Did the Castle Move for You, Too?

Did the Castle Move for You, Too?

How does a writer (or a director, for that matter) choose what to reveal, and when? When a director adapts a book for the screen, this question can become the central focus, overshadowing and detracting form other aspects of the film. Slavish attention to plot and dialogue when adapting a movie can result in gibberish, the screen failing where the book succeeds. The reverse can also be true (though perhaps not according to literature majors, who seem insistent that “the book is better than the movie), especially when the original book is not particularly deep, or only explores one aspect of a theme or character. Adaptations, more than anything, make choices, and those choices define the film.

What kind of choices do directors make when adapting a book? Take “Howl’s Moving Castle,” for instance. It’s easy enough to summarize the plot: “A teenaged girl is transformed into an old woman by a wicked witch. Through a series of adventures and encounters, she falls in love with Howl and restores his heart, freeing both herself and him.” This seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

It is amazing how differently that plot can play out, depending on who’s directing it. Dianna Wynne Jones is a masterful writer, and manages to spend more than a hundred pages describing how Sophie (the teenaged girl) makes hats without it getting boring. This is important, because Jones is establishing her character; setting the scene, if you will. Hayao Myazaki (another master of his craft), on the other hand, spends far less time cramming all the detail he can into the first fifteen minutes of his film, establishing his characters visually instead of using a narrator or introductory text.

The choice that Jones made is a strength of her book; by the same token, the choice that Myazaki made is a strength of his movie. This is not to say that Myazaki could not have spent the first hour rehashing Sophie’s daily routine; the question becomes “Would it have been as effective?” Would the audience have cared more about Sophie? Perhaps not.

This brings up an argument about the different mediums that has a long and glorious lineage: can books do something that movies can’t? and its equal and opposite query: can movies do something that books cannot?

The answer, put simply, is “yes.” Movies cannot recreate the experience of reading a book; how long a person spends on a paragraph or page is a matter of personal choice; how they imagine a character, and whether this is accurate to the way the author is trying to portray said character is again, a matter of personal choice. Movies have the opposite problem: the pacing is at the discretion of the director, and every detail is set and immortalized on film. How a character looks and acts, what he or she sounds like, all of these are decisions made by the director and the audience is powerless to change this.

So we’ve established that certain things are unique to books and movies; what other things are not (perhaps) as clear cut? You can tell the audience in a book over the course of several pages what a character looks like, and still fall short on details. A director can spend a two second shot establishing the same physical characteristics.
The flipside of this is the inner monologue; a writer can spend a few minutes setting up an internal conflict, and a film director may need more than half the movie to set up the same conflict, or do it with a cheesy overdub of the internal thought process (thereby potentially breaking the illusion that we are watching true events as they happen).

This difference in medium is not a question of limitation; both films and movies can describe events and characters, setting and plot, as well as establish tone. Neither is particularly limited.

The difference comes down to what a book or a movie can do well, and what it can do quickly. A book can describe the emotions of a character quite well and clearly, quickly drawing analogs and unequivocally distinct images to portray the mental state of a character. Movies can establish a look, a scene, and a body language within seconds of the opening of a movie.

Both Jones and Myazaki play on the strengths of their medium, and the adaptation of the book to film comes with certain changes. Myazaki has reorganized plot, melded and molded characters together, drastically changed the ending, and yet has ended up with a successful adaptation.

The reorganization of the plot (including the editing down of certain passages) is evident from the very opening of the film. Instead of a long explanation of the kind of world we’re looking at, Myazaki establishes the moving castle (its mechanics and visual appearance), Sophie’s hardworking attitude, and her somewhat shy demeanor.

Jones’ method (spending a good chunk of the beginning of the book describing the magical land, the role of witches and wizards in it, and Sophie’s complicated relationship with her TWO sisters and her STEPmother) gives us a different feel for the place. The kingdom of Ingary is described well enough that the reader is comfortable in it; it seems like home. Jones spends her time wisely bringing us up to speed, using Sophie as the vehicle of our instruction.

Myazaki throws us in headfirst, not quite in medias res but never bothering to explain things. The visuals do the talking, and Myazaki walks us through a peaceful little European-style town, complete with trains and flower shops and quaint trolleys…and for some reason flying machines, soldiers, black blobmonsters and young men that can fly.

The time each artist spends establishing the world (and how they do it) makes for a quite different interpretation on the audience’s part. In the movie, we’re not given the background of Sophie’s sisters, and therefore cannot see her character from their eyes with quite the same detail that the book gives us. Our vision of cartoon-Sophie isn’t defined by other characters, we just watch what she does to get a sense of her character.

Speaking of character, the character set between the two pieces is fairly consistent, with some important differences. “Suliman” in the movie is a combination of two characters (Pentsemmon and Suliman) and ends up becoming the main antagonist. Ironically, Suliman and Prince Justin are also combined in the character of Turniphead, and the dog character is repurposed as a spy (in the book, Percival is an amalgam of leftover Suliman and Justin bits, transformed into a dog). Michael (renamed “Markl” for some obscene and obscure reason no doubt related to translation-decay) is now more like a child than a teenager, and certainly not pubescent enough to go romping through a bakery with Sophie’s sister like he was in the book.

All of these character changes also have a profound effect on the ending; the witch’s character is deflated by the end of the movie (in keeping with the book) but the main antagonist is not the demon that corrupted her. Instead it’s the character of Suliman (now a woman, though still Howl’s mentor) that provides the reason for Howl to change.

These changes are important, but the adaptation is both good and faithful. Bear with me; it gets better. Yes, a movie that drastically reworks the source material, leaving out giant plot points (did we forget to mention that Howl is really named Howell, and he comes from a mysterious place called “Wales”? Myazaki did) and smushing characters together like the Witch of the Waste’s blob men can still be faithful to the source material.

Myazaki achieves this by looking at the central theme of the book (or perhaps ONE central theme; there are sure to be as many “central” themes as there are readers), that of responsibility and honesty in love. Both pieces look at the character of Howl, and how he changes from a cowardly, reluctant miscreant into a heroic, honest and lovable person (well…at least he and Sophie realize they’re perfect for each other. The other stuff about heroic and honest and such may be wishful thinking). In any case, it tracks the evolution of two characters, Sophie and Howl, as they emerge into their true selves. Whether the main antagonist is Suliman and her machinations or the demon of the Witch of the Wastes, Howl still has to face his inner demons (both figurative and literal) in order to be truly free.

Despite the similarity of theme between the works, there are enough differences that it’s interesting to track them. Sometimes their effect of the work is small, and other times it completely changes the context and course of the plot.

Howl, for example, is really named “Howell Jenkins” in the book, and he is from Wales. Jones loves to play with tropes, and the subversion of tropes, and she pulls a fairly big one with this revelation. By describing things in her “fantasy” world as real and familiar to Sophie, Jones sets up an inverse reaction to what we’d expect: the “real” world of wales is now strange and unfamiliar, from Howl’s clothing to the dialect and “horseless carriage.” It is clear that we’re meant to feel at home in Ingary instead of Wales.

This makes the book a portal story in a classic sense, in that the portal actually leads to another world, our world. In the movie, the “black” door leads to somewhere else, though it’s certainly not our world or Wales. Myazaki made the decision to keep the portal confined to Ingary, removing quite a large subplot.

Another subplot that the book describes is the search for Prince Justin. His absence is sorely felt as the King prepares for war; in the book, the king is not quite the enthusiastic buffoon he is in the movie, but he still needs his brother for the impending military invasion. The friendship of Justin and Suliman (Suliman is also form Wales, by the way) sets up a domino effect that is treated like a loose end in the movie; turnip-head is suddenly Justin/Suliman when his curse is lifted, left to go do…something.

These changes are significant, even if they don’t affect the core theme the book and movie shares. The respective differences give a certain emphasis to the actions of characters in the pieces, and change the particulars of the relationships. Jones chose to make sure that most, if not all, of her characters found some sort of true love and togetherness as a family. Myazaki emphasizes the motley crew perspective on family, that you find people and stick with them, even if you’re not related.

Subplots aside, the book and the film fit in well with the other books and movies we’ve read in 312. The main character (or characters) are unsatisfied with their lives (Howl leaves Wales, Sophie leaves the hat shop) and find a portal to another kind of life. Magic, and things out of the ordinary, live beyond the portal. The main character is young, and grows as a result of the journey. The biggest contrast to the other films and books is that Sophie is already in the world, and once she crosses the threshold into Howl’s house she wants to stay.

The big difficulty with this adaptation is the sheer number of details and differences present. It is possible to write a book, if not many books, on the subject. It is always exciting to see a master of one craft interpret the work of another master; though it may not happen often, I look forward to the next time a Myazaki adapts a book by a Jones.