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Hayao Miyazaki's 2004 adaption of Diana Wynne Jones's children's novel Howl's Moving Castle broke the record for the largest theatrical release for any film-animation or not-in Japan, screening in one out of every six theatres in the nation and earning a worldwide box-office gross of $235,184,110 (Cavallaro 157).1 A critical approach to the film, with special consideration to its source novel, allows for a study of Miyazaki's version of Howl's Moving Castle as a transformative adaptation. While the film retains many elements from its source text, from the fire demons to the eponymous moving castle, it also adds a new component to the story: war. In the book version, the protagonist, Sophie Hatter, is a young woman working at a hat shop who is cursed to look like an old, withered crone by the villainous (and beautiful) Witch of the Waste. Rather than face her friends and family, the elderly Sophie exiles herself and ends up living with the lecherous Wizard Howl in his moving castle as she attempts to free herself from her curse (a goal eventually accomplished in the novel through Sophie's resolution of a conflict between her sisters and their lovers). Miyazaki retains Sophie's curse and her refuge with the Wizard Howl as the film's backdrop, but makes a war raging through the country the conflict to which the reversal of Sophie's curse is tied. In this way, while Jones's book explores the crucial role that communication plays in preventing and ending conflict, Miyazaki's film demonstrates that the loss of open dialogue can lead to war. The film thus transforms the narrative of Howl's Moving Castle into a critique of the contemporary, international politics surrounding the Iraq War.
The film version of Howl's Moving Castle illustrates an approach to adaptation that moves beyond "borrowing," what film critic Dudley Andrews describes as the "casual appropriation of stories, ideas, or situations" (113). It also eschews the process of' intersecting," in which a work is recreated as closely as possible in another medium. Instead, Miyazaki takes a more controversial approach to textual adaptation: transformation. "Adaptors," critic H. Porter Abbott argues, "if they are good at all . . . steal what they want and leave the rest" (112). As this essay will examine, a transformative...