HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE

I've gone through Wednesday's local movie listings and tallied the numbers. On 6/29/05, you could see Herbie: Fully Loaded on 18 screens in the greater Pittsburgh area. You could see Madagascar on any of 11 screens, and The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl on 6 screens.

You could see Howl's Moving Castle on one screen. That's the same number of screens devoted to something called Paper Clip.

Now, I'm of the mind that Academy Awards are one of the least reliable indicators of cinematic quality, but I'm also having trouble imagining another context where a director or actor whose last film brought home Oscar gold would be buried like this in a metropolitan market.

I don't even know who, exactly, to blame. Did Disney send out only a limited number of prints to hedge its bets in case the film flopped, or to keep the deck as clear as possible for the newest wacky Lohan vehicle? Are theater owners declining to book it because it runs two hours and can't be overscheduled like the typical eighty-five minute kidflick? Or are parents and kids simply not responding to it, the former disliking it because it may require answering some questions, the latter disliking it because of its complexity or uniqueness? No, let me take that back. I doubt quite seriously that kids aren't responding to the film or that they are put off by its complexity. The ultimate root causes are irrelevant, and the effect is simply dispiriting. A movie which is demonstrably vastly superior to the other three current movies aimed at children is being seen by a tiny fraction of the audience lining up for the others. The screen imbalance here is 35:1. Something's wrong with the market, or something's wrong with us.

Since our youngest was born in September of 2003, my wife and I have generally played tag team when it came to taking the older two kids out to movies. I took them to see The Incredibles, while my wife has taken either or both of the girls to see A Series of Unfortunate Events, Millions and Robots. Neither of us, however, was about to miss out on Miyazaki, so we took the 22-month old along, a risky proposition given that Miyazaki crowds include a larger number of adults without kids in tow, which makes it a bit less likely that there will be the sort of heightened expectation of ambient noise. Our babysitter doesn't arrive for a few weeks, though, so Virginia got to see her first theatrical film.

When we got into the car afterward and pulled away, Ali said something to the effect that if all children's entertainment was that good (or imaginative, or thoughtful), the entire cultural landscape of growing up would be vastly different, for the better. I completely agree. It's so easy to get wrapped up in what we saw in Howl's that you can forget what you don't see in Miyazaki's films, this one included. We didn't see a simple, mechanical plot which moved from A to B to C, stressing narrative efficiency and clarity over the ambiguity of wonder and the messy, diffuse enchantment of discovering a new world full of divergent possibilities. We didn't see characters who could be summarily identified as "good" or "bad," described in three words or less and assigned plot-roles on that basis. We didn't have to sit through potty humor or, worse, oh-so-clever humor couched in middlebrow referents or double-entendre aimed at the adults who are buying the popcorn.

But this isn't the cinema of reaction; it's an altogether different vision of what sort of things are worthy of captivating an imagination. The film continues some of Miyazaki's earlier tropes: the girl seeking to undo a spell that's both literally and figuratively holding sway over her and in the process rescue a young man caught in his development and serving an unjust master. Howl's is a remarkable example of fairy tale filmmaking, combining images of pure wonder with characters capable of inspiring trust and situations where the actual obstacle to be overcome is much larger and deeper than that show on the screen.

In Sophie, there is a poignant treatment of the way in which we grow old and confront the facets of ourselves from all our yesterdays. Her maturation is set against the backdrop of a civil war that is always in the periphery, threatening to destroy the characters but never advancing on them literally. There's something here about the way in which children-- and adults-- create realms of respite in times of strife. For a movie about war, though, the film contains very little violence.

I reread Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of the film. He quotes a Hollywood Reporter piece in which the writer wonders whether the film will work for American audiences: "Plotting is so multifaceted that it will confuse children, and it lacks the clear-cut heroes and villains tpical of animation." To his first clause, that wasn't my experience. My kids weren't confused in the slightest, and even the toddler was enraptured by the film's visual beauty. As to his second clause, his perception of the needs of children is askew. Many children (or at last mine) appreciate seeing clear-cut good guys and bad guys on occasion, but they're also capable of understanding and appreciating stores with ambiguity and complexity mirroring their developing real-life experience. Those are, not coincidentally, the same attributes that characterize adults who are appreciative of great art, so we shouldn't be surprised that Miyazaki is able to draw adults voluntarily to his animated films.

Other misc. trailer notes:
Chicken Little: I will never see this film. This film will never cross the threshhold of my house in any video format.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Well, it's a story that relies on grotesque, overdrawn characters and locales, so Burton's a natural. And assuming the script simply takes random swaths from the novel, some narrative form should adhere. Still, from the trailer alone I wonder if Depp's gone about this the wrong way by playing Wonka as modern-day Mike Jackson. Subversive, yes, but potentially very grating. I'm thinking I'll need to smuggle in a flask of Jesus Juice just to sit through it.