Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Howl's Moving Castle
2004 · Hayao Miyazaki · Howl's Moving Castle on Sightlines
An old woman climbs into the hills, and a house comes walking toward her on bird legs. Two kinds of motion in one shot. The body has to earn every step; the building doesn't. Almost everything Howl's Moving Castle knows is arranged in that image, and the strangest part of it is that the old woman is a girl.
That morning Sophie was a milliner, young and unremarkable and fine with being unremarkable. A jealous witch came into the shop and left her old. Now watch the film a second time and try to find the scene where she gets young again. There isn't one. Her age drifts. She is bent and grey in one scene and unmistakably younger two scenes later, and the variable isn't magic or plot. It's confidence. When she stands up for herself she gets younger. When she apologizes for existing she is ancient again. Nobody in the film ever mentions this. The entire character arc is conducted through the drawing.
Gilles Deleuze, writing on cinema in the 1980s, has a name for why this works, and it comes from the part of his film books people skip. Before movies, arts that wanted to show motion had to pick the big moment: the discus-thrower at full coil, the saint at the instant of the vision. Deleuze called those privileged instants, poses chosen because they summarize. Cinema broke the habit by sampling motion mechanically, twenty-four times a second, at what he called the any-instant-whatever: no instant more important than the one beside it. And he thought the animated cartoon was the purest case of all, because there the drawing is never a pose to begin with, only "a figure in the process of being formed or dissolving."
That is Sophie's face, described decades early. It explains why you can't locate the shot where she turns young: there is no shot. Age here isn't a state the drawing depicts. It's a rate the drawing runs at.
Deleuze's other useful idea arrives late in his second volume, where he describes a cinema of the body, films that stop routing a character's interior through speech and put it in attitudes and postures, in how someone stands and walks. A body holds its before and after in one shape. Alongside it he keeps Brecht's word gest: a posture that gives away a social relation without anyone stating it. Sophie's stoop is a gest. It's the shape of a girl who decided years ago that she wasn't worth looking at, and the witch's curse doesn't invent it. The curse enlarges it until we can't miss it.
Miyazaki had been building toward this for fifteen years. Kiki's Delivery Service gave him a heroine whose interiority was carried entirely by posture and gait, and taught him to animate flight as felt physical labour rather than weightless swooping. Spirited Away, the Ghibli feature immediately before this one, did transformation as slow body-horror rendered frame by frame instead of explained in dialogue. Howl's takes both techniques and asks them to carry a feature by themselves.
There's a further oddity worth naming. Sophie isn't young, then old, then young. The film never establishes which age is the true one. Deleuze, chasing how films make time visible without resorting to flashbacks, described peaks of present: contradictory presents held at once instead of replacing one another in a line. He found it in narration, in films that tell you two incompatible versions of the same afternoon. Miyazaki puts it in a face. Both Sophies are running simultaneously, which is why the curse never gets a clean undoing scene. There's no original underneath to restore.
And while she oscillates, the house walks. Deleuze noticed that some films take movement away from the character and hand it to the world; the figure goes still and the world moves through them, the way a dance absorbs a dancer. Miyazaki built the machine for it. Sophie stops walking and her home walks instead. Hisaishi's waltz does the same work in three-four time. It's called "Merry-Go-Round of Life," and a carousel is motion that returns rather than arrives.
The castle is where the craft debt is most literal. Castle in the Sky gave Miyazaki the walking automaton and the habit of articulating machinery with real weight and plausible joints; Porco Rosso gave him the interwar European aeronautics the design language still speaks. What's remarkable is that he animates machines exactly as he animates bodies. The castle is turrets, pistons and fish-scale plating drawn so densely it seems to breathe, and it wheezes as it goes. André Bazin grounded film realism in the photograph's physical bond to the thing that stood in front of the lens, which is precisely what a drawing does not have. Miyazaki wins realism back by another road: effort. The castle convinces because it is heavy.
Which leaves the war. Classical action cinema runs on a simple circuit. A hero sees a bad situation and acts, and the act transforms it; the villain is the situation with a face on it. Miyazaki refuses to supply the face. Nausicaä set the rule twenty years earlier and Howl's inherits it whole: neither belligerent is demonized, so there is no correct side to win for. Remove the bad side and the machinery seizes. Howl's only available move is refusal, and he will not fight for the king. Miyazaki was bending Diana Wynne Jones's novel as the Iraq invasion unfolded, and the pacifism isn't a message bolted onto the story. It's a structural decision that cost the film its engine. What sits where the heroism should be is domestic: an old woman goes into service in a wizard's house. In a film with no right side, keeping one household alive is the only act left that isn't complicit.
This is what the film did to the art. It carried a feature-length arc on the drawing rate of a single body, with almost no dialogue doing the work, inside a family picture made for the widest audience a studio can reach. Animation's usual boast is that it can show anything. Miyazaki's counter-boast is smaller and much harder: it can show the one thing a photographed actor cannot. Prosthetics give you an age, a state you are in. A drawing can give you an age that never settles, sliding by degrees with each returning ounce of nerve.
So watch it again, and don't watch her face. Watch her shoulders and her back. Then try to say how old she is in any given scene. You won't manage it, and neither can she, and that failure is the character rather than a flaw in the drawing. It leaves a good question hanging over the ending. If a curse only shows you what you were already doing to yourself, what exactly gets lifted?
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — "Sophie's age is never fixed: her body drifts older or younger from scene to scene as her confidence falters and returns — a character arc conducted almost entirely through the act of drawing itself." There is no transformation shot to point to; each drawing is a figure mid-formation rather than a pose of an age.
- attitudes & postures (cinema of the body) — The arc runs through the aging body's bearing and gait rather than dialogue — the technique the dossier traces to Kiki's Delivery Service, "a young female protagonist whose interiority is carried by posture and gait, the embodied-performance technique Sophie's aging body refines."
- the gest — Sophie's stooped old-woman posture reads as the social attitude of a milliner who had already effaced herself; the curse enlarges an existing bearing, and her confidence returning visibly straightens her.
- peaks of present (series of time) — Her body "drifts older or younger from scene to scene" with no age established as the true one, so the girl and the crone coexist as contradictory presents rather than succeeding each other.
- movement of world — The ramshackle castle strides the landscape on spindly bird legs while Sophie rides inside it; Hisaishi's waltzing "Merry-Go-Round of Life" sets the same displaced, returning motion in three-four time.
- crisis of the action-image — The pacifist armature inherited wholesale from Nausicaä — "the moral refusal to demonize either belligerent" — leaves no villain and no situation a decisive act could transform; Howl's response to the war is resistance to fighting for the king, and Sophie's is domestic service.