Howl's Moving Castle

In the land of Ingary, where seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility are real, it is a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Sophie Hatter was the eldest, resigned to a quiet, dull life trimming hats in her family's shop. While her sisters, Lettie and Martha, were sent off to promising apprenticeships, Sophie was left behind to inherit the business, a fate she accepted as the price of her birth order. She sat in a small alcove, stitching roses to bonnets and veiling to velours, her only company the hats themselves, which she addressed with gentle prophecies. “You have mysterious allure,” she would tell one. “You are going to have to marry money!” she'd inform another. Her world was small, filled with the scent of felt and silk, and the whispered gossip of customers - gossip that often turned to the dreaded Witch of the Waste, or the heart-eating Wizard Howl, whose tall black castle roved the hills above the town.

One afternoon, the shop bell clanged and the grandest customer Sophie had ever seen swept in, draped in sable and winking with diamonds. It was the Witch of the Waste herself. “I've heard of you, Miss Hatter,” the Witch said, her voice musical but commanding, “and I don't care for your competition.” With a flinging motion of her hand, she cast a spell. Sophie looked at her hands and saw them wrinkled and skinny, with knuckles like knobs. In the mirror, the face of a gaunt, withered old woman stared back. Calmly, surprisingly so, Sophie accepted this new reality. “This is much more like you really are,” she told her reflection. Knowing she could not stay for her stepmother to find her, she packed a bundle of bread and cheese, took up her shawl, and hobbled out of town to seek her fortune.

Her journey into the hills was slow and aching. She propped up a discarded scarecrow in a hedge, wishing it luck, and freed a trapped dog that rewarded her with a growl before slinking away. As night fell, cold and windy, a familiar shape came rumbling and bumping toward her across the moorland: Wizard Howl's castle. Seeing the smoke pouring from its turrets, Sophie thought only of the warm fire within. “Wizard Howl is not likely to want my soul,” she told her walking stick. “He only takes young girls.” She demanded the castle stop, and it did, but an invisible wall barred the door. After a frustrating trip around its lurching, grinding perimeter, she found a small back door, which she beat upon until it flew open.

Inside, a boy named Michael tried to turn her away, but Sophie pushed past him and sank into a cushioned chair by the hearth, the very picture of a determined crone. She pretended to sleep, securing a night's shelter. In the heart of the night, she awoke to a voice from the flames. A long, thin, blue face with a purple mouth looked out from the fire. It was Calcifer, a fire demon bound by contract to the hearth. Seeing that Sophie was under a spell, he offered a bargain. “I'll break your spell,” the demon crackled, “if you agree to break this contract I'm under.” The main clause was a secret, but Calcifer promised she could discover it if she stayed. Sophie, seeing no other choice, agreed.

When Howl appeared the next morning - a flamboyant, handsome young man in a blue-and-silver suit - Sophie declared herself his new cleaning lady. The castle, she had discovered, was magically filthy, and she began a remorseless cleaning campaign that terrified Michael and Calcifer. Howl, to her surprise, barely seemed to notice, more concerned that she leave his spiders unharmed. He was a creature of immense vanity and dramatic moods, spending hours in the bathroom on beauty spells. Sophie soon learned that he was not a soul-eater but a heartbreaker, a slitherer-outer who pursued young ladies relentlessly until they fell in love with him, at which point he lost all interest.

His latest conquest, he lamented, was a girl named Lettie Hatter. This news sent Sophie into a panic for her sister, and she journeyed to Upper Folding in a pair of seven-league boots to find the real Lettie, a talented apprentice witch, being courted by Howl in an apple orchard. It was clear Lettie was charmed, but not yet conquered. Sophie's visit was followed by the arrival of a doleful, bespelled dog-man - another of Lettie's suitors, sent to watch over Sophie - and the reappearance of the scarecrow, which hopped with sinister purpose to the castle door. Howl, with a crack of thunder, flung the creature to the far ends of the sky, but the encounter left Sophie shaken.

Soon, darker enchantments began to close in. A strange poem appeared, which Howl recognized as the terms of a curse laid on him by the Witch of the Waste, a curse that was now coming due. In a terrifying journey to a strange, non-magical land called Wales, Howl confronted his past and his family, and learned the curse would bind him to the Witch on Midsummer Day. At the same time, Sophie's disastrous attempt to blacken his name to the King of Ingary backfired, resulting in Howl being appointed Royal Wizard and commanded to find the King's lost brother, Prince Justin.

The Witch, sensing her moment, struck. She fought a furious magical duel with Howl over the sea at Porthaven, a battle of illusions and raw power that churned the waves and disturbed screaming mermaids from the deep. Though Howl fought her to a standstill, the Witch discovered the castle's new location in Market Chipping. She sent a message through the ether: she had captured a woman named Lily Angorian - a schoolteacher from Wales whom Howl had been courting - and would only release her if Howl came to her fortress in the Waste. Sophie, blaming herself for letting Miss Angorian wander into danger, seized the seven-league boots and strode off into the desolate heat alone.

In the Witch's fortress of fused chimney pots, Sophie found not Miss Angorian, but a headless man in a throne and the Witch herself, ancient and mad. As the Witch's magic trapped her, the scarecrow burst through the wall, followed by Howl. The scarecrow, a magically animated being containing parts of both Prince Justin and the lost Wizard Suliman, battled the Witch while Howl revealed the truth: Miss Angorian was the Witch's fire demon, sent to infiltrate the castle. They raced back through a magical wind, but it was too late. The demon was inside, holding Calcifer in its fist. As it squeezed, Howl collapsed, his own heart, given to Calcifer in their long-ago bargain, failing with the demon's.

With a crack, Sophie struck the demon's hand with her magic-infused stick. Calcifer fell free, and Sophie, knowing what she must do, gently separated the fire demon from the dark, faintly beating lump of Howl's heart. “Have another thousand years!” she told Calcifer, who shot up the chimney in a flash of joyous freedom. Kneeling beside Howl, she pushed the heart back into his chest. He awoke with a groan, complaining of a hangover. The curse was broken. Sophie's hair was its natural red-gold again, and the scarecrow stood restored as two men, Prince Justin and Wizard Suliman. As her sisters and family, who had arrived for a Midsummer visit, crowded around, Howl took Sophie's hands. “I think we ought to live happily ever after,” he said, and though Sophie knew it would be far more eventful than any story, she found herself smiling. In the hearth, a familiar blue face flickered back into being. Calcifer had returned. “I don't mind,” the fire demon said, “as long as I can come and go. Besides, it's raining out there.”