Howl's Moving Acid Trip

I try to write reviews about things that move me, for better or for worst. Miyazaki's films usually move me for the better. I love 'My Neighbor Totoro' and 'KiKi's Delivery Service' is one of my favorite films. Something about these films makes me insist on (inadequately) describing them to whoever will listen as "unlike anything you've seen before." I am envious of this sort of magic.

Totoro was about discovery, and the plot was nothing more than kids discovering new friends with the power of their imagination. The stakes were never really that high in Totoro, but Miyazaki slowed things down, explored them, and worked with them so that you felt that everything was at stake. Marvelous.

But as for actual plot - Totoro was pretty thin. The same was for KiKi's Delivery service - serviceable plot (young witch comes of age - no antagonists), but my visceral response to it was amazing. The attention was in the details, and the details gave me a whiff of something else that my mind had to fill in. What is behind that corner? What's going on in her mind? KiKi's was a clean film with delicious details.

Tonight, I watched Miyazaki's 2004 film, "Howl's Moving Castle" expecting more magic. What I got was an acid trip. This description is inadequate, for the worst.

Don't get me wrong - the first half of the film I was thinking to myself, "is this going to be one of my favorite films?" There were hints of war, a clever and cunning and different heroine, and characters that made me want to see how the events in this story world all came together like independent strings intersecting at a precise point to be exactly the sort of story I see before my eyes, and how there could be no other possible story but this one. There were hopes that this story was that well written. But by the end of the movie, I was pausing the DVD player to say "no way", and not in a good way, but in a pissed off - maybe I'll second guess Miyazaki's past brilliance - sort of way. Yes, there were details galore - melting old witches and blob men and flagella wings on aircrafts and secret passageways that lead to new lands and all of that. But somewhere in all these new, wonderful acid-ridden details that someone must have surely come up with in some sort of altered state, there was the hubris to think a film could get away with nonsenical fancies as a plot. Gone were the simple plots of Miyazaki films past, but unfortunately they were replaced by incoherence laced up with different iterations of "love is a heavy burden" repeated to me at 5 professions a minute, interlaced with a song that translates under the subtitles as "love is a heavy burden" or something to that effect...

The end went something like this: old lady turns young then old again, stars are falling, time travel to a kid eating a fire demon from the heavens that merges with his heart, then a shaggy dog goes insane, scarecrow loses his stick, but then turns into a prince that can end the depressing war lickity split ("I'm a prince from a far away land!"), and the previous villain agrees that the war ends too, because she sees all this through her magic ball and is somehow touched, and all is forgiven. The heroine ends up loving a narcissistic jerk who throws tantrums and melts all over the place. And this would all be cool if it didn't feel like the creators (Miyazaki and co.) of this film were puking half digested ideas out at me, and then setting it to wonderful music, played on loop. The movie started out so promising, but then it became a J. J. Abrams production: "Throw everything at the audience to immediately gratify my ego as a 'visionary', and then back out of it by quick band-aid slapped on explanations, and expect the audience to eat it up and think me wonderful for it because they so much enjoyed the beginning of the story that they can't possibly be wrong about the end of it being a pile of doo-doo." Cognitive Dissonance at its worst.

I've read somewhere that other cultures make stories that don't fall into what is expected of the "Western" story structure, meaning beginning, rise, resolution, or something similar to that. Post modernists will talk about how not everything need be explained. From what I know, the Japanese love post modernism (it's all about how you feel, man...) as evidenced by the promising but then too big and finally preachy "Neon Genesis Evangelion" as well as the very good, very haunting post-modern-done-right "Wind-Up Bird Chronicles". Things don't always tie up togethr, it's how you feel, things don't have to have cause and effect...just beauty. I get it, and I appreciate it, I do. But it still needs to work somehow, and just because it doesn't work, don't expect us to pretend it's our fault for not getting it (I'm talking to you, Studio Ghibli!). I made that mistake with Matrix 2 - pretending to think it was better than it was so that I could feel good about myself for "getting it." Buying into that crap is an awful feeling. Never again.

Borges - I don't get all his stories, but I can tell it makes sense, somehow, and I need only work at it to appreciate it. "Howl's Moving CrackHouse?" Well, if they ever figure out what they wanted to do with the last Act instead of painting with hallucinatory poo (poo in the form of both beautiful drawings and shitting writing), let me know. Otherwise, wake me up when I'm done purging the last half of this film from my memory.