[ID: excerpts from an interview titled Anime and Author
What did you feel when you heard that Howl was to become an animated film?
One of my main feelings, when anything I write is adapted for another medium, is astonishment at how many people it takes to do it. Film, play or dance are all essentially team projects. This realisation is followed by amazement at the way ever detail is subjected to huge attention: a sort of, “If I’d known you were going to have to take all this trouble, I wouldn’t have made it so complicated!” This guilty feeling is, if I’m lucky, followed by delight. A quite different work of art has been created on a basis provided by me.
It is a fact that a book has to be altered in order to come over on screen or on the stage. A book can give you the inside of a person: all other media can only give you the outside.
Did you have any input into the making of the film?
Some very serious people from Japan came to talk to me about the book. They were very interested in knowing exactly where Ingary was, so they could go and look at it and use it as background for the film. They had trouble believing me when I told them I’d made it up. They insisted I sent them somewhere, so i suggested Exmoor and some towns in Essex. But they wouldn’t go there. They went to Cardiff instead, which was quite wrong.
Did you like the film?
I thought it was wonderful. It was rich and strange, and the animation was beautiful. I’ve loved Miyazaki’s work for many years, long before I knew he was going to make a film of my book. When we eventually met, I found that he understands my books in a way no one else has ever done.
He did of course introduce his favourite obsessions into the film. He has to have flying machines! He crammed the story full of flying machines and war scenes on the very thin basis that the King in my book was planning a war. Miyazaki and I were both children in World War II and we seem to have gone opposite ways in our reactions to it. I tend to leave the actual war out (we all know how horrible wars are), whereas Miyazaki (who feels just the same) has his cake and eats it, representing both the nastiness of a war and the exciting scenic effects of a big bombing raid. But the faint miffed feeling I had about this was very much smaller than the sheer awe I felt knowing that large numbers of people had spend several years painstakingly drawing and painting every frame in a long movie.
Which parts did you especially like?
I loved the hat shop, even though you don’t see much of it. And the breakfast scene where they cook bacon and eggs on Calcifer’s head. But one of the best scenes in the film is where Sophie and the Witch of the Waste are climbing an immense flight of marble stairs, panting and shouting insults at each other, while Sophie is carrying the dog. It’s like a dream and a nightmare, and it’s very funny.
Were the characters as you imagined them?
Howl is less of a drama queen in the film, and more of a hero. I thought Calcifer was wonderful. He wasn’t quite like I describe him, but still wonderful. And Sophie was very well done, especially as the film went on. Although she was an old woman, she gradually began to move more and more like a young girl.
The Witch of the West is partly based on one of my more formidable aunts. Oddly enough, the way the Witch is portrayed in the film looks very like her. She even wears the same clothes!
What about the castle?
When I first saw the castle, I thought, “This wasn’t the castle I wrote.” But I liked that it had its own distinct and often quite threatening personality. It was funny and frightening, and a bit vulnerable, the way bits fell off it. My castle was tall and thin and made of black blocks. A bit like living inside a chimney. But Miyazaki obviously likes more detail and translated it into a thing of fantasy. /]
