Why does Howl's Moving Castle fluctuate between the bottom and top of Ghibli fans' lists...

Damn, I'd love to see the pre Iraq howls. You can sort of see where they were going with it.
I enjoyed howls as a kid but even when I was young I recognised the plot was kind of wonky

nothing about Howl's feels "rushed" or "rewritten". Its very beginning ties into the ending. You just pull critique out of your ass.

it loses direction and flops when they start focusing on the war; they should have just stuck to magic, they should have just stuck to wizard fights

Howl as a character doesn't even exist without the war

The first half is a great adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle. The second half is an old-school Ghibli movie. The two are not joined well, and so people will only ever like half the film.

I still can't figure out what the point of her transforming into an old lady was. It's not like she started out as some vain, frivolous person who needed to be humbled. Howl's too much of a manchild to care either way, until she simultaneously reclaims her youth and fixes him. I have to assume that it's some kind of theme in the book that got dropped from the movie because of how much of a mess the narrative is.

>people unironically grasping to find the "point" in Ghibli films
I now see why Miyazaki hates anime fans so much. They want everything to be condensed & tropetized into a familiar structure that can be easily understood and processed through their already existing knowledge.

cool strawman

Brainlet post.

the source is pretty shit btw
what a mess of story and extremely weaker theme that Ghibile's love and peace
still I don't rank Howl very high, as other user said the plot is pretty weak in the last half and everything just kinda resolve after the climax

what a pseud

>plotfag calling anyone a pseud

in the book it's just the same old narrative "ugly girl is actually hot as fuck" women loves to read
in the anime however, it supposes to symbolize her mental age
at first she lives like a old woman, all work without enjoying her life and , drowning herself into the emotion of youth
through out the story you can see she slowly revert to the actual mental age of a young lady, which means getting younger, sometime it solidifies she suddenly turns really young, that's when she gets emotional burst
in the end with her love for howl, she finally find her true self and break the curse

Yeah, so this is my Ghibli "list". It separates the great, good and bad Ghiblis according to my objective superior taste. Kinda like fighting games tier lists you know? Now let us argue back and forth about why your list is wrong and shit and mine is undeniably perfect.

>Howl is a the hot dream guy for every girl in the world?
i think he's an effeminate asshole, honestly. a very beautiful narcissistic asshole.
Nausicaa > Porco Rosso >>> everything else.

If you're trying to look for some larger thematic reason then it could be because Sophie had no confidence in herself and was acting like an old person with no future or love left. You can see more explicitly when she transforms back to her younger self when speaking from her heart or acting on her desires compared to when she reverts back to the old lady form when she has doubt in her mind. When Howl tells her she's beautiful but she can't believe him and transforms back is a good example. Her body matches the state of her mind. The movie emphasizes earlier that Howl has a reputation of being frivolous and superficial. We don't know until later how much he cares for Sophie no matter what she looks like.

we as humans naturally like to establish hierarchies and this includes art. some things are just objectively better than others because if everything is good or great than nothing truly is. subjectivity is a cope by tastelets whom lack critical thinking.

That's the closest I could come to a reasoning for it, but it just seems so bizarre. Being a responsible, hard worker is somehow bad? Yet as soon as she's cursed, she just up and leaves on a whim like a youth before launching into her whimsical interactions with the castle and side characters. I'm still doubtful on it because of how flawed the setup is.

Not having a list doesn't mean you have no internal understanding you liked some works better than others you stupid fuck.

Because it was a lot of peoples introduction to Miyazaki because they had no choice. Nowadays people can start with the true kino like Kiki and Porco.

Sophie's white hair after she gets back to being young symbolizes her retaining the wisdom of being old.

Attached: Howl's kiss.webm (810x428, 2.94M)

>becomes revisionist history
Retard alert

Attached: Turniphead.webm (820x436, 2.94M)

If being a responsible hard worker comes at the expense of nurturing any meaningful relationships in friendship, family, or love then yes that could be interpreted as bad. When she's cursed she no longer has a youthful body with the energy to be productive like before. With her lack of self-confidence and distance from her real family then it's no surprise she decided she was useless and decided to quietly disappear on the assumption that no one would care or put up with her.

Attached: Howls 1.webm (784x416, 2.99M)

Attached: Howls 2.webm (784x414, 3M)

Attached: Howls 3.webm (784x414, 2.97M)

Unironically because it's a movie that men will never understand. They can't relate to Sophie as a character. So they sit in a distance mumbling about "muh plot". They just don't get it (even though it's simple).

I guess the justification just seems so weak because we essentially only see a single day in her life and a bunch of people judging her for not being a vapid whore. And then it immediately appears to be untrue because she's so energetic and lively once she sets out.

You really think the movie would benefit from ~30 minutes of Sophie ruminating in the tedious boredom of her old life?

What exactly is it about Howl that drives women crazy?

Attached: Interview with Dianna Wynne Jones.png (624x488, 130.18K)

Well there's only so much you can show in a 1-2 hour movie while still trying to balance pacing so I would chalk that up to a limitation of the format.

Attached: Turniphead cane.webm (860x456, 2.79M)

It's escapism for girls.

I mean, even just a few minutes of her being directly dispassionate about an actual suitor would fix a lot. Like having her not only bored during a date scenario, but also unconcerned that the guy is already eying other women. As it stands, we only really get a sense that she's serious and maybe introverted, which those around her judge based on their own zeal for life.

But I think the aging curse is just fundamentally flawed in the narrative because being old doesn't provoke her or teach her anything. She accepts it immediately and then shrugs it off as a byproduct of her will to help Howl, a strength of will which she shows from the very start several times over (with the soldiers, against the witch, leaving home).

>top of Ghibli fans' lists
Is this true? I find it hard to believe. Sen to Chihiro was a weak collage of typical Ghibli scenes, but at least it was somewhat passable, so I could understand westoid critics latching on to it as a foreign film in their attempts to seem sophisticated. Howl's is just bad. It feels like some half assed commission work no one at the studio was really into.

Because it's superior in every way and a timeless classic. Ghibli is not a "bigger is better" studio. Totoro, an even simpler tale, is their flagship creation for a reason, while "grand adventures" like Laputa are pedestrian by comparison. Not even Nausicaa has aged all that gracefully.

Excuse me, just the greatest ghibli film ever made coming through

Attached: MV5BMTgwODM5MzE4M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzc5MDI2NQ@@._V1_.jpg (920x690, 278.04K)

The praise for Howl's is near unanimous outside of fringe contrarian boards. You might say it's a moot point since that goes for almost all of the Ghibli catalogue, but still Ghibli claimed a chair next to Spirited Away, Nausicaa and Mononoke.
All Ghibli films are timeless classics.

>Ghibli claimed a chair next to Spirited Away, Nausicaa and Mononoke.
Howl's* not Ghibli.

Brutally mogged in every aspect by In This Corner of the World.

This. The film is great. Still not ghibli's best (that'd be between mononoke, laputa and spirited away), but the source material was very disappointing. It's one of the few instances where the movie is better than the book, by far.

Because the MC is a decrepit old woman. Nobody wants to see that. Everyone watches anime for the cute young girls.

this, it's the ghlibi film i remember least about. i remember more from tototoro and the last time i watched that was 20 years ago

>spirited away
>weak
You probably even understood it. Your zoomer brain can't get through so many layers of symbolism and complexity. I wouldn't expect it.

casablanca is a sad movie with funny parts, porco rosso is a funny movie with sad parts. big difference

Sure is zoomer pseud galore in here. How can you get filtered by howl of all things. did people not understand the timeloop thing or something?

Howl's Moving Castle, in terms of its style of narration, feels like a music video.

spirited away is literally zoomer-core as is all 2000s/2010s ghibli shit

I've had enough ghibli adaptations of twee novels by english hags

>I can fix him

On Your Mark is the best Ghibli work