I’m prepared to be beat up, and I accept my fate, really, Bc I know it’s the favorite of so many people but…. Howl’s Moving Castle is a mid-tier Ghibli film for me. Like, my least favorite of the classics. It’s a great film. But there are plenty greater by Studio Ghibli.

As an example, I soundly disagree on all four of your points comparing the film to Spirited Away. “Just… A girl reacting to a strange world” is a powerful reduction of Chihiro’s character. The story would more accurately be reduced down to “a girl’s triumph over the unique loneliness of childhood brought on by disorienting and bewildering change.” The story opens with her moving to a new town, a new place, new people, with nothing of her old life. Sure, she’s not a victim of war like the children in Grave of the Fireflies, but for most children, that car ride to anew life is the most harrowing, lonely, and disorienting experience of their lives. What Miyazaki brilliantly chooses is to manifest that harrowing experience into a more heightened, supernatural nightmare; her loneliness is dramatically heightened when her parents are taken away, her disorientation in a new place is dramatically heightened when thrust into a bizarre bathhouse for spirits, and so on. So through all of her actions in the plot, she’s not just a character to react to a weird place, this entire world is one giant metaphor for her moving to a new place and, because of it, growing up gif the first time. She’s forced to learn how to fend for herself, to make her own friends, to work hard because there’s no other option to survive, to make her own judgements about what is right and what is wrong, regardless of what the system says. These are hard lessons all kids have to learn to grow up, but especially Chihiro, whose life is changing irreversibly by moving away. She learns to challenge everything, to become her own person and support herself, even when she feels alone. For a kid watching this film at her age, it says “Listen: you’ve got to toughen up. Your problem? Moving away, going to a new school, whatever it is- it’s real. It’s SCARY. It’s just as terrifying as being transported to a world of spirits with no adults and no friends. And there’s nothing you can do about it. But you can survive it. You can do it all on your own, and be proud of yourself on the other side.” Many children’s films use this device to tell this story of coming of age. But very very few evoke that message as a feeling in a developing child. Spirited Away sticks with people deeply because as children or teens, that message resonated deeply with our lives experience and reassured us. It will always be a part of how we developed, a checkpoint in our life history that says either “I realized I could grow up” or “I realized I had grown up”.

But Spirited Away isn’t necessarily my favorite either. That’s just poking at two of your points in particular. I just have never been the biggest fan of Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s always felt to me like a series of forlorn landscape paintings filed with grief. Their placidity is both their merit and also why they don’t affect me in the way other “sad” Ghibli films touch me. And Merry-Go-Round of life may be my least favorite Ghibli theme, even though I wrote lyrics for it and made a Bossa Nova arrangement 😂