I put on Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle the other day to watch with my seven-year-old. It's been a while, and I come to it with the self-awareness I wouldn't otherwise if I were watching it alone: will he "get" it? Will it enchant him the way it did me? I want so much to share what is true and good with him. I can't live life for him, or shield him from pain forever, but I can give him that: a bouquet of beauty, the memory of whose fragrance can see him through dark times. Light and high beauty forever beyond the Shadow's reach.
As the film played, I found myself getting irked here and there. The more I watch him, the more I wonder if Miyazaki is the prodigious story-teller we make him out to be. As I'm writing, I think I mean that in the sense of story without image. Pure narrative, perhaps. He relies very much on the visual, on motion and music and light and color. He is gifted at what he does, and I don't make light of it. There is a behind-the-scenes clip in Spirited Away that shows how they brought in a dog for the animators to observe what it looks like giving it a pill, to translate that into animating a girl force-feeding a dragon a remedy. It's gorgeous, breathtaking even. The love and detail put into rendering a realistic and enchanting pageant of imagery is laudable. Likewise, Howl's Moving Castle is beautiful to watch, performative and ballet-like, every movement and shot choreographed with care.
But I think I like Diana Wynn Jones' version of Howl's Moving Castle better, as a narrative. She is less didactic in her storytelling; I prefer an actual enemy, real evil at work, rather than the New Age-y phantoms of war and human conflict. Miyazaki's Howl is much more forgivable for his idiosyncrasies, more charming and less conceited. Sophie's relatives aren't even allowed to be benignly awful. I get the impression that I've come away from a kindergarten lesson about how everyone is different, we all just need to "get along," and "love conquers all." As he is a survivor of World War II, I get the compulsion toward optimism. But I can't help but feel it stale and forced in the face of personal and public tragedy; saccharine and too-simple in a way that George MacDonald's universal salvation isn't.
In fairness, there is always difficulty in adapting a written work into the medium of film. So perhaps I do away with the problem altogether by saying, Miyazaki is a gifted film-maker, rather than storyteller.
The subject of adaptation is one which I tread carefully. As a storyteller, I've a heightened awareness of what it means to put the work of one's imagination forth into the world, only to have it twisted, misunderstood, weaponized, or forced into a "message." In a very real way, it has held me back from making stories. I see what the Tumblr generation has done to Tolkien, and it grieves me.
It is with this kind of teeth-set-on-edge countenance that I watch the development of the situation surrounding Amazon's Rings of Power. Certain things signal that this is not a good-faith handling of the source material and Tolkien's desires. The more time goes on, the more I fear that they don't intend to honor Tolkien's vision, which is something the first Peter Jackson trilogy was remarkable at preserving. Tolkien would have loathed the changes made to his story for the sake of adapting it to film; but I can see that what was done was done out of necessity, and love. And that's enough for me.
Rarely do adaptations honor in this way; even less so do they surpass the originals. A recent case of this, I feel, is in Leigh Bardugo's YA trilogy Shadow and Bone. The Netflix adaptation breathed life into it, upped the stakes, and added dimension to the characters and conflict. I feel guilty even writing that. I feel I ought to be allied with Bardugo against the changes that highlighted the flaws in her work. Because of course, without her, there would be no material to work with to begin with.
It's a creative's conundrum: do I share the fruit of my imaginative inner world with the outside? Do I trust them with my life's work and passion? What is the cost-benefit analysis? These are things I'm contemplating these days. I'm not entirely sure yet of the answers.
+JMJ+
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