Howl's Moving Castle

So guys, now we've arrived ay another super, super famous Studio Ghibli movie and maybe its second most famous film next to Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle. People have been praising this movie for a long time along with Spirited Away and other huge Ghibli movies. That being said, not every review I've seen for this movie has been positive. Some have had problems with it and said they didn't like it and, I'm not gonna lie, when I first saw this movie, I was kinda on the fence about it myself. I saw more problems than I thought and I agreed with what some people were saying. There was something about what happens that I personally didn't like and thought was bad and boring. But, I recently rewatched the film in preparation for this review and I actually liked it a bit more if I'm being honest. I mean, I still have the problems I had with it the first and this is a film that's still not one of my favourite Ghibli movies and not really something I'd want to rewatch that much, but, my reaction is better than it was the first time anyway. The story is about a girl named Sophie who owns her own hat shop but she's visited by a lady named the Witch Of The Waste and wants Sophie's help for something but when she refuses, she turns her into an old lady and she decides to find a wizard named Howl to try to help her. She finds him in his litteral moving castle and decides to make herself the cleaning lady. Not only that, but there's also a war going on and two different sides wants Howl's help but he's running away from a lot of it. After the Witch Of The Waste has her powers taken away, Sophie sorta begins to go back to normal but she decides she wants to help Howl. So, yeah, while the film does have a lot of ideas and great thoughts like a lot of Ghibli movies, something about how it's done here didn't make it all that great here. I mean, there are a lot of good moments here and I'll get to those, but I didn't entirely like the pace the film was going at before. Like I've said a lot already, these Ghibli movies are usually really slow and that's been a huge positive for a lot of these. Here though, while it worked sometimes, I really didn't like how slow it was at the beginning. It felt really slow and kinda boring and didn't feel like it was going anywhere. Some stuff was also a but confusing like how Sophie doesn't ask Howl to help her with the curse and then that's kinda thrown aside for a while. I mean, it has some cool ideas and visuals, but, for the most part in the first part, it was just boring for a while and also kinda weird because there's a scene where Sophie goes to talk to someone for Howl but the Witch goes there too and there's a really, really awkward scene where they're walking up the stairs to meet the person and they're both so slow and it's so weird and kinda ugly to look at too so I don't get why that was there. However, I honestly think that after that scene, the film felt like it sorta picked up a bit more. I sorta felt things were a bit more interesting, though I found it weird that Sophie decided to keep the Witch Of The Waste with them after that, but, anyway, I think they did some other things like this more interestingly like how Howl's castle can move locations from a dial and I thought that was used for some cool things like when he shows Sophie a place he was when he was younger and how they do some things in the climax was cool too like how there's some other crazy things happening and the witch was sorta going crazy herself with trying to get Howl's heart and that leads to her causing the castle to fall apart when Calcifer goes out, as in a living fall of fire that allows the castle to move and stay together. Though, that also led to another weird scene where Sophie is able to go to the past and see Howl as a child when he first got his powers and, I dunno, I really didn't get it and I don't think they actually explain how that happened, but still. So, yeah, while it did have some stuff that was a bit confusing, I think the second part of the film made up for the kinda boring first part. They did also have some other cool things before that too like that scene I mentioned where Howl showed Sophie that other place and how they did the animation in that scene was really nice. There's also another cool scene where they show how Howl sorta remakes his castle from the inside and how they do that visually was really cool. Scenes like that are where I think I appreciated the film a bit more. The ending is cool too where it's revealed that another one of the characters named Turnip-Head is revealed to be a prince of a kingdom, though, again, like some of the other things here, it wasn't really explained very well and felt like it kinda came outta nowhere. So, this film is kinda up and down for me a lot because it does have a lot of cool aspects to it, but it also has some things that rubbed me the wrong way. But the stuff that works well does work really well. The animation is obviously outstanding like all these Ghibli movies and I really loved the dubbing here, especially Christian Bale as Howl himself. I thought he did a really great job and helped Howl stand out a bit more. But the others like Jean Simmons, Emily Mortimer, Josh Hutcherson, Billy Crystal and Lauren Bacall all do great too. So, yeah, this review might have been kinda all over the place, but it's hard for me to really get a grasp on my actual thoughts on the film because there's a lot that I liked and disliked. I'd say you should check it out if you're curious and see what you think, though I don't know if it's a fim I'd ever want to watch again. So, guys, that's my review of Howl's Moving Castle. Thank you all for reading and please comment down below to tell me what you think.