I normally don’t review movies, but today is an exception because I just saw Hayao Miyazaki’s latest OMG-movie, “Howl’s Moving Castle”. Don’t ask me how I saw it, especially when it’s not due to be released in Australia until the end of the year – all I can tell you is that when it DOES become available, I’ll be obediently going to the cinemas and buying the DVD, so no worries mate.

Seeing the movie was quite an experience, as it is with all Miyazaki movies, but I feel compelled to write about this one because “Howl’s Moving Castle” is quite different to any other Miyazaki movie I’ve seen. That’s not to say it’s better than other Miya-sama movies; quite the opposite. In fact, at the risk of blasphemy, I’ll have to say that this Miyazaki movie has the best animation and the worst plot of any Studio Ghibli film I’ve seen.

Some things that appears in this movie that I haven’t seen in previous Miyazaki movies. Firstly, mutual KISSING – I’ve NEVER seen lovers kiss in a Miyazaki movie before. In Porco Rosso, Fio pecks Marco’s mouth when he wasn’t expecting it, and San gives mouth-to-mouth feeding to Ashitaka, but HEY LOOK! This is two consenting adults kissing! Woah. The second is a male lead that is at least a head taller than the female lead – most male and female leads in the past have been around the same height. And a shockingly-bishonen male lead – not that I’m complaining. I’m moving into Howl’s Castle myself. Permanently.

Now, there’s bound to be people out there who LOVE this film to death, and I do adore some parts of it too. Namely anything involving the wizard Howl, who is quite a departure from the typical Miyazaki hero. It’s also a love story with a good-looking male lead, which gets points. And let’s face it, Miyazaki is simply incapable of making a boring movie. I was never bored during this movie, though I was certainly confused – and here comes the basis of my criticism for the plot.

For those living under a rock, “Howl’s Moving Castle” is based on a children’s fantasy novel of the same name by British writer Dianne Wynn Jones. It’s un-read by me, though if some other British fantasy writers I’ve read is any indication, this won’t be a Dungeons & Dragons style fantasy. Instead, it’s the kind of fantasy I adore – a deconstruction of fairy tales centering on the eldest of 3 daughters called Sophie Hatter. She is a hat-maker who has a spell cast on her by a witch, turning her into a 90 year-old woman who then leaves home and shacks up with the wizard Howl of the title. Howl is wandering around the Welsh countryside in a giant moving castle, powered by a Fire Demon called Calcifer, who himself is bound to Howl by a contract he can’t reveal. He and Sophie make a pact to break each other’s contracts, and this forms the basis of the story.

Now, this sort of thing makes a rockin’ story, and Miyazaki seems to have followed the plot up until the point I’ve described. However, it’s the second-half of it that utterly baffles me. Many things happen, yet they happen almost randomly, without a set of rules to abide by or any explanation of the goings-on that you would normally expect in a magical-world movie. This contrasts with “Spirited Away”, which was itself about a magical world; yet that world had established rules that the audience can at least intuit without being given an explanation. Here, it’s a complete free-fall.

There’s a war going on in the background, but how and why it started is not explained. There’s a cursed prince in the last 3 minutes, but who cursed him and why is not explained. What’s up with the Wicked Witch of the Waste, and what does she have against Howl? Howl dyes his hair, and then emits green goo all over the place in a creepy scene, but that itself is not much explained. In fact, the green goo scene shouldn’t have been in there at all – Howl in that scene was acting SO differently from his earlier scenes that it defied common sense. Sure, he’s upset he’s no longer blonde. But why is being a blonde so important to him in the first place? It’s a pity, because all these unanswered questions means that character development suffer. It’s hard to get a firm image of the characters in your mind when the rules of the world they inhabit is always up in the air and doing flip-flops.

Now, I’m GENUINELY curious about these questions, because there seems to be a HUGE backstory to all this. I feel if only I can get my hand on the novel I would know why everything happens (I have a feeling that the book is going to be flying off the shelves, though for all the wrong reasons). Above all, I wonder if the plotting problems came from cultural barriers in Miyazaki’s adaptation of the story. British children’s fantasy is often very strongly rooted in, well, English themes, especially fairy tales – the very idea of turning Sophie into a 90 year-old is a device for poking at traditional fairy tale roles. No doubt there’s plenty of word play and literature references along the way as well. Trouble is: did Miyazaki make a note of this? Or did he think it was interesting for a young girl to be turned into a grandma, and nothing else? The interviews so far seems to suggest so. Miyazaki has no obligation to use the same themes in the movie as the book, but if he had somehow misinterpreted the story, than that may explain the confusion.

“Howl’s Moving Castle” is a good movie, but unlike his previous other movies, not a great movie. Miyazaki is incapable of making bad movies, but there is no doubt the plot of this one does NOT make sense in the same way his previous 7 Ghibli movies have made sense. Is it still worth seeing – definately, the open-endedness probably means that people will walk away with different interpretations of it. And ofcourse, it’s one of the most beautifully animated movies around. That itself is worth the price of admission.