Duck: Anyway, welcome back listeners to-- not Come Out and Play. That's my other podcast.
Dia: I mean, if you're about to launch a D&D session on me with zero prep, I will be coming to your house to bite you.
Duck: That would be fair. Hello, listeners, and welcome back to Analysis Roulette, the podcast that is this podcast.
Dia: And not another podcast. Incredibly descriptive.
Duck: Right? It's very specific. This is the podcast where the rules are made up and that-- wait, no, that's another different podcast. This is the podcast where I learned about literature in much the same way as a child with a glue gun learns about sculpture.
Dia: The podcast where we know what we're doing.
Duck: And there are words.
Dia: Absolutely, there will be words. And I believe this week, you are walking us through a poststructuralist reading of Howl’s Moving Castle.
Duck: That is certainly something I am attempting. Yep.
Dia: Well, I'm excited. Shall we start with specifying what version of Howl's Moving Castle are we looking at?
Duck: Yes, let's go through the terms of reference. So I am aware that there is both a book and a film. I have not read the book. I have rewatched. I had to-- I had previously watched the film and I have rewatched the film with my limited knowledge of poststructuralism. Thinking in mind, I will say that there will be at least some book discussion because one of the interesting things about this film is it doesn't really stand alone. You know, there are plenty of films that are adapted from books that work as films. This one, certain crucial pieces of exposition are not present.
Dia: I think the thing is, it's a film that's designed to make sense to children. And children have much lower demands of plot and much higher demands of vibes.
Duck: Yes. And the vibes are fine, though. It's only when you start to try and work out what just happened that you've run into problems.
Dia: Yeah, I definitely experienced-- I mean, this film is-- So, my background on this is I read the book as a kid because Diana Wynne Jones was one of my favorite authors. I read all of her books when I was about 12. But I didn't actually watch the film until I was in my 20s. I think I watched it for the first time about three, four years ago now. And I rewatched it two weeks ago, but this film is so intensely vibes heavy that I already am not 100% sure what order the sequence of events occurs in.
Duck: Right.
Dia You might have to walk me through some plot details.
Duck: I will try to walk us through a brief summary of Howl’s Moving Castle for the sake of the listener who may or may not have seen this film recently, or at any point in the last 20 years. So you realize this film is 20 years old.
Dia: I had a moment when I was-- I did a little bit of background reading just to prep for the podcast. And at one point it references the modern world at the time of the film, and it references specifically computers in the book. And I lost my mind because in the book it's like there was a box with some kind of text thing on the glowing screen. I was like, oh, that's a 1980s computer.
Duck: It’s a 1980s computer.
Dia: That's a--
Duck: It’s probably green text.
Dia: That’s significantly older than I am.
Duck: Yeah, and the film came out in 2004 which is 19 years ago now.
Dia: God.
Duck: It makes the older than new Doctor Who a show that has been going nearly as long as old Doctor Who.
Dia: It is older than Supernatural, the show that keeps on giving.
Duck: I hear there's been some Supernatural news although, as is the way with Supernatural news, I try not to know what it is.
Dia: When has there not been Supernatural news? I am so looking forward to one of us rolling Supernatural so I can make you watch it.
Duck: This is the fate I have let myself in for.
Dia: And I get to pick the episodes! I'm going to pick episodes that you're going to enjoy. I'm going to make you doubt yourself.
Duck: [doubtful hum]
Dia: There’s good bits. Early on.
Duck: You can certainly try.
Dia: In series like, one to five there were high points.
Duck: How many series were there
Dia: I stopped watching at seven. I think it went for at least six more.
Duck: That's a resounding recommendation.
Dia: And then there’s a prequel.
Duck: And then there's just the continued Expanded Universe of “the actors saying things”.
Dia: [The Misha] Collins Expanded Universe. Okay, which is beside the point, we do not need to talk about actors except possibly to discuss Christian Bale's Batman voice’s first appearance.
Duck: We do not need to discuss Supernatural today. I'm sure that day will come. We're talking about Howl's Moving Castle, a very beautiful film from 2004.
Dia: It’s so pretty.
Duck: It's so pretty even when it's-- there are a couple of points where it is deliberately being as pretty as possible. But all the rest of the time, it's also just so pretty.
Dia: I did look up some reviews of it, and some like chatter like Tumblr, TV Tropes, that kind of thing, just to get like a [live sense] of the film. And one of the things that really threw me was how many people were talking about like, oh, the body horror of the goo and the old women who were so ugly, and I was like, everything is so pretty. Even when like, there's green goo and skeleton hands and old women, which is apparently a problem, they're all really pretty.
Duck: It is, it is beautifully drawn, and animated, the colors are lovely. It's a film that has just said, No thank you to the concept of diegetic lighting.
Dia: And we should specify at this point, before we go any further than saying this film is very pretty, spoilers.
Duck: Everything that follows, we are making no effort at all to avoid any kind of spoilers. So if you want to go and watch this film before you hear us talk about it, go do that.
Dia: Do you want to walk us through either the film or poststructuralism? And we'll head forward from that.
Duck: I'm gonna do the film, then I'm going to make you do poststructuralism. Because you will--
Dia: Hang on, No, no, this was your job!
Duck: No, no, no, no, no, no, the analysis is my job. Summaries we can share.
Dia: Okay, I'm dubious about this. I don't know that I agreed to this, but--
Duck: You will get-- you will get poststructuralism more right than I will.
Dia: Do you want to bet.
Duck: And then the listener will be able to go, Hey, Duck’s doing it wrong, which will be fun for them.
Dia: I really, really hope that none of my professors ever ever hears of this’s existence for several reasons, but mostly because of how wrong I'm about to be.
Duck: Wonderful. So this very beautiful film, it is kind of a, a sequence of set pieces strung together more than it is a strictly chronological narrative. There are various bits that are not hugely clear, such as how long passes between various scenes. And sometimes what's happening. We've mentioned that, but it is broadly speaking a story about a young lady who is working in a hat shop, which she does not find particularly exciting. It's her father's hat shop, and she's the eldest. So it's her hat shop now and she's got to keep it running. She's going somewhere, I think is never explained. But she's, she's heading out after work, and is rescued from an awkward encounter with some soldiers in an alley by a remarkably beautiful young man.
Dia: It's not not a V for Vendetta moment.
Duck: It's not not that. It's, it is very much, he turns up in exactly the way where he is clearly supposed to be about to rescue her with violence from some villains.
Dia: It's very swish swish drama,
Duck: Right, but instead he like, picks her up and flies away with her over the rooftops.
Dia: It's very whimsical,
Duck: It's very whimsical. Howl-- this is, we will, we will learn his name later. But this is Howl, the wizard of the title, he is rescuing her because she was being attacked, but also he is being followed. So no sooner has he rescued her than he is giving her instructions on you know, not looking down or letting them be seen because he's being followed. And he, he sort of sweeps off again and into the night as in again a very Batman superhero sort of way. There are some slightly awkward family encounters where we, we get what's sort of going on with Sophie, that she doesn't really want to be doing what she's doing. And then she is followed home by the mysterious entities that we're following Howl and a witch comes into the hat shop. And they exchange some words that are mostly Sophie being very brave. And then a spell is cast upon her by the witch and Sophie becomes very old. We meet old Sophie. We will be spending most of the film with old Sophie. Not with young Sophie.
Dia: I do want to address: old Sophie looks cute! So many people I've seen saying like, oh, she's turned old and ugly and it's her confidence because she feels ugly and she looks really nice.
Duck: Yes. And there are there's there are sort of-- I think there's two, yeah, there's two kind of old ladies who the film spends a lot of time on. Sophie’s definitely the cute one. Sophie is turned old but she’s-- the film does not have her turned ugly. She has just turned old she's you know she's she's she's gray and and her face is lined and she, her back is stooped.
Dia: Yeah, and like I think crucially no one comments on ugliness. They just say you're old.
Duck: Yes, no one ever--
Dia: She has achy knees and crotchety attitude, but it's not a curse of ugliness, it's a curse of old
Duck: No, noone calls Sophie ugly or ever comments on her appearance much at all?
Dia: No.
Duck: They kind of take her at face value. Which to be fair is what I do when I meet old ladies.
Dia: Yeah I very rarely-- I very rarely meet old ladies and go, Wow, you're ugly?
Duck: [laughs] On account of, you have basic manners and are not a monster? Yes.
Dia: Like, you know, I've seen people in the street with wrinkles, I did not run away screaming.
Duck: It's good of you.
Dia: That's very noble of me. It's really hard.
Duck: The world appreciates your forbearance in this matter. Sophie responds in what I’m going to describe as a dramatic way, which is, rather than talk to literally anyone in her life about this problem-- now, granted, the curse includes you won't tell anyone about it. But I feel like when you turn up suddenly old, you don't necessarily have to explain that that's-- that something has happened. That's just my feeling that perhaps some parts of this would be self explanatory. But Sophie's response is to run away from home. She packs up her little bindle and she climbs up into the mountains on her own. It's an understandable emotional reaction to so many things. She meets a scarecrow. It's a remarkably alive scarecrow. It has a turnip for a head. She calls it Turnip. It bounces and follows her and brings her a coat, which is nice. And then she says, well, that's very helpful. Could you bring me a house to shelter in because of all this storm, and it bounces away, and she feels very proud of herself for thinking of a way to make the magic scarecrow go away. And then it comes back with a chicken legged steampunk house.
Dia: This is the titular steampunk house.
Duck: This is the Moving Castle. Yes, it's amazing. We don't see nearly enough of it.
Dia: I want one.
Duck: I want one. I want to see all of the rooms, we don't see-- we see about four rooms of the inside of this Moving Castle and it's big. It's got to have more rooms than that. And we don't see them. And that annoys me.
Dia: I mean, I feel like they don't exist unless Howl is actually remembering that they should be there.
Duck: That's possible, I would have thought Calcifer had a decent memory for what rooms should be in the castle.
Dia: He remembers. I just don't think he cares.
Duck: That's fair, we should introduce Calcifer, Calcifer is the next character we meet. Calcifer is a kitchen fire.
Dia: He's also a mood.
Duck: He is, he's a slightly crotchety kitchen fire who just wants you to stop bullying him? He's a darling. There is also a small child called Markl, who I understand is less of a small child in the book.
Dia: Yeah, in the book I think he's in his mid teens. And he is called Michael. I'm under the impression that this was just this wasn't actually an intentional change so much as just dubbing was not good in 2004.
Duck: I mean, that's in the same way as we're saying Howl but in the film. At least I watched the subtitled version and you know, in the film, it's pronounced Howell.
Dia: Yeah, I think in the Japanese, like subtitles, writing the material, etc. It's like transliterated as Hower, but L and R are phonetically pretty much the same in Japanese.
Duck: And you can't just run consonants together in quite the same way you can in English. So you have to have a vowel in between so becomes Howell?
Dia: Yeah, which to be fair is his name in the book, to my knowledge, his original name is Howell.
Duck: Howell is a perfectly cromulent Welsh name.
Dia: It’s the greatest plot twist of a generation.
Duck: Which we have to say is not in the film, the film will not inform you of this. Which is--
Dia: But it is the most important thing about the film because it's infinitely more entertaining if you remember, this is just some guy.
Duck: Just some guy. He has an animate talking fireplace demon called Calcifer. He has a small child. Markl is, you know, maybe eight years old, adjusting for being drawn in a particularly cute anime way. But he is, he is distinctly pre growth spurts, he's a tiny child. He has an adorable disguise where he has a cloak that makes him look like a tiny old man instead. Or at least gives him a big beard and big eyebrows.
Dia: It’s so cute.
Duck: It's amazing. It keeps falling off as well. Every time we see him in disguise, his disguise keeps falling off.
Dia: It's so cute.
Duck: Sophie gets here, feeds the fire, falls asleep in front of the fireplace, wakes up to make the best of her, her new world by making breakfast, because she's basically has found herself in a house with a tiny child who wants breakfast and isn't big enough to cook. So she cooks breakfast. And in the middle of doing this Howl returns which is the point where Sophie gets the confirmation that the, yes, this person who rescued her was Howl, and also she's in his house. And he says, Well, who are you and why are you in my house? And she says--
Dia: Not unreasonable.
Duck: A reasonable question under the circumstances, right? And she says, I'm your cleaning lady, which is a totally unreasonable thing to say when someone says who are you? Why are you in my house? But nonetheless works. Howl goes, Sure. Okay.
Dia: This is maybe our first indication that the great wizard Howl is. is something
Duck: There's something going on with him. He's just going with some kind of flow.
Dia: Yeah. I feel this is also our first indication that this movie is not going to follow a series of events necessarily so much as a series of incidents.
Duck: Yeah. Yeah, sort of beads on a string kind of story structure. You know, there’s the school of narrative where you tell people the next thing that happens. This is not from that school. This is much more of a we're hitting the highlights of a story. We’ve learned that Howl has a couple of aliases, and that his aliases who are also wizards and these aliases have been summoned to meet with the king because there's a war on. Did we mention there's a war on? There's a war on.
Dia: So, fantasy World War One is happening, ish.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: And we've-- that's why there are soldiers and we've heard some dialogue about the kidnapped prince. All of these things are occurring.
Duck: Did we? I totally missed that. That makes somebody make more-- slightly more sense but not like a lot more sense.
Dia: I have heard this reaction from so many people, yes. Two random passers-by in the crowd, I can't remember their exact words, but basically they are saying “Oh, and the prince has been kidnapped, which has made tension between these nations really kick off.”
Duck: I wonder if that was not subtitled.
Dia: It is so blink and you’ll miss it, I would not be surprised if it was subtitled as like, crowd talking.
Duck: Yeah, I did, I missed that, in that. But that's a nice easter egg to still fail to explain some other things. But you know, technically make them foreshadowed.
Dia: If you're paying a lot of attention, and indeed more attention than I would expect of the average under-10, a lot of things make slightly more sense. Most of them do not make sense.
Duck: Right. This is a film full of glorious set pieces. There are some glorious set pieces. There is some, there's a beautiful montage of Sophie, having declared herself to be the cleaning lady, just completely-- I was going to say blitzing. But in the context of fantasy World War One, that's, you know, an undiplomatic term. She cleans the house, she, there's a cleaning montage. Studio Ghibli loves its montages,
Dia: Especially montages of labor.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Ghibli loves to make a movie that is happy to exist in the process of living a life.
Duck: Yeah, I'm actually thinking like, in Spirited Away. There's a cleaning montage.
Dia: Like, doing your job, cleaning your house, cooking your food, are things that Ghibli movies luxuriate in.
Duck: To be fair, it's where we spend a lot of our time in life.
Dia: Agree! That time is precious, and you should enjoy it. And you should dice the onions up into tiny pieces because it's meditative, and it makes things good.
Duck: I support this as a philosophy of life
Dia: And the food looks so good.
Duck: Anime slice of life with food is my happy place.
Dia: I have been a vegetarian for six years and didn't eat pork much before that. But this movie made me want bacon.
Duck: Bacon in real life is not as good as bacon in this movie.
Dia: No, despite what that weird period in the late 2000s, early 2010s would have had us believe.
Duck: Yeah, bacon mania has thankfully passed. But real bacon has never been as good as the bacon in this movie and won't be because this is the Platonic bacon
Dia: Oh, and the eggs.
Duck: Eggs can be that good.
Dia: Eggs can.
Duck: You just have to get lucky with your egg. There's some cooking. There's a lot of cleaning montage. There's some shopping. There's some being menaced by magic creatures. Howl goes out on mysterious wizard purposes and comes back as a sort of giant bird monster with a human face.
Dia: As one does.
Duck: Every night, I do this. Regularly. And he goes flop on his chair in front of his friendly fireplace which again, a nightly mood. And I cannot remember the sequence of events that leads to him turning to goo…
Dia: Oh, I’ve got--
Duck: Oh yes, like. Okay, so he's, he's a bird monster, and they make him go, he goes for a bath. And because Sophie has been tidying she's rearranged all the conditioners and shampoos and things only they're magic potions because he's a wizard, and he dyes his hair orange.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And then he comes down and has a magnificent breakdown about how he is hideous and life is not worth living if he isn't beautiful.
Dia: Just to be clear, he has dyed his hair red.
Duck: It's a perfectly ordinary shade of red. It's pretty close to Markl’s shade of red.
Dia: He’s Welsh!
Duck: He’s Welsh, he seen a redhead before, Markl is a redhead with hair pretty much that color.
Dia: There are other redheads in this movie, I understand is a Japanese movie where there is kind of a bias--
Duck: It's not just the movie. There's other redheads in the room.
Dia: There are redheads In the room. This is set in fantasy Europe, Howl is Welsh.
Duck: But he is also having an absolute screaming tantrum about how he is hideous and ruined and life is not worth living.
Dia: It's an absolute diddums like when Anne of Green Gables dyed her hair green, and she was a small girl in Victorian times.
Duck: Right and Howl is a wizard who should know better but nonetheless,
Dia: He can change his appearance by magic. We've seen him do it.
Duck: But what he's going to do is collapse in despair. And just to point, point up that he is deeply dramatic. He is not just collapsing in despair with his head in his hands. He turns to goo
Dia: He does, he turns to goo.
Duck: He turns to thick green sloughing off on the floor, slimy goo. He looks like lime gelatin.
Dia: It is to me the visual representation of what dysphoria feels like.
Duck: I vibe more with the bird creature but I can see where you're coming from.
Dia: Like, oh, this is all over me and I don't like it. I am turning to goop
Duck: And it drips on the stairs.
Dia: Yes. you're getting gender All over these stairs.
Duck: Yep. So they put him back in the bath, which is a reasonable thing to do with a wizard who's having a tantrum and turning to goo and he comes out fine. He's fine.
Dia: I think he also flashes Sophie at that point, but it's while he's covered in goo.
Duck: Yes. Sophie is helping him up the stairs while he is. I mean we're talking like an inch to two inch thick layer of goo over his entire body. And she is helping him up the stairs as he is dissolving into goo and she looks down and realizes he's not wearing any clothes and she determinedly looks back up and focuses on where she is going and puts him in the bath and leaves Markl to take care of in the bath. Yeah. Howl has been summoned to do a thing and he doesn't want to do the thing and a lot of the film is Howl putting off responding to his letters.
Dia: He-- it is implied been drafted.
Duck: Yes, wizard drafted.
Dia: Wizard drafted, and wizard drafted does mean turning into a bird monster. So it's even more understandable than regular draft dodging.
Duck: Right. He's wizard draft dodging and his great plan for wizard draft dodging is that Sophie should pretend to be his mum, go and tell the king's chief wizard that he's a wastrel and should not be drafted because he's useless.
Dia: Literally a note from his mom to not have to be wizard drafted.
Duck: He wants a note from his mum that he-- that mum says I don't have to go to war. And I’ve forgotten my kit.
Dia: Important to mention at this point that Miyazaki when making this film was strongly against the Iraq War, which was just beginning,
Duck: Which was just beginning.
Dia: And this was his solution. No, it wasn't. Miyazaki, he has said very many very wise things, both about filmmaking and the Iraq War. But he did also create this movie.
Duck: This movie has opinions on the war. At least, it has opinions on the war within the movie, if you see what I mean.
Dia: The war definitely is very, very much increased in prominence from the books. So in the books, the threat of war is looming, and I believe in the sequel, The war does occur. But the draft dodging and bombings and actual fighting are not present in the first book.
Duck: Interesting. Yeah, the film is kind of all about the--
Dia: Yeah in the book he’s not moving his castle and avoiding kings for draft dodging reasons. It's more of a tax avoidance situation from memory.
Duck: That's even more relatable.
Dia: I don't think it's literally tax evasion. I don't remember it very well. And my knowledge of taxes was not good when I was 12.
Duck: More schooling should, it should do tax evasion.
Dia: Very much an, uh, evading responsibility situation.
Duck: Being a wastrel .
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: He’s being a wastrel.
Dia: He’s not getting her to lie about him being a wastrel, he's getting to lie about being his mum.
Duck: It's true. And we have by this point seen that Sophie's apparent age fluctuates wildly.
Dia: Yeah. Her hair color though does not it remains gray, but her physical--
Duck: Her hair remains the same shade of lovely silk gray. But her level of stoop her level of linedness of face,
Dia: Her physical size even,
Duck: Yes, and quite subtle stuff around her, her figure, some quite subtle stuff around-- It's not just that her face is lined, that there is a sort of middle age default setting where she has quite a strong jaw.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And then when she reverts to young Sophie of a sort of 19 or 20 it becomes a much pointier, sharper face because she's still got her teenage baby face, which is quite fun because you see, her age fluctuates a lot. But because this is a very well animated movie, you kind of, you always recognize that it's Sophie. And you can pick up on some fairly subtle changes in her, her age through the course of a scene.
Dia: And it's such not spelt on-- not spelt on? not spelled out, that this is happening at all, let alone why or how? Or if it is clear to people around her.
Duck: Yeah, nobody ever comments on it. So we kind of have to assume--
Dia: It might just be rude. This is a magical world.
Duck: I definitely got the vibe of Howl knows enough of what's up that he's like consciously being polite and not mentioning this, possibly for Sophie’s benefit.
Dia: That is plausible. I do also think it's possible that for the first two thirds to three quarters of the movie, he is so self absorbed, he's seen this, he just hasn't internalized it in any way.
Duck: Also very plausible. Yes. The next set piece is Sophie trekking up a very long royal Boulevard to the royal palace.
Dia: With a dog. There's a dog, you can't skip the dog.
Duck: A small wuffly dog.
Dia: A Good boy.
Duck: He is a good boy. He's very old. He's very tired. He can't bark properly anymore. He just sort of goes weh, weh.
Dia: is name. I think his name is Heen?
Duck: His name is Heen.
Dia: He's a good boy. And that's what matters.
Duck: She also falls into company with the Witch of the Wastes. The one who cursed her.
Dia: Yes
Duck: Who is crammed into her palanquin being carried along by some goo creatures. And they exchange some sass. And then they are both required to climb a large flight of stairs.
Dia: This takes up so much time.
Duck: This is this is like a pivotal scene
Dia: It's a lot.
Duck: Yeah, I mean by that, you have to treat it as a pivotal scene because this takes at least as long as the whole cleaning montage just to climb these stairs. It's like a couple of minutes of stair climbing and associated dialogue.
Dia: And it is also in a weird way very, very physical, like viscerally it feels like I have made the poor decision to take the stairs at Covent Garden.
Duck: Right! For our listeners who are not familiar with the London tube, the Covent Garden in question, whilst a London landmark, is also a tube station, which does not have escalators. So you either have to wait for a crowded lift, or you look at the sign that says 170 Steps to the surface and you go, eh, seems fine.
Dia: It does seem fine. In that moment, it seems like a good idea. Lifts take a long time, there's a big crowd, it's a popular tourist destination.
Duck: Right? And when you're standing at the bottom of the steps, looking at the sign that says Warning 170 Steps to the surface you think I can do that? I'd be fine.
Dia: The sign’s for like old people and disabled people, right? That's not me.
Duck: But then you make it about 40 steps up and you're like, Oh, this is quite a lot of steps. And at that point, it's too late to change your mind because also quite narrow steps and lots of other people behind you have made the same decision.
Dia: And crucially, they’re narrow, slightly uneven and quite steep steps.
Duck: Yeah. And they spiral.
Dia: They spiral.
Duck: It's a workout.
Dia: It's a mistake you only ever make once.
Duck: This is what it feels like watching Sophie and the Witch of the Wastes climb the steps to the palace.
D; It feels neverending. And I mean that as a compliment.
Duck: Yes, Sophie is having to carry the little dog because the little dog is so little that he can't make it up the steps because he's like a, he's a long haired dachshund.
Dia: Yeah. I do not remember the film well enough to know if this was my impression, despite having seen it two weeks ago, I have seen multiple people say that. Sophie thinks that the dog is Howl?
Duck: She does.
Dia: She does, cool, I couldn’t remember,
Duck: Howl says I'll be with you in disguise. So she's like, clearly it's this dog. And she says to the dog, Howl is that you, and the dog says woof which she finds a convincing answer.
Dia: I mean, it would not surprise me as an answer.
Duck: It's a very plausible answer, but it is not Howl. It's a dog. Sophie’s climbing the steps with a dog, not getting any notably younger, and the Witch of the Wastes is climbing the stairs. Now the Witch of the Wastes. There is interesting stuff going on with her size. I don't mean that just in the ordinary how fat she is sense. She is drawn larger than life.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: So she takes up more of the doorway in Sophie’s shop near the beginning than she ought to, when we see her in her sedan chair and she's at the window to talk to Sophie, her face overfills the window of the sedan chair so we only actually are seeing one of her eyes and like the side of her nose.
Dia: Yeah,
Duck: She gets out of the thing. She is still kind of monumental as a figure, as she climbs the stairs, in addition to you know, at this point, you know, it's not the age that's the thing, it’s, there is some pretty vicious fatphobia in this scene.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: She's climbing the stairs and she can't climb the stairs because she's unfit and she's so fat.
Dia: Yeah, and it’s interesting because this is, it's an interesting thing from the fatphobia and ableism and general, let's go with pretty privilege, elements of this movie that this is a movie almost entirely about very vain people.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: Which can make it quite hard to read how you're supposed to take some of the fatphobia
Duck: Right and this is definitely the worst scene for it.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Because as the witch is climbing she's losing that larger than life and monumental size and becoming fat and drawn in a “you are supposed to be disgusted by the skin folds, You are supposed to be disgusted by the sweat."
Dia: Yeah,
Duck: Kind of way. And there's a very funny moment that they get shown in and there's one chair in there, which is like, mine! That chair is mine.
Dia: You gotta love the Witch of the Wastes.
Duck: I do love the Witch of the Wastes
Dia: She’s so fun.
Duck: While she's sitting in the chair having weird magic done on her, Sophie goes and talks to the court wizard, the king's chief wizard, whose name I've forgotten, and presents the “my son Howl is a wastrel” excuse. Which is very visibly not fooling anyone.
Dia: Sophie is also a terrible liar.
Duck: She is! She is a forthright person. She trends toward the blunt and I love that for her. But it does mean she does a bad job,
Dia: Madam Suliman! That's the name of the--
Duck: Suliman, which is an interesting choice of names to give.
Dia: I can possibly explain that: in the book. This is two people.
Duck: Okay.
Dia: Madam and Suliman are different characters in the book with different roles.
Duck: Interesting.
Dia: And pretty different moral positions within the fairytale.
Duck: Yes. Suliman in the film is quite straightforwardly an evil wizard.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: But like a politically connected, elegant evil wizard, in contrast to the Witch of the Wastes, who is a hideous old woman with moles? Who casts curses on you?
Dia: And she looks great. Like I do appreciate a glamorous evil wizard who isn't like Maleficent glamorous like she's just cool looking.
Duck: Madame Suliman would wear power suits.
Dia: Yeah, like she isn't fun sexy evil cool looking. She's just regular cool looking.
Duck: No, she.
Dia: She looks like a cool anime character.
Duck: She looks like Elizabeth Holmes.
Dia: She does.
Duck: Yeah, she has cultivated the air of someone who will be listened to in boardrooms.
Dia: Yeah. Who can blame her?
Duck: I cannot blame her and then Howl turns up pretending to be the king and then the king turns up also being the king.
Dia: He's bad at it.
Duck: And is like, that's cool. That's a fun doppelganger. Anyway, I'm off to do some more war.
Dia: Yeah, crucially, Howl is doing a better impression of kingship than the king? Because Howl, unlike Sophie, can lie to save his life.
Duck: Howl does nothing else.
Dia: That isn’t true. Howl also expresses drama.
Duck: Howl loves bacon and lying.
Dia: Yeah, those are his two hobbies.
Duck: There is a wizard battle because Howl doesn't want to be drafted and Suliman wants to draft him. It's brief but cool. They escape on a flying machine. Howl goes off to do some more wizard fighting. Sophie flies home.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Howl at this point appears to sort of take up wizard fighting on a freelance basis.
Dia: He will not be drafted but he will get into bar fights.
Duck: Right but he's picking bar fights crucially with like enemy airships.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Peril intensifies, Suliman is sending magical creatures to try and get to Sophie, and Howl, and by extension, the rest of the little motley collection because when I say they escaped, they sort of took the Witch of the Wastes and the little dog with them.
Dia: Yeah,
B; Kinda by accident. The Witch of the Wastes is great at this point because at this point she has been rendered extra old because Suliman has has switched off all her magic powers
Dia: She is.
Duck: And now she's a very old lady. She has not mellowed out, or become redeemed in any way. She has just become old enough to be harmless.
Dia: Yeah, and she is. It's not even like the Discord from My Little Pony treatment. She has in no way become redeemed or good, but she is part of the gang.
Duck: Right! She's just too feeble to do them any harm. And well, she's an old lady, and she needs feeding her porridge. So Sophie does.
Dia: Yeah, she's just there now.
Duck: She’s just also here. Did the whole, the whole thing, they adopt the Witch of the Wastes, because what they're gonna do, throw an old lady out on the street?
Dia: Yeah, like the eight year old, the dog, the fire and the scarecrow are all significantly more helpful than the Witch of the Wastes. But she's just there.
Duck: They're not gonna throw an old lady out on the street, or let her starve, so she's here now. She's in the family. They call her grandma.
Dia: It's amazing.
Duck: It's the best gang.
Dia: It’s so good.
Duck: It’s really, really great. A series of crises occur. And this is where, the part where something, where the timing becomes clear that, a point where it becomes clear that the amount of time things are taking doesn't really make-- has not been clarified, where you realize that it doesn't make sense how long some things take or don't. And you realize that you're getting definitely individual scenes rather than-
Dia: Yeah, it takes as long as you need to process the emotion of this particular moment, as opposed to the amount of time that this moment should take up.
Duck: Yes, Howl does some magic. Howl’s Moving Castle has the, the inside of Howl’s Castle opens to three or four different places depending on the setting on the door. He does a big redesign. And now the inside of his castle is Sophie's house from the beginning. And one of the doors is the front door of Sophie's house leading to Sophie’s shop. But it's clearly a shut down Sophie’s shop at this point.
Dia: Because she has not been there. She's been busy.
Duck: Sophie has not been there. As part of the escalating peril, her mother shows up and they make up which makes it clear that some time has passed her mother is sort of portrayed as this very airheaded woman who doesn't really understand anything that's going on with Sophie or the business.
Dia: I mean, at this point, she is also spying on them.
Duck: At this point, she is also spying on them. But there's this very kind of to the point where you wonder if it's a magical smoothing over lack of clarity as to how long Sophie has been gone, or what they supposedly argued about when Sophie ran away. Not clear. But it's part of Howl’s house now. And then there's peril. And as part of the escaping from the peril, they blow up the house. No, I think the logic here is Howl is going to keep trying to protect the house for as long as it is connected to the wider structure of the castle. So the thing to do is to cut that connection so he doesn't have to protect the house which is actively being bombed as well as being invaded by magic creatures.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: So they switch the castle back to its being a moving castle front door, and they take the fire just out of the castle and the whole thing falls to bits, including severing its connections to its other front doors.
Dia: Because Calcifer is the magical fuel, not just for cooking breakfast, but also for the existence of Howl’s Moving Castle.
Duck: He makes the castle exist, he makes it move. He makes it be hot water, he objects to how many baths Howl takes.
Dia: Yes. And when you take him outside. None of those things continue to happen.
Duck: Right. All of those spells don't work.
Dia: The hot water one is not a pressing issue, the rest of them...
Duck: So the whole Moving Castle collapses and then the very next thing they do is put Calcifer back into it and make him make the castle move. Because they also need to physically leave. Yeah, we get a series of magical getting-- things get more magical and harder to clearly describe but Sophie has a question mark vision. She's moving through some kind of magical void space at the time. It might be a preserved reality moment. It might be a memory, it's, it's magic. But she sees young Howl making a deal with Calcifer. So Calcifer has his heart and he has a lot of magic power. And she says you know that she's going to find them in the future and they should wait for her. She comes out of this magic vision to find bird monster howl. Bird monster howl flies her back To the last remnant of the Moving Castle, which is just a pair of chicken legs and a raft. It is possible--
Dia: Same.
Duck: A favorite incarnation. It's great. Although I do also very much enjoy the interim spherical Toad mode.
Dia: All modes are good.
Duck: All modes of the Moving Castle are good.
Dia: I want a transformer toy of the Moving Castle that does all the modes that would be so good.
Duck: It would be so good. Sophie briefly checks in with Calcifer to be like, are you gonna die if I do this and Calcifer is like, Probably not. So she does it, puts Howl’s heart back in Howl, Calcifer is released, Howl ceases to be nearly dead. He's a real boy now. Because he's got his heart back. And is now once again capable of love.
Dia: So once again capable of love and immediately is in love with Sophie. Because fair enough.
Duck: I mean, who wouldn't be. You can't argue with it really. Calcifer briefly takes a jaunt around being like I’m free and then three minutes later is like I came back because I missed you all. So the gang is back together.
Dia: I love him.
Duck: He's great. And the last scene of the film is Madame Suliman being like, well get everyone together. I suppose we should stop this foolish war, then.
Dia: So that is where the Scarecrow comes in.
Duck: Oh yes. The Scarecrow saves them from certain doom, subtype gravity. And
Dia: His stick gets broken and it's the saddest moment of the movie.
Duck: His stick gets broken. And Sophie is like cradling this, somehow limp, Scarecrow.
Dia: His turnip head.
Duck: Like, talk to me and he's, he appears to be dead. So she kisses him. And he turns into a real boy.
Dia: He turns into the missing prince.
Duck: He tells us the missing prince who is like, Ah, I am a cursed prince and only true love's kiss can save me and then watches Sophie and Howl having a true love moment is like, oh.
Dia: To be fair he takes it great. His attitude is very much well, there's plenty of fish in the sea.
Duck: Right? His attitude is I can't really argue with that. And I mean I get where he's coming from. So I'm gonna go back to my country and help stop the war.
Dia: Yeah, I think it is actually this is his country.
Duck: I thought he was from the next door one. Doesn't matter.
Dia: I could be wrong. I think he's from this country.
Duck: He does have the same color scheme as all the princes from this country.
Dia: Yeah. And from memory. He basically says, like, that the Witch of the Wastes cursed him true love's kiss broke the curse, but he thinks he'll fall in love again. So it's fine that his current true love is in love with the shallowest man on the planet.
Duck: Also, this is happening in front of the Witch of the Wastes who is flirting heavily.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: The Witch of the Wastes is like, come back anytime to this young, restored prince.
Dia: Who she cursed be a scarecrow. So you've got to respect her for trying her luck.
Duck: I respect the gumption.
Dia: Like it's implied that he turned her down or something like that's why she cursed him so this guy turned you down when you were like a hot glamoured magical super woman…
Duck: Right! You had a Cruella de Vil thing going.
Dia: Who cursed him to be a scarecrow. But you're going to try your luck again now
Duck: You have to respect the gumption.
Dia: You have to respect the gumption.
Duck: And that's Howl’s Moving Castle.
Dia: That is, that is the sequence of events depicted by the film.
Duck: Hey Dia, what's poststructuralism?
Dia: Oh my god. Okay. So it's been a long time since I studied this. But poststructuralism is as it kind of sounds, what comes after structuralism. So structuralism is this theory, it's very associated with kind of Russian literature and contemporary ideas on governance, but I'm gonna just rattle through that simplest version of structuralism, is that we know things by their connection to other things. So any word I say, you don't really know the word right? You know the thing it represents. And this is for across language. So if I say, pot in English, you can picture what a pot is, you know what that means? If I say a word that you know in German, if I say Pferd, and you know that that's German for horse, that has meaning to you. This is the linguistic side of it, which is the side of it I come from, in literary terms and anthropological terms this has expanded to okay, this doesn't, isn't just true for words. It's true for ideas, we know things by their connections to other things. So everything in the world you know, through your relationship to that thing. And it's relationships to other things. This is me trying to do the simplest possible explanation of structuralism. In literary terms, Quite often what that means is okay, all works are interconnected because no one work would make sense in complete isolation. If I were to explain to a space alien the plot of Batman, I couldn't just open with, okay, there's a guy and he fights crime.
Duck: No, you would at least have to talk about. Okay, so law and cops and New York.
Dia: And more than that if I wanted them to really get it, I would have to say, okay, so this is Superman. It's the first real comic book.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: This is sort of the opposite of that. I probably also have to explain like America and Judaism, and like, vigilantism. There are a lot of--
Duck: Probably bats.
Dia: Yeah, Also, bats.
Duck: Although to be fair, the bats hardly feature in Batman.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Very little bat.
Dia: But like, all of these things are things I would have to explain. And that's true of any work, right? So if I were going to explain to a space alien, Little Red Riding Hood, I would have to go, I couldn't just open with the story. I'd have to go okay. Woods, wolves, feminism, fairytale..
Duck: Rumplestiltskin.
Dia: There's a lot I've got to run through. So any text you think of exists, not just as a solo unit, but through its connection to other things.
Duck: Sure.
Dia: So that's the sort of generic general vibe of structuralism and that can be in macro terms where it's okay, so Howl’s Moving Castle? We can understand that as a unit in itself. But also, you need to know what a Ghibli film is you need to know about the book, you need to know what a fairytale is, you need to know what an allegory is, you need to know what character archetypes are present in this film, you have to know all of these interconnected elements and those are all present in other texts. You can also look at it on more of a micro level. So you might say, Okay, what concepts does this film look at? Maybe extremes might be age and youth. Those are paired concepts, they make sense as a pair, we think of them in terms of the antithesis of each other. If I asked you what is age, you struggle to define it without invoking the idea of youth. And this film has a lot of pairs, age and youth, beauty and ugliness, War and Peace, all of these kinds of twin concepts. So those are the two variations on the concept of structuralism that you're likely to see in literary theory, that's by no means an explanation of all of structuralism.
Duck: This has been a three minute summary of a wide literary field.
Dia: Yeah, like structuralism is used in linguistics and anthropology, in politics, in, I've seen in archaeological-- it covers a lot. So by all means, if you're, you have any interest in this at all, go read about structuralism. It's really interesting. It's a great lens for looking at the world. But we’re talking about poststructuralism. What poststructuralism is, is, at a certain point in the careers of many structuralists, many notable structuralists, people who founded structuralism, they got to a point where they look back on it and went, Okay, but that's not enough. Really famous examples of this are people like Roland Barthes, who were really influential structuralist writers. And in later years went, actually looking at things in isolation, looking at things in more complex terms than structuralism. A lot of this doesn't actually work in the structuralist setting.
Duck: So collectively remembering that the real world was there and could be observed.
Dia: Yes. So Roland Barthes famously, is the person who gave us Death of the Author, which is in and of itself, a very poststructuralist understanding of a text, which is the text exists. When you read the text, that meaning is as true as anyone else's reading of the text, including the author. That's a very post structural reading, because it implies that this is not actually intrinsically connected to other things. It's connected to you, the reader.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: And the really simple version of post structuralism is: Okay. If I send you out into the field where we keep goats, and you see a sheep, and you come back and tell me this, you're going to have more to say about the presence of sheep, then it wasn't a goat.
Duck: Right, there are going to be specific descriptions I can give. Besides its non goat-ness.
Dia: Even without having any knowledge of sheep and how they do or don't relate to goats, you can make assertions that are not related to the existence or nonexistence of another thing.
Duck: I will report back on this not-goat in a different way to how I would report back on the not-goat of a tiger.
Dia: This is stuff that is accounted for within structuralism. Structuralism isn't inherently just about pairs, because that would make for very poor politics and anthropology and linguistics. But this is the easiest way to approach post structuralism which is okay, in what ways is structural theory simplistic, incomplete? What do we lose when we look at a text with a structural lens? And that's kind of where post structuralism comes in. That's not 100% accurate. That's not 100% explanatory, but I feel like that's enough of a grounding to kind of make sense. And if you're the kind of contrary person that goes, structuralism sounds stupid, please go read about poststructuralism, it's really interesting, you can learn a lot, you will learn all of the things I got wrong in this explanation.
Duck: So part of the reason I asked you to do the explanation is that I did that and I came away going, I don't, I don't know what they want me to think, or-- not in terms of a dominant opinion that we'd have. I don't know how they want me to think and had to have a chat with you about what so what do I do with this set of theories? Because I am the sort of person who looks at structuralism and goes, Well, that seems wrong. So poststructuralism, in some ways looks a little bit like, what if we had some common sense again?
Dia: Yeah, to me, as someone who came from a linguistics and language background, structuralism makes a lot of sense to me from a kind of social anthropologist, linguistic standpoint, right? You have sign and you have the thing, you have the Platonic form, you have the thing.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Whereas poststructuralism makes a lot more sense for me from a cultural literary point, which is, okay, but we're a species that has developed beyond that, we have a more complicated nature with the written word, a more complicated relationship with the written word, then sign and meaning. And that is also true of the written word, as it refers to anime.
Duck: So in the post structuralism in the context of talking about House Moving Castle on a podcast…
Dia: Yeah, we picked an easy one to start with.
Duck: Hmm, because in terms of things that are signified, you know, things that are gestured at, things that are referenced and things that are in opposing pairs. And given value according to relationship. Howl’s Moving Castle has got a fair amount of all that. So much so that it's hard to sort of stop drawing parallels, you know, you have old and young, in so many places. So you have Sophie herself, who is young, but is then cursed to be old, sort of over and over again, through the film. depending on what's going on with her emotionally, she becomes more youthful. And it's implied that when they have their big true love moment at the end, although her hair is still silver, she is now young again. But you also have Sophie, even when she's looking old, she is young. And that makes her a contrast to the witch of the waste. But the Witch of the West is also a contrast to young Howl it's and then, and the witch of the waste is also an opposite to Madame Suliman. So they're both the old powerful wizards but in very different ways. This is actually even stronger when you start bringing in some book lore. Because,
Dia: Yeah,
Duck: Another thing that the film really doesn't cover is that Sophie is also powerfully magic.
Dia: Yeah, doesn't come up, at any point in the film.
Duck: Doesn't come in the film at all. But this makes her even stronger.
Dia: If you assume that-- I’d say this, I think I'm in the minority that I read the book before the film,
Duck: Probably.
Dia: Before I watched the film. It makes a lot more sense if you go in with this advanced knowledge. But it's also the kind of film that doesn't encourage you to care that it doesn't make sense.
Duck: No, no, it doesn't. It's, it is a film that has taken the bold step of not making sense of itself. Which to be fair is a thing Studio Ghibli does.
Dia: Yeah studio ghibli produces movies that are truly children's movies in the sense that they make sense, the way that games you play with other children make sense?
Duck: Yeah, they make sense in the way that every scene kind of seems to follow from the previous scene. But if you go back three steps, doesn't necessarily flow.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: It's very dreamlike in that way. It's dream logic.
Dia: And in a way fairytale logic.
Duck: Definitely, yeah. And fundamentally, one of the stories in house Moving Castle is little girl runs away into the world and meets a man, which is the story of about half of all fairy tales.
Dia: And the other half a little girl doesn't go anywhere and still meets a man
Duck: Right? There is a very--
Dia: Meeting men is both the primary occupation and the leading cause of death of all women across history.
Duck: Yeah, yeah. There's probably a study to be done on that. But the ways in which this, this kind of film doesn't really make sense, we do kind of have to go beyond its internal structure to understand not so much what it's saying in terms of message but just what happens in it.
Dia: The message is much more clear than the plot.
Duck: Yes, I can tell you that this film is opposed to war, far more clearly than I can tell you what happened in the last 15 minutes.
Dia: I mean, as evidenced by the fact that you spent the last three weeks preparing a poststructuralist reading of this film and did not know about the prince until I mentioned it.
Duck: Right, this film is very beautiful and very powerful and not beholden to petty concerns, like exposition.
Dia: Is there any exposition at any point in this movie?
Duck: I don't think there is. It's a bold, because it's, it was a bold narrative move
Dia: They are talking about things. But I wouldn't say they are explaining them.
Duck: No, no. And there are significant parts that are done purely visually.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: All of the stuff with Howl being a bird monster and getting turned back.
Dia: Yeah, we don't know what the bird monster is called. If there's a word for that, because no one mentions it.
Duck: We know that it's the form he turns into when he's going to fight. We don't know if that's inherent to magic, or is just because he's fighting airships. And that itself as well, we know there's a war happening, because we are told so but all of the shots we see of the war are 20th century war. There may be a front somewhere, but what we see is flying machines and bombs.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: This is something that looks like war to us.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: I think in a way, the war that-- despite this being 2004 and the Iraq war happening, and the Cold War and the Vietnam War, having occupied so much of people's imaginations, I think it is still what definitely many Europeans picture when you hear war, the war.
Dia: It’s the war,
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: I know it's two wars, but it is one war, because it's the war.
Duck: It's the war. And when you think of it, you think of, you think of the Blitz, you think of bombing you think of…
Dia: In a way that is extremely structuralist that calling it the the war, defines it beyond its nature as a war.
Duck: It makes it the Platonic war.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: That all war is a reference to.
Dia: Yeah. And also, that is kind of--
Duck: Which was literally true during the Cold War. You've got these little satellite conflicts that are all references to the big war that we're not having.
Dia: Exactly. And I think that does make it very interesting from a sort of intercultural perspective, because this is a Japanese movie that is set in generic Europe, Germany, France, Wales.
Duck: Yes. Yes, it's very nonspecific, but everyone is wearing European fashions everywhere. There's a lot of blonde people around.
Dia: Visually it is of the last couple of centuries of Europe ish.
Duck: Yeah, the palace has got onion domes. The palace is very Russian.
Dia: I personally love when anime does this, because I think it's very fun. I mean, to see the way that, let's be honest, a lot of Western media does treat Asia done back to us.
Duck: Absolutely .
Dia: And I don't mean-- I actually, genuinely like it. It's like when anime does gratuitous Christian symbolism and the creators just go, yeah, I think it looks cool.
Duck: I support that.
Dia: I can't-- I think it was really famously, I think it's Evangelion has like a hero being crucified at one point. And the creator was interviewed and was like, yeah, I thought it looked rad. I saw it in some Christian stuff. And went I'm having that. And I’m like Yes. The cultural translation I want to see.
Duck: So there's another opposing pair of Orientalism versus occidentalism. One of those is colonialism. And the other one kind of basically isn't.
Dia: I heard this anecdotally but I believe Ghibli animators were sent to Diana Wynne Jones to ask where it was set and she kind of just pointed at some nice rolling British countryside.
Duck: Excuse me, where's your book set: Just look out the window?
Dia: Because it's not set anywhere. It's set in magic land. So this is my scenery. We have that I guess. Is that what you're looking for, some scenery?
Duck: Yeah,
Dia: The architecture of the town is very Alsace. I think it's very French-German border, which makes sense as where it was getting beaten up in, well, war in Europe, in general.
Duck: And the architecture of the palace, which is very European with consciously Middle Eastern influences, like it's this, this onion domes on the palace, but it's in a very, very Kremlin way in the we have built this palace more or less to French design and put some onion domes on it.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: It's that kind of hybrid look, which is very European.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Because we have always been looking at the Mediterranean to see what the cool people were doing. We claim not to do this, but this is our history.
Dia: It's the architectural equivalent of a continental breakfast. Like, There's a lot happening. It's from a lot of different places, we're going to call it Continental.
Duck: Right? A continent was involved with it.
Dia: It’s Continental,
Duck: Which continent? don't worry about it.
Dia: It's got all the stuff you like, don't don't ask more questions.
Duck: It's got croissants.
Dia: It's got croissants and sausages, what more can you want?
Duck: And fundamentally, the film Howl’s Moving Castle, you can imagine them eating croissants and sausages far more readily than bowls of rice.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: This is somewhat beside the point, I did have one thing I kind of really wanted to dig into, from a, do an actual analysis point of view, rather than just a let's talk thing. It's easier for me, I'm bad at this.
Dia: There is an analysis we're getting to, yes.
Duck: Right. And the actual analysis the like the one thing that I was like, this is potentially interesting and meaty so one of the things that is known about Diana Wynne Jones, and I'm already going beyond structuralist bounds because I'm talking about the author, as a person who existed in the real world in a specific time and place,
Dia: That’s permissible.
Duck: Diana Wynne Jones studied at Oxford.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: And due to the particular age difference between them, Diana Wynne Jones studied at Oxford at a time when both JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis were teaching at Oxford.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: And attended lectures that they taught. In Tolkien's case at least, very begrudgingly taught, like he wants to write his book.
Dia: Against his wishes,
Duck: Against his wishes Tolkien gave lectures to Diana Wynn Jones, yes.
Dia: Despite his every attempt to avert it,
Duck: Right. JRR Tolkien famously, is the author of The Lord of the Rings, which
Dia: Really?
Duck: I have heard the Lord of the Rings described as being like Mount Fuji. Either Mount Fuji is in the picture, or you're standing on Mount Fuji.
Dia: Yeah. This is very much the case, I believe with Lord of the Rings and fantasy literature. Post Lord of the Rings.
Duck: Yes, certainly Western fantasy literature.
Dia: As opposed to fantasy literature pre Lord of the Rings, which is under Mount Fuji.
Duck: JRR Tolkien did not actually invent Western fantasy literature. The roots go back further. But he, this is where the seed breaks ground, and everything after it is either shaped by the Lord of the Rings or consciously in reaction to the Lord of the Rings.
Dia: Yeah, like even after a certain point, you do not have to know of Lord of the Rings, you probably do because it's hard not to be you don't have to know any details of Lord of the Rings, to be familiar with everything that Lord of the Rings brought into fantasy.
Duck: Absolutely. You can write generic extruded fantasy product that is just the Lord of the Rings watered down without ever touching the original.
Dia: Because it's in everything you are standing on Mount Fuji, whether you know it or not.
Duck: And Diana Wynne Jones having been lectured by JRR Tolkien, surely read these books that came out in 1954 and 1955, which is about--
Dia: It would be so funny if she hadn't.
Duck: I don't think we live in a universe where Diana Wynne Jones did not read the Lord of the Rings, but I don't like have personal knowledge of this. I don't want to assert it.
Dia: I just think it would be incredible if she hadn't. If she just waltzed up to Tolkien like I have read none of your books. I'm here to be--
Duck: And I'm not going to. Howl’s Moving Castle. The book is written or published about 30 years after Lord of the Rings is published. And then the film comes out 20 years after that.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: I specifically want to draw, draw an opposing pair between Eowyn and Sophie.
Dia: Structuralism!
Duck: Structuralism! Because this is structuralism.
Dia: Tell me about the sign.
Duck: So Eowyn is one of a handful of female characters in Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings is a book of many characters, has a long cast list, about six of them are female.
Dia: The joke with Tolkien versus Lewis is Lewis had many detailed and actualized and, whilst not necessarily positive, definitely diverse portrayals of women in his books, some of which are great, some of which are poorly aged. Tolkien had about three but all of them had swords.
Duck: Isn't there's another like little sidenote structure there to draw? Because one of the things that I think Eowyn is is a reaction to Lewis.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Because JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis were friends and had a little writing criticism group.
Dia: Yes, Lewis’ most famous review of Tolkien's work is it was once brought to his writing group, and he had barely gotten a page in before Lewis said “Not another bloody elf”.
Duck: Right. Famously, their friendship was almost destroyed over Lewis putting Father Christmas into Narnia.
Dia: Because Tolkien hated it so much. Indeed, Narnia was born in no small part of Tolkien's assertion that there would never be a good fantasy novel with such modern technology as a lamppost in it.
Duck: Right, Lewis went, that sounds like a dare to me.
Dia: Yes, crucially, they both wrote one another into their books. Lewis wrote Tolkien into Narnia as this sort of grandfatherly, knowledgeable, caring Professor figure who has taken in these evacuated children and sheltered them. And at the end of the book reveals that he knows all kinds of interesting things about magic. And, Tolkien wrote Lewis into his books as a grumpy tree.
Duck: Honestly, the great, I would take it.
Dia: Yeah, I want to be a grumpy tree. Why am I not in any of your books as a grumpy tree?
Duck: Fine. I'll make a grumpy tree. The point is that Western fantasy literature, as with many artistic movements, was created by just a group of friends in the same place at the same time who were doing art together to establish relation to each other all the time. Yeah. So Lewis and Tolkien are actively comparing their work as they're writing. And Lewis in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe has Father Christmas turn up and give presents to the children and he gives the boys swords. And he gives Lucy, the youngest girl, a healing potion and Lucy says, paraphrasing here, I want a sword! Why can't I have a sword? And Father Christmas says, quoting here, “Wars are ugly when women fight.” And then Tolkien goes and writes Eowyn.
Dia: Which is interesting because Lucy is like nine, there are very valid reasons for her not to have a sword.
Duck: But also a valid reason for her to want to sword.
Dia: Yeah, it is the experience of being a nine year old girl is wanting a sword, a little sword.
Duck: And noone will let you have a sword because it's not feminine. And you're like I don't care about feminine. I'm nine. I want a sword.
Dia: To be fair she does get a knife. But it's not as good as a sword, everyone else gets a sword. Sword. And by everyone else, I mean one person but that's what your older brother feels like when you are nine, is everyone else is getting a sword.
Duck: Peter got a sword, I want a sword. Eowyn gets a sword. Eowyn gets herself a sword.
Dia: Yeah, Eowyn does not ask Father Christmas for a sword.
Duck: Eowyn has this speech about getting a sword. It was because-- the speech about rejecting the whole concept of hearth and home. I’m going to quote again quoting a slightly longer quote. So Eowyn says when Aragon tells her to stay home and lead the people in there in the absence of the soldiers. Eowyn says, “I am weary of skulking in the hills, and wish to face peril and battle. All your words are but to say, you are a woman and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the house of Eorl and not a serving woman. I can ride and wield a blade, and I do not fear either pain or death. I fear a cage, to stay behind bars until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone.” Eowyn says, fuck keeping house. Everything important is done not here. Everyone important is not here. I'm going to go with them. And I'm going to get honor and glory, because that's what matters. And she gets it.
Dia: And this thing in the context of Tolkien's works are very anti war, he does not agree with Eowyn in most of the book but Eowyn gets to believe this.
Duck: Eowyn gets to believe this. And then Eowyn gets to do it and to slay the Lord of the Nazgul. And I think there's a common misreading of this. I think people tend to read this as Eowyn exists to solve the riddle of no living man may hinder me. I think that's absolutely perfectly backwards.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: That line exists to give Eowyn her moment. Eowyn isn’t a plot contrivance? The prophecy is the plot contrivance.
Dia: People get very waylaid by the fact that Tolkien infamously did not like the prophecy twist in Macbeth. And thought it would be a woman. Like, I think that is broadly true. He didn't like the prophecy in Macbeth at all, which is, no man of woman born will slay this man.
Duck: To which the solution is lol, cesarean section.
Dia: Cesarean section, not technically of woman born. And there are, there are similar prophecy contrivances in Macbeth. And Tolkien did not like them. And this isn't not a reference to them. But I do think as a very accomplished writer... It's weird to assume he would have an entire character exist just because of that bugbear. With one, very influential, but still just one element of one Shakespeare play.
Duck: And it's also notable that that line from the Lord of the Nazgul doesn't come up until he's facing Eowyn. This is not some established fact about that character. And we've got to somehow get him off screen. So we've got this woman to come and solve the problem. That prophecy exists to give Eowyn her moment.
Dia: So this is me, this is me, just jumping in on the note prophecy. This is very, very common in the school of literature which Tolkien taught, which was medieval literature, it is not at all unusual for prophecies to come out of nowhere and be immediately solved for no reason other than to make the actions of the hero more important,
Duck: Right.
Dia: And by that reading, in a very structuralist way, Eowyn is here and this entire battlefield is here to prop up Eowyn.
Duck: Absolutely. And that's the thing, because what is often elided is that, so Tolkien-- we talk about the translation conceit, where Tolkien, sort of pretended, he was translating out of the languages of Middle Earth into English, we talk a lot less about what his actual project was, because he was very open actually, and saying what he was trying to do with the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings, and to a lesser extent the Hobbit because he wrote that first and it's a children's book, but with this whole set of stories was to create English, Norse legends. So you have to create an English ancient mythological framework that gives you legendary heroes that you can look up to or emulate or refer to or poetically reference.
Dia: That's a very great tradition in English and I do mean English physically, not English language, literary history of trying to create the English epic.
Duck: Yes, that's what the Lord of the Rings is meant to be. It's why the Shire is just an English Shire and why it's called the Shire. Yeah, it's why you know, he's written us alternative explanations for all the Roman ruins is to get our well these are Numenorian ruins
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: But it's the same ruins. Eowyn is that, is the, is, Eowyn is not a character, Eowyn is a legendary figure. Everything we see, we see Eowyn in like five scenes. And they are the highlights of a heroic tale.
Dia: Yeah, and we don't need the rest. We know the rest.
Duck: Right, or at least the rest doesn't matter. Because the rest is particulars and individualities. And what matters is here is the legend of the shieldmaid.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Sophie can be interpreted 30 years down the line as a reaction to Eowyn. So you can say well, Sophie's whole-- Eowyn says, fuck keeping house, I'm going to do important things. And Sophie says, I'm your new cleaning lady.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And makes her whole place in the narrative in the life of the wizard who is doing the supposed, or, avoiding doing the important things, through keeping house, through caregiving. And she's doing that all along from your-- she arrives in the house and the first thing she does is, I should cook the breakfast for this small child. And some of the last thing she does is she is feeding the Witch of the Waste porridge. Because someone needs to feed the old lady.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: So you could just say oh, this is what Sophie is, say Sophie is an anti Eowyn. Except that that kind of still falls down.
Dia: And this is where the “post-” comes in.
Duck: Where the post structuralism comes in. Because Eowyn exists as just a beads on a string highlights of the heroic shieldmaiden and Sophie is more of a character than that. Sophie exists as a personality. You cannot swap someone else into Sophie's narrative and say all the rest is just details.
Dia: She has a very unique character in that like when she has turned into an old lady she goes oh, well, I guess my bad fashion sense suits me better now.
Duck: It's just like well now my clothes suit me, into role playing the old lady. It's hard being old because my knees creak. Yeah, like it's true. But also her reaction to it is to make a joke about how hard it is being old.
Dia: She has a very, not necessarily laissez-faire, just accepting approach to everything in her life.
Duck: She has about the same reaction to being cursed to be old as she does to have. having a wizard having a breakdown covered in green goo as she does to nearly dying in a magic battle. Dia: Like all of these things are just the next thing I have to deal with.
Duck: And she has an individual personality and tastes. She doesn't like turnips. But she makes an exception for turnip head because he's nice. Eventually. Initially she doubts him because she does not like to eat turnips. She is more concerned about this than the bit where he is an animate scarecrow.
Dia: He's very cute, in the book he is described as quite nightmarish. I think there's an excellent bit where he's trying to get into the house and Howl is stopping him and kinda goes, No, you're scaring Sophie. And also me. Whereas like, it's hard to imagine anyone being scared of movie turnip head.
Duck: It is hard, like maybe in the dark.
Dia: He’s a good bean,
Duck: Yeah then you would go, no it's my friend turnip.
Dia: Yeah, like startled. Yes. Scared, no.
Duck: No. But you can't just read Sophie as a narrative structure. The book doesn't exist to make her a legend. She also does not exist to make the book go. So even though there is, I think that echo is sort of buried, you have to kind of dig for it.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: You have, you do not require absence of Eowyn to create a Sophie.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: You can just watch this film and go, that's my friend. Sophie. She's cool.
Dia: Yeah, I don't know how well known Lord of the Rings is amongst Japanese under-tens. That's fair. I have not checked, I have not done any surveys.
Duck: Probably less so than under English under-tens. They tend to know a lot about it.
Dia: Yeah, there's a utilitarian element where it's okay, this has to make sense to its target audience. And Ghibli films are very interesting in that their target audiences are very niche and very scattered. So like, generally speaking, it's kids the same age as the female protagonist. In the ones that have one, sometimes the guys are a little bit older, that kind of thing. And it's very, very targeted to them without much interested in interesting adults. So you can say on a utilitarian level? Well, we're assuming viewers don't know this. But at the same time--
Duck: And thats fair.
Dia: And you're not very interested in making sense. So That cannot be the only reason that you change things.
Duck: And for another interesting, parallel. This film came out in 2004. The Fellowship of the Ring directed by Peter Jackson came out in 2001.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: So it's still following on in film terms from the same story, but it's very hard. And it is obviously working in the tradition that is defined in part by the Lord of the Rings. Because the Western fantasy novel, it's standing on Mt Fuji . But I think it is very hard to read it as just a reaction even though you've got even in that closest parallel there. It's not a rewrite, and it's not a subversion it’s doing something else. It's doing its own story.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Sophie is not a scaffold for a highlight reel.
Dia: I think you can start, I think I can't speak for all authors. But I think you can start writing something as pure reaction. I mean, it's not impossible that this is the case with Eowyn herself. It's not impossible that the first thought Tolkien had was, what if, instead of a C section, it was a woman, right? Before we ever have Eowyn as a character, but at some point, if you are not even good, if you are invested in writing, at some point, it becomes more than a reaction.
Duck: Yes, you can't have a one joke character.
Dia: Not for more than one paragraph.
Duck: Yeah, this is what I mean, you can have a joke. But the point where they become they transition from plot device or joke delivery device, to a character, they have to be something more than that, because a character is a sort of a level of representation of a possible person that allows you to elaborate on what that person is like for yourself.
Dia: Yeah, and I think, I think you're right, this is where from a structuralist versus post structuralist standpoint, this is where this is a really interesting film. Because it's a film that is incredibly saturated with references to the point of being disinterested in its own story.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: If you want to actually have a straightforward explanation of the plot of Howl’s Moving Castle, the film, you have to bring it with you. It's not in the text.
Duck: And yet. I have never heard anyone say this film feels incomplete. I've heard criticisms of this film. It was not actually one of the most popular Ghibli movies when it came out. I've never heard anyone say that they felt like they needed to read the book or know Lord of the Rings or be infinitely familiar with fairy tales to understand this movie, because it's not interested in its own inherent structuralism.
Dia: Right. Right. It has all this bits of structure that doesn't ever quite cohere because it isn't interested in making them cohere The points it has to make are not points about a structure of concepts. They're much blunter than that. They're not. They're, war bad. Draft dodging good. But also be friends with your friends. Try to be friends with your friends, friends. Don't throw old ladies out on the street. There's some pretty basic moral principles here. It's good to care about stuff.
Duck: Yeah,
Dia: I would say that's one of the big points that the film is making. It's a part of the way of-- that is--
Duck: To care about the stuff more than it cares about making the stuff make sense.
Dia: It's a film that has emotion and meaning before it has logic or comprehension. And that is really interesting as a post structural thesis, which is, okay, it's not that I think there's a tendency within academia to approach structuralism as this very sort of mean, brutalist economy of thought, right? There's this sense that, oh, well, it's, it takes all of the beauty and meaning out of things, if you think that they are purely mechanisms of understanding, and I don't think that's true. Like it feels to me like discussion of brutalist architecture, where it's like, well, it only looks ugly, if you don't like it.
Duck: Right. And you can, you can, you can oppose it by simply having different tastes.
Dia: And it's also it's like, okay, so if you think of structuralism as a school of thought, in almost all disciplines, which is keyed to a linguistic understanding, I think a lot of people think of that as limiting. And to me, it's not because language is the nature by which we understand one another in many ways.
Duck: Absolutely, it is.
Dia: And that's not unemotive just because linguistics is scientific, doesn't mean it's rational beyond the point of emotion or understanding or belief. However, this is what the world would be like, if you took all of the structuralism out of it.
Duck: Yes, I think to put it sort of in very stark terms. What struck me when I was sort of reading up on what structuralism was in order to understand what post structuralism was, is that structuralism seems to me to live in a universe where the basic modes of thought, and the basic modes of knowledge are to read and to speak.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And I think Howl’s Moving Castle lives in what is to me a much more familiar mode, where the basic mode of knowledge is to act. And observe. This is a film that does stuff and sees what happens.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And has not drawn it together into a theorem.
Dia: Yeah, I see where you're coming from. Yeah.
Duck: So yeah, that's my thesis is that Howl’s Moving Castle isn't interested in making sense and isn't interested in resolving the many contrasts and poles that it sets up because it is much more interested in going somewhere and seeing what happens when it does stuff?
Dia: I think that is correct, because it's, again, as a fan of the book, the books that inspired the book, the things that inspired the books that inspired the book,
Duck: Broadly speaking, a fan of modern Western fantasy literature.
Dia: And also a fan of Tolkien's academic work.
Duck: Surprisingly broad overlap of people.
Dia: Yeah, like, you know, from that background, this is, again, I didn't watch the film until I was in my 20s and was relatively, I was doing a master's degree in comparative literature, having done an undergraduate degree in Old Norse literature,
Duck: You made choices.
Dia: I did. watching this for the first time, it is saturated with structure, it is absolutely filled to the brim with connectivity with other ideas. Yes. And it is outright refusing to reach out its hand and connect to them.
Duck: Right. It's got, it's got all of these members set up that it's just not looking in them.
Dia: Like when you first mentioned Sophie as Eowyn, my first full, genuine immediate thought was no she's not she's Jill, because the character that Sophie feels to me like an instinct connection to is Jill Poole in the latest Narnia book that no one likes as much even though they're my favorites.
Duck: Everyone is wrong because the Silver Chair is great and Jill is .
Dia: The Horse and his Boy is my favorite Narnia novel and I'm so alone.
Duck: Ah, The Horse and his Boy!
Dia: But that's the character she feels the most like to me, which is this very business-like sort of girl we all kind of knew at school, you know, the girl that was a little bit overachieving and mildly irritating but so nice that you felt bad for being annoyed by her.
Duck: I think I think you're right in that. Specifically, I think that Jill Poole absolutely would yell at you while you had your dramatic breakdown about how she'd never once in her life been beautiful.
Dia: I mean, that is every single reaction he has to all of the men in her life.
Duck: And she's right. And she should say it.
Dia: Like, every single time she ends up in Narnia, she kind of goes, Okay, what do I have to clean up? What have you been doing?
Dia: Yes. What have you done to make this happen to me?
Duck: To be fair, you did.
Dia: Love her. She's one of my favorite characters in anything ever. But like my immediate reaction when you said, Oh, Sophie and Eowyn, was, no Sophie and Lucy and Sophie and Jill. And actually also Sophie and other Ghibli protagonists, who are much more beautiful in interesting ways, because most of the protagonists are very quiet and beautiful and solemn, except for the ones who are absolute space aliens. And like immediately, I think it's almost impossible to watch without noticing how much it's not interested in relating to any of those other things.
Duck: There is an awful lot that goes into the compost that grows Howl’s Moving Castle, but it's all down there in the compost.
Dia: Yeah, like, and it's interesting from the book going, like, I think if you-- if you're a fan of Diana Wynne Jones, one of the things you see a lot is people going oh, lol the movie made X scene so romantic and whimsical. And in the book, it's just silly. And it's like yeah, that's kind of the point, all these people who do not see shared silliness as romantic. Like, I like the walking in the sky seen as the archetypal one because if you read the book, it is very much like it was very scary. We were very high up and there was so much wind I had to shout everything. And in the film, it is whimsical and beautiful and the Merry Go Round of Life plays and it's like I don't think that isn't a version of what happens in the book. I don't think it's a-- I don't think anyone in the making of the filament What if this about whimsy? They just did whimsy. Yes. It really strongly resists being even an adaptation.
Duck: Right, an adaptation is by nature not the same as its source text. But also I think in that scene, I think movie Sophie is still having a terrible time being very high up. Howl is having a lovely whimsical moment.
Dia: I’ve seen people say like the, the film The book is from Sophie's perspective, almost the entire actually the entire way through, but with varying degrees of empathy. Like, oh, my first read age 12, I did not realize that when she goes into Howl’s backstory she is in Wales in the 1980s because I was 12 and did not know enough about well, Wales in the 1980s to recognize it through the eyes of a fantasy character.
Duck: You see, it looked like a Doctor Who episode?
Dia: Yeah, it just, you know, I was like, I reread it sometime later, because, you know, I loved it and read it again and went, Oh, these are computers. He plays rugby. We're in Wales, okay. In the 80s. Okay, I thought this was just a different fantasy land. It's just Wales.
Duck: Extremely valid, especially for a 12 year old.
Dia: Yeah, like I- I've been to Wales many times, just not in the 80s. You know?
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: I didn't know much about PhD students or rugby.
Duck: I continue to not know about these things.
Dia: Everything I know about rugby, I know against my will. Like, it's very solidly from Sophie's perspective, even when it's showing us things that are more familiar to the audience than Sophie. The movie. While it is from Sophie's perspective. It feels like it's from Howl’sperspective, emotionally, like,
Duck: Yes, so one of the things I noticed is that Howl in his art style is the least characterful of the characters. So Sophie has a particular face. Markl is a baby but he has a particular face. Howl has a “I am the most beautiful” face. Howl, Howl's appearance is pure signification.
Dia: Like there's a reason that he has gender euphoria and goals to people of many, many genders.
Duck: Right, because all it is about Howl’s face is signifiers of, I am the most beautiful.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: No actual recognizability there. Just you know, he just has big blue eyes, slightly too big blue eyes, and flowy hair and a smile. And that's it. So Prince Charming.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: He's much more interesting when he turns into goo.
Dia: He is. I have to say though, end of the movie Howl with the short black hair. It's just not his look.
Duck: I liked I liked that it matches Sophie's hairstyle at the time.
Dia: I know but it's just there's a reason that everyone remembers beginning of the movie Howl, you know?
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: This is one of the many structural pairs within the film. Hair length. Short or long
Duck: Short or long. And what does it mean to have made your hair into a fire?
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: I think I've said everything that I can coherently say about Howl’s Moving Castle?
Dia: Sounds good. I think it's my turn to roll.
Duck: I think it is. I'm gonna pull up the list of things so we can find out what exactly what, what academic thing you’ll be presenting for us next time.
Dia: Okay, so my first, I’m rolling my first number. So my analysis is number 20. That is, Oh, God.
Duck: Abuser slash innocent paradigm, which we call-- we named it ourselves to mean the thing that's very popular on social media right now.
Dia: Yeah, it's who is the bad guy? There must be one.
Duck: There must be one.
Dia: And oh, we're doing an abuser innocent paradigm of number 53?
Duck: Number 53. Captain Marvel.
Dia: This is-- context, This is Captain Marvel, DC, who I actually know things about, and not Captain Marvel, Marvel, who I know nothing of. And also a second-- a sequel film just came out. So we're actually being topical. Yeah, go us.
Duck: You'll have to tell me what all I'm consuming because I assume I'm not reading like 50 years worth of comic books.
Dia: I will say the movie and I might ask you to read a couple of comics for context.
Duck: I can do a couple of comics.
Dia: Okay, one problem. This feels a bit too easy. As in to answer the question, who is the good guy? And the villain of this film waterboards a child?
Duck: That does seem like fairly obviously someone who's being abusive and someone who's innocent in the situation, doesn't it?
Dia: There's not much okay, there's. Do you know what I'm gonna go with it? I'm gonna go with it. There is there's a lot of stuff about parents, which is sort of secondary, but we're just going to ignore the main villain. I'm going to pretend that what isn't-- we're just gonna roll up. We're gonna label him definitely bad. And have a look at the maybe bad corner. We're gonna go deeper. Yeah, we're gonna go to the next level with this. Okay, I'm genuinely so so excited. So, this time next whenever, I will be presenting a reading of Shazam slash Captain Marvel, in accordance with what we've been calling the abuser innocent paradigm.
Duck: I'm looking forward to that. And when you listen to that episode, it will all make sense.
Dia: I have faith in us.
Duck: This has been Analysis Roulette, and this has been a poststructural reading of Howl’s Moving Castle. A genuinely good film we've been talking about for the last two hours.
Dia: Thank you for your time and all your attention and we'll see you next time!
Duck: I fried my own brain.
Dia: But thank you for listening!