Howl's and dissent.

• Not only does AO Scott review the film for Friday's edition of the New York Times ("Admirers of his work, which is wildly imaginative, emotionally intense and surpassingly gentle, will find much to appreciate in this film because it demonstrates, once again, his visual ingenuity and his sensitivity as a storyteller. For newcomers to his world, "Howl's Moving Castle" is a fitting introduction to one of modern cinema's great enchanters"), he's also got a very fine and appreciative profile of Miyazaki in the Sunday edition which starts right off establishing him as "the world's greatest living animated-filmmaker."

• Four stars from Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader and, once again, a sharp and vital point about Hollywood assumptions right at the end.

• Stuart Klawans in the Nation: "In its merger of antiquarianism and fantasy, artisanship and magic, the castle neatly sums up the art of its creator."

• David Edelstein in Slate: "It's as if Miyazaki has wedded his enchanting Spirited Away to his ferocious allegory of the end of nature, Princess Mononoke, and come up with something more discomfiting than either."

• Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "Miyazaki's gifts as an animator place him in a category of his own. To see his latest film is to be somehow reminded of Italians who could hear Verdi's operas as soon as they were sung or English readers who could experience the novels of Dickens episode by episode."

And so on. But not everyone is won over. "I must come clean: Miyazaki bores me to tears," confesses Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. At the same time, though, "[M]y problems with Howl's Moving Castle may have been exacerbated by the fact that I'd been lucky enough to see a new movie by the 82-year-old wild-card director Seijun Suzuki in the same week.... Princess Raccoon is inventive, weird and beautiful, all the qualities that are commonly ascribed to Miyazaki's movies. But unlike Howl's Moving Castle, it's also passionate and heartfelt, and not just an exercise in studied whimsy."

Josh Neuhouser's disappointment, though, is of quite a different order. Miyazaki most certainly does not bore him. Of his "most creative period" in the 80s and early 90s, for example, Neuhouser writes, "Particularly of note is the wonderful Kiki's Delivery Service - it seems to be a simple (though charming) coming of age story on first glance, but the attention paid to the relationships between the young and the old, and the rural and the urban are strongly reminiscent of Ozu." But with Howl's, he fears that what we have here "represents a serious stagnation." Perhaps his most interesting and even cautiously hopeful points come when he explains why "Ghibli doesn't have to go down like this."

Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2005 4:28 PM