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Howl's Moving Castle (2004)
Howl's Moving Castle is a 2004 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, based on Diana Wynne Jones' 1986 novel. The film was produced by Toshio Suzuki, animated by Studio Ghibli, and distributed by Toho. It stars the voices of Chieko Baisho, Takuya Kimura, and Akihiro Miwa. The film is set in a fictional kingdom where both magic and early 20th-century technology are prevalent, against…
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki · Shot by Atsushi Okui · Cut by Takeshi Seyama · Music by Joe Hisaishi · 119 min
How it was made
- Mamoru Hosoda was originally attached to direct the film but left after Studio Ghibli's executives rejected many of his concept ideas, and the project sat shelved until Miyazaki took over and resumed production in February 2003.
- Miyazaki was struck by the novel's image of a moving castle, which the book never explains mechanically; working out how such a structure could actually move led him to the design of a castle that walks on giant chicken legs.
- Miyazaki travelled to Colmar and Riquewihr in Alsace, France, to study the region's architecture as a reference for the film's setting.
- Although produced digitally, the film's backgrounds were hand-drawn and painted before being digitised, and the characters were likewise drawn by hand before being scanned into the computer.
- The film's 1,400 storyboard cuts were finished on 16 January 2004, with in-between animation completed on 25 June, only weeks before the film's summer 2004 release.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Hayao Miyazaki
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