Hauru no ugoku shiro

Woot! I am the proud owner of "Howl's Moving Castle" on DVD. What an awesome movie. I liked it as much or more than the book (which admittedly, I was a little bit disappointed with). I loved the backgrounds- Miyazaki's films have these amazingly verdant landscapes. When I watch his movies I can almost smell the grass. His recent films have been veering further away from the whole wisdom-of-nature rhetoric that dominates some of his earlier films, most notably in "Princess Mononoke" and "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds". Not to say I am dismissing these films as environmentalist sermonizing, I enjoyed them quite a lot, but I really loved the bizarre premises of his last two films, which weren't constricted by a man-versus-nature debate. I also felt the heroes in some of his previous films were a little too flawless; purity is admirable in the abstract but freaking BORING in a work of fiction. But that's my opinion. I always root for the bad guys anyways :P

*** On a side note, I feel all my expensive university-educated brainpower has been slipping away from me in the last year. I need to use more big fancy words! Keep my synapses firing!