Howl's Moving Castle (ハウルの動く城 Hauru no Ugoku Shiro) is an Academy Award-nominated Japanese anime, Romance/Fantasy film based on Diana Wynne Jones' novel of the same name and directed by Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli. Mamoru Hosoda, director of two seasons and one movie from the Digimon series, was originally selected to direct but abruptly left the project, leaving the then retired Miyazaki to take up the director's role. The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 5, 2004. Diana Wynne Jones did meet with representatives from Studio Ghibli but did not have any input or involvement in the production of the film. She's quoted as saying, "It's fantastic. No, I have no input—I write books, not films. Yes it will be different from the book—in fact it's likely to be very different, but that's as it should be. It will still be a fantastic film." Miyazaki travelled to England in summer 2004 to give Jones a private viewing of the finished movie.

The animated film was released to cinemas in Japan on November 20, 2004. The film has also been dubbed into English by Pixar's Peter Docter and is being distributed in North America by Walt Disney Pictures. The film began showing in select cinemas around the United States and Canada on June 10, 2005. It was released nationwide in Australia on September 22 and in the UK on September 23.

Eighteen-year-old Sophie Hatter works in a hat shop in the town of Ingary, and lacks self-confidence and direction; she feels plain, unattractive, and destined to live a mediocre life. One day while walking to meet her pretty younger sister Lettie at the bakery, Sophie has a chance encounter with the handsome but mysterious wizard Howl, who rescues her from some menacing soldiers. Howl charms her with his looks and dashing feats of magic, briefly sparking happiness in Sophie. But later that night, the vain and jealous Witch of the Waste appears in Sophie's hat shop in the form of a large, fat, richly dressed woman, along with several of her threatening minions. After hinting at some prior connection to Howl, she cruelly curses Sophie by aging her into a 90-year-old hag before disappearing.

Now on self-imposed exile, Sophie abandons her home and forces herself into the Wastes. Despite her recent bad experience with magic, she befriends a magical animated scarecrow she mistook for a walking stick, christening him "Turnip Head." Turnip Head, in gratitude for Sophie's friendship, secures her shelter from the cold Wasteland within none other than Howl’s moving castle — a mobile, chaotic ensemble of metal scraps but a feat of magical engineering nonetheless.

Inside the castle, Sophie makes a deal with Calcifer, a feisty, smart-talking fire demon who powers the castle's movement. Because of a magic contract that binds Calcifer and Howl together, Calcifer must work as Howl's servant, a position he has grown to resent. If Sophie can find a way to break the contract between them, Calcifer will lift the curse from Sophie and restore her to her real age. Unfortunately, a clause in the contract stipulates that neither Howl nor Calcifer can disclose the terms to a third party, so Sophie has to figure it out all on her own.

"Grandma" Sophie also meets Markl, Howl's eight-year-old boy apprentice, who initially resents Sophie's lack of magical know-how, but soon grows to love her as a motherly figure. Upon meeting Howl again, Sophie — ashamed of now appearing to Howl in the body of an ugly old woman — claims to be a cleaning lady hired by Calcifer to maintain the castle. Her fib works, and Howl immediately buys into it and starts her working as the castle maid.

Sophie discovers that the front door of the castle is magically connected to several buildings in different parts of the country, where Howl maintains a different identity at each one: In the seaside town of Porthaven, he as known as the Wizard Jenkins, while in the royal capital of Kingsbury he is known as the Wizard Pendragon. She also learns that, despite his cavalier and pompous attitude, Howl has many admirable traits, such as undercharging customers who haven't the means to pay for magic spells, and his having rescued Markl from poverty when Markl's parents died. But by and large, Howl - despite being a grown man - acts selfish, childish and immature in many ways. He is fastidiously vain about his looks, insensitive to Sophie's feelings, and often throws temper tantrums over trivial things.

Among other things, Howl reveals to Sophie how he knows the Witch of the Waste: she once appeared to him young and beautiful and he pursued her as a lover, but when she revealed her true ugliness, he coldly rejected her; thus, the Witch constantly searches for Howl with the fury of a jilted lover.

Eventually, Howl receives summons from both Porthaven and Kingsbury to help each side fight a war against the other, the war being fought because one of the two kingdoms' Crown Prince Justin went missing, and each side blames the other. A die-hard pacifist who hates violence and bloodshed, Howl is afraid to respond, believing also that the summons from Kingsbury is a trap set by Madame Suliman, the king's head sorceress and his old mentor. This is, in fact, why he created his moving castle — as a means keeping on the run to avoid being drafted as a War Magician.

Howl convinces Sophie to go to Kingsbury and pose as his mother, in order to convince Madame Suliman to leave him alone. Howl gives her a magic ring for protection and follows behind in disguise. En route to the royal castle to meet with Suliman, Sophie runs into the Witch of the Waste, who proudly boasts that Suliman sent her a royal invitation, presumably to become a War Magician in the fight also. However, upon entering the castle, the Witch of the Waste is captured by Suliman's stronger magic, and is then stripped of all her own powers and shrunken into a helpless old lady. Sophie witnesses this and Suliman discloses that the real reason she summoned Howl and the Witch to her castle was because she can no longer afford to have "rogue magicians" roaming the countryside, using their powers for their own interests. Suliman demands that Howl submit to her and become a War Magician, or else she will strip him of his powers just like she did the Witch. Sophie angrily defies Suliman, defending Howl's true noble character, and Howl then drops his disguise and appears beside her. Just when Suliman has cornered both of them, Howl used his magic to help Sophie escape on a flying machine — along with Suliman's asthmatic errand dog, Heen, and the now-helpless Witch of the Waste in tow — while he keeps the palace guards distracted with an illusion.

As the war continues, Madame Suliman attempts to track Howl down and Howl begins fearing for the safety of Sophie and the others. After setting things up for them in case of his absence, he takes Sophie to a cottage in a flowery alpine field, where he used to stay as a child. Unknown to Sophie, the self-confidence she has gained since being cursed, along with her developing affection towards Howl, has caused her curse to begin reversing itself, returning herself little by little to her original age (although her hair has irreversibly turned silver in color). However, the effects of Howl's own contract with Calcifer begin to take their toll: Each time he transforms into a large birdlike monster to defend himself and his loved ones from danger, he becomes increasingly unable to revert back to his human form. Howl struggles to keep this fact hidden from those he cares about.

Howl presents Sophie with a gift as a token of his affection toward her: He transforms the castle into a larger and nicer version of itself, while magically adding Sophie's old hat shop onto it. Unfortunately, this allows Sophie's mother to find them. Sophie's mother gives the Witch a charmed cigar that poisons Calcifer with its fumes. Outside the castle, Sophie's mother laments that she was blackmailed by Madame Suliman into betraying her daughter.

Suliman's henchmen then begin swarming the castle, forcing Howl and Sophie to retreat from the flowery meadow back into the castle. Howl transforms himself into the bird monster again, to protect Sophie by drawing the enemy fire away. Fearing for Howl's safety and afraid that he will soon completely lose the ability to change back into human form, Sophie convinces Calcifer to move the castle so they can all escape. But the poisoned cigar has weakened him too much, so Calcifer can only do this by partially demolishing the castle, along with Sophie's hat shop, and then moving only a smaller portion of the original structure. Fueled by Sophie's long braided hair, which she gladly offers up to him, Calcifer then powers a smaller portion of the castle and moves it to safety. Unfortunately, as he moves the castle, the Witch spies Howls' heart in the ashes - the one thing she had secretly been questing over throughout the entire story. She greedily grabs at it, but the heart is so hot that it sets her aflame. Sophie then desperately throws a bucket of water on her and Calcifer. The shock of having his flames extinguished makes Calcifer unable to control the castle; it teeters on a high precipice, and both Sophie and Heen are thrown over a cliff as the castle starts to collapse again.

Having survived the fall, Sophie starts crying over the thought that by dousing Calcifer, she might have killed Howl. Suddenly, the ring that she received earlier lights up. Sophie asks if it can find Howl, and it points to the remains of the castle's front door, connected to a portal that only Howl knows the destination to. Taking a chance, Sophie (with Heen following close behind) enters the door to find herself in Howl's childhood. After witnessing an adolescent Howl swallow a shooting star and Calcifer then popping out of his chest, Sophie is pulled back to the door, yelling to the young boy that she can help him in the future. She now knows the contract between Howl and Calcifer: As a boy, Howl caught a dying (falling) star — Calcifer — and saved its life by giving it his own heart. The act of doing so bound Calcifer to Howl indefinitely as a servant, but the real injury was that Howl metaphorically lost his heart and became emotionally trapped forever in childhood, unable to truly and maturely love anyone. (This explains why Howl was so "heartless" to Sophie so often, and also why he had previously rejected the Witch of the Waste as a lover.) After having this realization and being pulled back through the door, Sophie finds Howl standing outside the door, still as a bird-monster but ready to take them both back to their friends.

Upon returning, Sophie convinces the Witch to give Howl's heart back to him. The Witch has a moment of realization and ruefully gives the heart to Sophie, who then pushes it into Howl's chest. Suddenly, a bright light appears, and Calcifer emerges in his true form, as a shooting star happily spiraling into the distance. Without Calcifer powering it, the remnants of the castle suddenly give way and plummet down a steep slope. Turnip Head, in a moment of bravery, uses his balancing pole to stop the castle from sliding off a cliff, although he is badly broken in the process. Sophie thanks him for saving their lives by giving him a kiss, and Turnip Head instantly transforms into Crown Prince Justin, the missing prince whose disappearance had ignited the war. He had been transformed by a spell that could only be broken by "a kiss from your true love". However, when Howl wakes up, Sophie (having since had the curse on her broken) shows she is really in love with Howl, giving the Witch a comical moment to flirt with the prince.

Heen appears before Madame Suliman in a crystal ball to show her that, with Howl restored to normal and Prince Justin rescued, there is no more reason to continue the war. Madame Suliman muses over these revelations, happy for Howl and Sophie's good fortune, and calls for a ceasefire. As the kingdom's aerial warships return home, Sophie, Howl, the Witch, and all their friends fly away in the newly rebuilt castle, living happily ever after.

As Jones noted, the film is significantly different from her original novel in many ways. Roughly the first third of the plot is similar, after which the movie branches off into original territory, flavored with many of Miyazaki's familiar themes: airships, redemption, cute non-human sidekicks. The focus is still on Sophie and her adventure while being cursed with old age, but the main action of the film's story takes place during a war, reminiscent of World War I and located in a fantastical nation somewhat reminiscent of pre-World War I Alsace. Indeed, many buildings in the town scenes are identical to actual buildings in the Alsatian town of Colmar, which Miyazaki acknowledged as the inspiration for its setting. Whereas the novel is concerned with Howl's womanizing and his attempts to weasel out of locating a lost wizard and a prince, the film has Howl avoiding helping in a national war for pacifist reasons, and deals with the consequences of this decision. This aspect of the film's plot is actually rooted in Miyazaki's political views as a pacifist- in an interview with NewsWeek magazine, Miyazaki told the interviewer that the movie had started production "just as your country [the USA] had started started the war against Iraq", and the subsequent rage he felt about the Iraq war "profoundly impacted" the film. The movie also delves into spectacular scenes of radically alternate realities co-existing within the normal reality of the main story, and phantasmagorical visuals are prominently featured throughout the second half of the film. The book also sees the protagonists detour for one chapter into the 20th century world, where Howl is known as Howell Jenkins. This element is not used in the film, although one of Howl's aliases is "The Wizard Jenkins."

Many of the book's characters are modified for the film. The character of Howl's apprentice, Michael Fisher, is a teenager in the book but a young boy, "Markl", in the film. Sophie has only one sister in the movie compared to two in the book (although the other sister is alluded to as an aside near the film's opening). The Witch of the Waste, instead of looking young and beautiful, is a huge heavyset woman that later becomes an old crone—as opposed to terrorizing the characters as a frightening villain, she is treated as a "grandmother" character and is even taken into Howl's home. Calcifer, who is a scary looking fire demon in the book, is portrayed as an adorable little flame in the film, although in two instances he blazes up into a wicked-looking blue flame strongly reminiscent of his appearance in the book. Finally, while in the book there is a 'Wizard Suliman' (an ally), in the film this is changed to a 'Madame Suliman' (the villain). Various other characters in the film are composites of the book's characters, with different motivations and personalities. Sophie and Howl themselves most strongly resemble Jones's characters (though Howl has a completely different background), but with gentler personas and less selfish motivations; that is, typical Jones character traits are softened into typical Miyazaki character traits.

From Wikipedia