You know what's better than a new Hayao Miyazaki movie?

A new Hayao Miyazaki movie based on a Diana Wynne Jones book.

And you know what's better than a new Hayao Miyazaki movie based on a Diana Wynne Jones book?

A free screening of a new Hayao Miyazaki movie based on a Diana Wynne Jones book, preceded by a sushi-buffet "reception" at the theater. Not that there's much of a connection between the movie in question and sushi — I wonder if a Japanese PR firm would preface the critics' premiere of an American movie with a hamburger dinner — but hey, free sushi. It was pretty tasty, too.

In intellectual retrospect, Howl's Moving Castle was not quite all that I might of anticipated out of a meeting of the minds between my favorite animator and one of my all-time favorite writers. As an adaptation, it simplifies a lot of things, leaves in some unnecessary bits that slow the pacing at the beginning, drops out some explanations that would have been useful, which speeds up the pacing somewhat ridiculously toward the end, and tosses on a huge helping of Miyazaki themes, from "flying is cool" to "war is bad" to "there's no such thing as evil, and even bad individuals can generally be brought around to decent behavior if you just treat them respectfully." In a way, the extra material weakens Jones's story a bit, because Miyazaki is just echoing things he's done before several times over, in some cases not as well as he did them previously.

But that's all conscious interpretation, and after the fact, and largely based on beginning to re-read Jones's book Howl's Moving Castle, and realizing how much Miyazaki left out. Actually watching the film last night, I was overjoyed throughout, and thoroughly caught up in it all. It's a beautiful-looking movie, of course, and the story's still stunning, and the changes to the plot just made it harder to tell where everything was going. Even the English-dub voices worked fine for me, for the most part, though Billy Crystal as Calcifer was still too damn Billy Crystal. I not only loved it, I wanted to immediately see it again.

What Miyazaki really, really gets right, in my opinion, is Jones's unusual view of magic, which carries through most of her books. In Diana Wynne Jones fantasies, magic is rarely a formal or controlled discipline; it happens instinctively and responds to the magician's state of mind and unconscious intentions as well as to what s/he actually says or does. That paradigm blends uncommonly well with Miyazaki's malleable characters, which shift form constantly throughout the movie.

As Cass points out in his post summing up his take on Castle (along with the stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust and several more movies we've seen in the past week), I've been waiting for someone to do an animated Diana Wynne Jones movie for a long, long time. I first started planning one myself when I was about eight years old. It's no surprise that someone else beat me to it, since last I checked, I'm not actually in the animation industry. But I can't think of anyone better to take up the task than Hayao Miyazaki. I've been waiting for something almost exactly like this film for more than 25 years, and I couldn't be happier about it happening.

I'm-a feelin': content