When she finally gains knowledge of her power and what she’s done, she desperately tries to ruin the suit. Eventually, this is what happens: Howl seems to possess an irresistible charm with that outfit. While she does it, she keeps complaining about the wizard’s bad habit of womanising all day long she believes he will conquer many hearts wearing the suit. When she goes living in Howl’s castle, she sews a suit for him. She sews different types of hats and she imagines the effect they will have when people wear them this trick will make the marriage between a common woman and a noble man possible. She begins using her powers at the beginning, when she’s alone in her hat shop. The funny thing is that she uses them without even being aware she possesses them. She’s quite relieved when she finds out he only started that gossip to make people scared of him.Īnother big change is constituted by Sophie’s magical powers: totally absent in the film, they play a fundamental role in the novel.
She even believes that the young wizard actually eats human hearts and looks for the rest of them in the castle. In the novel, things go quite differently: he’s always out for winning women’s favours, thing that Sophie doesn’t like from the start. However, we soon forgot about it as we watch the film, for Howl never courts anyone. In both versions, it is said that wizard Howl is dangerous, as he’s used to eating pretty girls’ hearts. He admits with no hesitation he is a coward. A change in his shape is never mentioned and, most of all, the novel-version of Howl would never do it: all he does is going out, courting different girls each time.
This leads us to the second difference: whereas in the film Howl goes out a lot to fight, disguised as a huge bird, in the book he never does such a thing. On the other hand, Miyazaki decided to focus the biggest part of his version on the war between the reign of Ingary and an unknown country. The author only put it in the background: we learn that the king wants Howl to find his brother because his skills would be useful in the upcoming war, but it is only a passing element. The first important difference that we can notice is the theme of war: one of the major topics of the film, it is almost absent in the book. Very important: if you don’t want any spoilers, stop reading!
In my next article I will focus on the other two novels. In this article I will focus on the major changes between film and novel and I will tell you what I liked about the story. Miyazaki based his work on the first book, but there are a lot of differences. So I discovered that, while the animated film is “only” one, the books are actually three: Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), Castle in the Air (1990) and House of Many Ways (2008). I’d been attracted to it since I learnt that Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (which I absolutely adore) is based on a novel. This summer, I decided to read a fantasy saga: the Moving Castle one, by Diana Wynne Jones. The drawing in the cover of the book was inspired by the film’s version of the castle, not the novel’s
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