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke is gorgeous, but the celluloid might as well have been processed in blood. It’s easily the most ferocious movie he’s directed but its violence is not so much exhilarating as it is devastating.

We see this vision of 17th-century Japan—with Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, this is Miyazaki’s only other movie set in his home country—through the eyes of Ashitaka. He’s the prince of a village kingdom and the most heroic character we’ll see here. Tellingly, he doesn’t want to be a hero at all. Flat-voiced, clear-eyed, and curiously unaccented in both the Japanese- and English-language dub, he’s almost a blank. He’s handsome but without any physical blemishing; the effect’s uncanny. He’s gorgeous but his beauty is slightly unsettling. When we first see him, he’s looking out over the kingdom, and on-guard. Something’s coming.

That something turns out to be a gut-wrenching, churning mass of blood and gore. Its footsteps stain the hillside in rust-colored blood. It looks like a giant mutant spider until, in a moment of fury, the red-black blob skyrockets into the air. What lies underneath is a huge, rotting boar.

My first reaction was to be repulsed, and then terrified. Prince Ashitaka instead shows sympathy. He realizes that it is a dying god, and he respects it even as he asks it kindly, and then not so kindly, to leave his village in peace. The boar god refuses, and Ashitaka is forced to kill a god. In the battle, he’s scarred by it. There, at last, is his blemish.

Ashitaka’s willingness to show sympathy, to find the glow of life in everything on Earth, identifies him with Miyazaki. Indeed, the filmmaker lavishes attention on almost every object he sees—a grain of gold sparkling in the sun, a dragonfly hopscotching on a pond, the wind-blown hair of a woman warrior. He finds beauty in everything, and he renders the physical world with grace and obvious delight. Ashitaka’s as observant as Miyazaki, and knows more about Japan’s history, myths, and real live gods than anyone else in the movie.

But he’s also a stand-in for the audience, and I think that’s why he’s such a blank. In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, he notes that “the more cartoony a face, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe… Thus, when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself.” Ashitaka is a blank, I believe, because Miyazaki wants him to be a representative of the viewer.

Certainly, Ashitaka tries to be as passive as possible. After the villagers discover a large iron bullet in the god’s carcass, he’s charged with finding the bullet’s source. He vows to go on his journey with clarity, to see and judge, but not to act. (He says he was prepared to accept the consequences of killing a god as soon as he let his arrow fly. We believe him.) After all, he’s killed a god—he’s acted enough, he thinks. He tries to act as a movie viewer acts, watching the world unspool but being powerless to change its course. He’s our surrogate, our guide through the increasingly strange world of Princess Mononoke.

But surrogates are funny creatures. Even if they’re ciphers for the audience’s consciousness, they still have to act within the context of the movie. As a result, they do things we might not do, and we have no control over that fact. Miyazaki knows this. The scar smeared across Miyazaki is slowly spreading. The wound is an infection that will eventually kill Ashitaka. So there’s an urgency to his mission—if he finds the source of the god’s infection, Ashitaka might find the cure to his own. He tells his village that his journey will be one of a pure observer, but we see in his eyes that he’s also acting on his own behalf.

That tension—acting for the world vs. acting for yourself—drives Princess Mononoke. Every character is selfish in some way but, like The Rules of the Games sez, “everyone has his reasons.” Ashitaka quickly finds himself embroiled in a battle between the gods who rule the countryside and the humans who want to industrialize it. The humans are destroying the natural environment, but maybe the gods need to be tamed—they kill husbands, wives, and children, after all, with no regard for how such actions decimate communities. The gods and humans can’t strike a balance—they both want and expect too much of the other—and the result is war.

The daily grind in dreamland: Spirited Away (2001)

Matt Zoller Seitz was the first film critic I read regularly. Each Wednesday, I’d grab a copy of the latest Dallas Observer from the branch library, and walk home from school reading what he had to say. Sometimes, he infuriated me—he harped on the awfulness of Forrest Gump for several weeks in a row; I loved it, and it made me cry. (Gimme a break—I was in high school.) Sometimes, he made me laugh out loud, as he did when he compared the political naiveté of Clear and Present Danger’s Jack Ryan (a do-gooder CIA operative) to a worker at a Chicago slaughterhouse who suddenly realizes that, oh my god!, they kill cows here. Sometimes, he enlightened me—his long, thoughtful review of the Pauline Kael omnibus For Keeps introduced me to her writing.

By reading him, I learned that art criticism was a valuable literary form, and that reading divergent thoughts on a work of art is a good way of honing your own. I’ve followed his career from the Observer to New York Press, and eagerly anticipate the DVD release of his first film. So, I was pleased to see that he was thrilled about the blog-a-thon, and that he would write about Spirited Away.

On April 27, Matt’s wife Jennifer Dawson died suddenly, for reasons that are still unclear. (She was 35, in good health, didn’t do drugs, and didn’t smoke.) I can’t imagine what it’s like to suffer such a loss, so abruptly and without warning. Please keep Matt and his family in your thoughts and prayers.

I couldn’t figure out a way to send my condolences—I don’t know him—other than this: this essay is dedicated to him.

Spirited Away starts off anchored in the real world. Chihiro, an 11-year-old girl, is moving to a new town with her parents. Dad’s job takes him out into the boondocks—Miyazaki deftly gets across that these are big-city slickers with just a few words, and Chihiro’s scowl as she looks out the car window—and no one is thrilled.

Chihiro sulks. Her movement is intentionally sluggish, striking a pose that combines boredom and anxiety in a way that only pre-adolescent girls can do. Her limbs are lanky and awkward, and her face droops with bitterness. As she rolls around the back seat, crumpling up the bouquet she was given as a going-away present, we realize that Miyazaki’s portrayal of her is so precise, so grounded in microscopically close observation, that we can forget this is animation instead of live-action. She’s not a spoiled brat—Spirited Away’s rendering of her is too delicate for that—but just a kid afraid of change.

They drive through a modern Japanese countryside but find themselves on a brushback road. Dad, eager to find a shortcut to the new home, drives them to what looks like a gaudy, abandoned theme park. “They built these all over Japan in the 1990s,” he said with smug pride at his own wealth of knowledge. “And then the economy fell apart.” In less than ten minutes, Miyazaki has established the milieu, and the family’s place within it, in quick, efficient strokes. The family wanders through the theme park’s empty exhibits—“That’s funny,” says Mom, “they’re all restaurants”—until they come to a stand overloaded with succulent fishes and meats. (My stomach grumbles every time I watch the scene.) Mom and Dad give in to temptation and dig in, figuring that they can pay up as soon as the waiter arrives.

Aromatic, cooked, tasty food, but no one’s around to eat it or prepare it? Warning bells go off in Chihiro’s head, and ours, too. Tired of her parents’ gluttony, she wanders off until she comes to a bridge, across which there’s a huge, multi-storied bathhouse. She looks over the building, and then leans over the rail to see the sea and a train, until a boy—the first person other than the family that we’ve seen—practically yells at her to leave before the sun goes down.

It’s striking that we’re so absorbed in the physical details of this world at ground level that we don’t notice the gradual change in the light. Night strikes us as suddenly as it strikes Chihiro. The boy says he’ll stall them—who the “them” refers to isn’t immediately clear—while the family escapes. He puts his fingers to his lips and blows. What comes out isn’t a whistle, but shimmering petals of glass that twirl in the air.

Chihiro rushes to her parents, only to find that they’ve been turned into pigs. Even worse, black humanoid blobs—shadowy, with white eyes—begin to fade into consciousness out of thin air, or seep up from the ground. They’re everywhere, and Chihiro’s as scared shitless as we are. In a moment of raw fear, she puts her forearm up to her eyes to block out what she’s seeing, and is chilled to discover that she sees right through it—she’s starting to disappear.

Just like that, we’ve left reality and entered the dream world.

The magical mundane: Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

It’s easy to see what drove Hayao Miyazaki to adapt Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 fantasy novel, Howl’s Moving Castle. Both Jones and Miyazaki have a fascination with flight, magic, myths, and odd creatures. They share a dry, acerbic sense of humor. Most importantly, both share a love for smart, young female protagonists on the cusp of adulthood. Of his nine movies, six feature female protagonists. In Jones’s Sophie Hatter, Miyazaki must have seen shades of his own Kiki and Princess Mononoke.

In Jones’s novel, Sophie is a shy, unassuming young woman who works in her parents’ hat shop because she can’t see any other options for herself. She directs most of her sharp, dry wit—she doesn’t realize, among other things, that she’s very funny—at herself. Although told in the third-person, the novel clearly sees the world through Sophie’s eyes.

In today’s parlance, we’d say she suffers from mild depression and a lack of self-esteem. In the fairytale past of Howl’s Moving Castle, however, such now-mundane terms are nonexistent. What the people take as mundane, however, would seem extraordinary to us. It’s not uncommon to run into witches and wizards. Every family that can afford them has a pair of seven-league boots. Spell-enchanted objects refuse to remain stationary. A castle picks itself up and walks around the surrounding countryside. The castle’s location, and the handsome, frightening wizard who runs it, are both the sources of much town gossip. The wizard, Howl, is apparently a ladykiller, but it’s not clear at the novel’s outset that the term is metaphorical instead of literal.

Jones’s gift is in defining this magical world so clearly and articulately that, within 50 pages, we take it for granted. In a sly turn, Sophie later finds herself in modern-day Wales—cars, televisions, stoplights, video games, and electricity are all described, from Sophie’s perspective, in terms that make them seem as otherworldly as her world is to us.

At first, Howl too seems otherworldly to Sophie. Through a series of events too complicated to go into here, Sophie gets turned into an old crone by a spiteful witch—and can’t tell anyone about the spell—and ends up as Howl’s cleaning lady. As she lives with the man, she discovers that he’s no monster, but he is a foppish drama queen. His house is slovenly, but he’s a clotheshorse who’s always in style. He flies into a rage when he accidentally dyes his hair the wrong color. He gently chastises Sophie’s fashion, her nagging, her insistent presence. Sophie, who’s never known such luxury, resents him, and gradually grows to like him, and then to love him.

Of such stuff is screwball comedy made. But most of the novel’s humor, as well as its revelations, are psychological. Sophie flies into a rage herself when she thinks Howl is courting another woman, but only gradually realizes that her rage is borne of jealousy. Her thought processes, especially when it dawns on her that she is a magician as well, are hilarious.

Howl’s works because of its internal nature. How would a preeminent visual stylist bring to life the churnings of a young woman’s growing pains? Miyazaki doesn’t quite solve this conundrum in his film adaptation, but his attempt is fascinating to see.