Howl's Moving Castle

2025

Dridi, Yosr.  From postmodern fairy tale to ani-modern shojo: Adapting Howl's Moving Castle.
In Dominic J. Nardi & Keli Fancher (eds.). Studio Ghibli Films as Adaptations: Investigating How the Japanese Animation Powerhouse Reimagines Stories (pp. 34-54). New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

2024

Vahid, Vadhat. The slave aesthetics of suburbia: Animate architecture in Howl’s Moving Castle and Up.
In Vahid Vadhat (ed). Animate(d) Architecture: A Spatial Investigation of the Moving Image (pp. 153-168). Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press.

2019

Visnyei, Petra. Japanese apocalyptic dystopia and the role of steampunk in Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, 6(1), 41-55.

"Japanese film director, screenwriter, and animator Hayao Miyazaki created an intricate adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle (1986). Both the 2004 eponymous Japanese anime film and the novel seem to be set in the Edwardian era. The novel operates more as a fable, carrying traditional tropes of European folklore, while the film is closer to a dystopian alternate history. My paper examines how the adaptation, even though Japanese, manages to rework the story as a steampunk fantasy. The examination of the visual aspect of the anime illustrates how a Japanese adaptation of a British novel represents a steampunk story whilst bearing traces of the Japanese sense of apocalypse. The comparison of the source material and the film reveals a cross-cultural phenomenon: an engagement of typically Japanese animation components and an essentially British setting. This paper examines the film as an adaptation that operates with vastly differing plot elements: war and the exploitation of magical powers obtain much more important, sinister roles as subsidiary themes, especially in light of the fact that the Iraq war had started a year before the film’s release. This study, focusing on the thematic and visual components, identifies how a Japanese adaptation of a British novel gives a translation of a steampunk story whilst conveying a critique of modern wars."

2018

Bolton, Christopher. It's art, but is it anime? Howl's Moving Castle and the novel.
In Christopher Bolton, Interpreting anime (pp. 233-252). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Vieira, Catarina, & Kunz, Sara. Howl’s Moving Castle: Perspectives from literature to film.
In CONFIA 2018: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Illustration & Animation (pp. 27-37). Barcelos, Portugal: Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave

2015

Fraser, Lucy. Girls, old women and fairytale families in The Old Woman’s Skin and Howl’s Moving Castle.
In Tomoko Aoyama, Laura Dales, & Romit Dasgupta (eds.). Configurations of family in contemporary Japan (pp. 65-76). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Wilson, Carl, & Wilson, Garrath T. Taoism, shintoism, and the ethics of technology: An ecocritical review of Howl's Moving Castle.
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2(3), 189-194.

2014

Akimoto, Daisuke. Howl’s Moving Castle in the War on Terror: A transformative analysis of the Iraq War and Japan’s response. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 14(2).

"This paper is a film review of Howl’s Moving Castle, directed by Miyazaki Hayao and released by Studio Ghibli in November 2004. This movie is based on the novel of the same title written by Dianna Wynne Jones in 1986. From a perspective of peace research, however, this movie is related to Miyazaki’s anti-war philosophy in the post-9/11 political context and the following US-led War on Terror, especially the 2003 Iraq War. From a perspective of peace research, this paper reviews the storyline of the film with a special focus on war and peace issues. Moreover, utilising ‘transformative adaptation’ as an analytical research method, this paper provides a ‘transformative analysis’ of symbolism reflected in the main characters: Howl, Sophie, Calcifer, and Madam Suliman, which could respectively represent: Japan, Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, and the United States in the post-9/11 international politics. Finally, this paper offers a critical analysis of the 2003 Iraq War regarding its legitimacy and Japan’s response."

Bye, Susan. Connecting the pieces in 'Howl's Moving Castle'. Screen Education, 74, 112-117.

"Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Howl's Moving Castle (2004) is loosely based on Diana Wynne Jones' fantasy novel of the same name. Miyazaki has taken and reinterpreted a number of elements from the source text, such as the eponymous castle, the vain wizard, and the young female protagonist who has a spell cast on her that turns her into an elderly woman. Most notably, however, in response to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, he decided to construct the film narrative around the novel's passing reference to an imminent war. Rather like the slug-like henchmen, the war infiltrates every part of the film's story, complicating and intensifying the relationships being developed and explored. According to the film's producer Toshio Suzuki, the war theme gave Miyazaki the opportunity to explore 'the qualities that make people human and enable them to retain their humanity in a world brutalized by bloodshed and greed'. In Howl's Moving Castle, this idea is communicated through the strange but mostly functional community that the protagonist, Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer as the young version of the character and Jean Simmons as the elderly version), creates out of the disparate collection of characters she meets after arriving at the castle. "

2011

Bradford, Clare. Children's literature in a global age: Transnational and local identities. Barnboken - Journal of Children's Literature Research, 34(1), 20-34.

"This essay explores the concept of transnationalism, defining this term in relation both to the lived experience of transnational subjects, and to transnational texts for children. It argues that rhetorics of globalization have over-emphasized the impact and significance of global cultural and economic flows, although the production of children’s books is to some extent shaped by the internationalization of publishing houses and markets. The concept of transnationalism provides a way of thinking about how children’s texts address and are informed by diverse, complex influences, sometimes from a variety of cultures and languages. Transnationalism is not a new phenomenon but is visible in colonial texts which are shaped both by the particular, local ideologies of colonial nations, and also by the common concerns and interests of such nations. The essay draws on two contemporary texts to illustrate the workings of transnationalism: the film Howl’s Moving Castle, and Shaun Tan’s picture book The Arrival. It concludes by considering the concept of transnational literacy as a way of approaching scholarship and teaching in children’s literature."

2009

Swinnen, Aagje. "One nice thing about getting old is that nothing frightens you." From page to screen: Rethinking women's old age in Howl's Moving Castle.
In Heike Hartung & Roberta Meierhofer (eds.). Narratives of Life: Mediating Age (pp. 167-182). Vienna: Lit Verlag.

2007

Kimmich, Matt. Animating the fantastic: Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of Diana Wynne-Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle.
In Leslie Strayner & James Keller, (eds.). Fantasy Fiction Into Films (pp. 124-139). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Parsons, Elizabeth. Animating grandma: The indices of age and agency in contemporary children’s films. Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts,  1(3 & 4), 221-229.

"Analysis of three animated children's films, each with heroic grandmothers motivating their plotlines, suggests a shift in the representational politics mediating older women to child audiences. The films function as critiques, reflections, and mechanisms of contemporary capitalism's available sociocultural locations for older women, modelled through varying degrees of subversive performance. Interrogating the agency potential of housework, nurture and extreme sports, this article assesses the role and function of the “Granny trope” in contemporary children's media."

2005

Burkham, Anita. Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Horn Book Magazine, 81(5), 553-557.

Osmond, Andrew. Castles in the sky. Sight and Sound: The International Film Magazine, 15(10), 28-31.