The Art of Howl's Moving Castle

The Art of Howl's Moving Castle is a perfect compendium of almost everything having to do with the movie and artwork. The only thing lacking is of course, is the gorgeous soundtrack from the movie. (For that I recommend purchasing the Ost [IMPORT] Howl's Moving Castle Audio CD and listening to it while you peruse this beautiful book.)

Anyone who is a fan of the movie, Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, the artwork, and the screenplay will LOVE this book.

Here is why this book is really worth every penny:

CONTENTS:

Intro

- Production Synopsis

Part 1

- Contains Miyazaki's storyboards. His original concept sketches of the characters, backgrounds, and settings. You get to see the original artwork from the creator's mind. A chance to marvel at Miyazaki's inventiveness, and appreciate the Studio Ghibli animators' talents in bringing it to life on screen.

Part 2

- Neary 200 pages of beautifully printed scenes from the movie (all in color of course, glossy, crisp), following the entire storyline from start to finish, in a very clean layout. Each scene from the movie has concept art, sketches, and final prints. Nice printing, the rich colors and gorgeous artwork of the movie are beautifully intact. Large images, including a few two-page spreads (one of Howl in resting in bed after his "traumatic" hair experience.) *If you are keen to revisit the scenes from the movie, you will definetely not find this book to be lacking, it is chock full of images.

- All scenes have text captions and many include insights from the Studio Ghibli's artists and animators on how they worked to achieve Miyazaki's desired artistic effect. Also a very interesting section of the studio's use of CGI (using CG "(not to create reality but to) ...add realism to the animiation")

- Also full page prints of Japanese promotional posters at the end.

Part 3

- Contains the entire english screenplay of the movie (in case you wanted to see whether you missed anything). Again, nice layout.

(There IS in fact both a hardcover and softcover version of this book, however the softcover I have only seen in the all-Japanese version so far, maybe the english version will be published in softcover in the *future.

- *This tidbit written in Aug. 2005)

Nice. Really nice. As you open the pages, you'll see full traditional watercolor paintings of the castle, the backgrounds, and everything. The first part are character designs and sketches, then more to the finer ones, then movie stills. The latter part includes some digital enhancements on the movie. Plus of course, the movie script. This artbook is really a good find, I tell you. Although I must say, Spirited Away's Artbook is much better; but this is still as good as it can get. Of course, it's Studio Ghibli! :)

As a huge fan of the film Howl's Moving Castle, I was delighted to see this book being sold so cheap here on Amazon. The book is hardback, and overall, well presented.

My only complaint with the book is that the majority of it only contains stills from the film. They look great, of course, but I was hoping there would be more concept work, as well as pages dedicated to just backgrounds, as they were some of the most beautiful ones I had ever seen in an animated film.

In a nutshell: A good book with some beautiful art, which is cheap, though it contains mainly stills from the film, not a lot of concept work.

Not bad, the text part is interesting but if you buy this kind of books for the concept art and visual development of the movie, don't buy it, this one has very little production design visuals and most of the pictures are just stills from the movie.

I loved this book. The prints were gorgeous and the concept art was great. However, the one I got there was no glue binding on the spine and it was absolutely ruined. I ordered a replacement and I Got another one with no glue on the binding! I WANT this book but I really wish Amazon would simply open the book's cover and check it before sending it off to me.

If you've purchased any of the other Studio Ghibli Library titles you know what to expect from this title, The Art of Howl's Moving Castle. It is hard back with no dust cover and 256 pages.

The book is divided into the following chapters:

Hayao Miyazaki's Concept Sketch Collection
Concept Art, Background Art, Character Designs and Concept Sketches
Final Screenplay
Credits

The images are gorgeous, printing is beautiful and this is a real treat to look at. The colors are quite spectacular and they've done an excellent job with printing.

Highly recommended.

***Special Note***
If you are fan of Studio Ghibli I HIGHLY recommend you seek out the book, Studio Ghibli Layout Designs published by Studio Ghibli (I think). The book is in Japanese, but it doesn't matter much as only the first 5 pages are in Japanese and the rest of the book is just pictures. It's over 400 pages and nothing but layout designs (as the title suggests) from all the Miyazaki films. Gorgeous.

Following in the tradition of The Art of Spirited Away, this book captures some of the best work in progress art for the film. The paper is glossy, the size is perfect for a coffee table book, and the colors span a wide, wide range, though perhaps not as much as those in Spirited Away.

If you like The Art of Spirited Away, get this. There is something odd about it though. It's listed as being in paperback. The version I picked up at Barnes and Noble was most certainly not a paperback, and was in the exact same covering as The Art of Spirited Away, which is listed as a hardcover. Why is this?

The book looks awesome. The artwork is spectacular (its Ghibli so of course it is) and the information in the book was interesting, it was cool to see the process they went through to make the movie. Only problem I have is a tear on the front inside cover of the book? (Not sure if that’s the right description so I’m including a photo. That’s the only reason I’m giving it 4 stars instead of 5). Overall I would highly recommend this book :)

The movie is great, in fact it is one of my favorite movies, so I had great expectations for this book. The thing that annoyed me the most was the lack of general concept art, or rather previous versions of characters' design or something like that. Most of the book consisted in stills from the movie. But it had great information detailing the process, shortcomings, obstacles they had during production. Buy it if you are interested in that.

The Art of Howl's Moving Castle is a large, hardback book, and is chock full of information and pictures from the amazing movie by Hayao Miyazaki.

This book begins with hundreds of concept sketches by Miyazaki, containing location scenes and characters with notes. The concept sketches go in order of appearance from the movie, so the concept sketches for Sophie come at the beginning, for example, while the concept sketches for Human Turnip show up near the end. There are thousands of gorgeous location scenes as well plus short bios on some of the creators of the movie and a few articles that discuss the creaters' experiences working on the film. Also, at the very end is the complete final screenplay to read through. The screenplay has a few minor changes in it from where the English actors improvised a little (especially Billy Crystal), but otherwise, is exactly from the movie.

Being a student of film and the arts, I found this book extremely helpful and interesting, because it showed the creative process of a huge movie. I would definitely recommend it to any film or arts students to browse through if they wan to get an idea of what kind of work it takes to create such a monumental film!

The only qualm I have with this book is that there were hundreds of screenshots. Not that that's bad, especially if you want to buy this book to revisit the movie, but I would like to have seen a few more sketches and whatnot, or at least a few more articles on how the particular scenes with the screenshots were made.

That aside, I fell in love with this book and was enchanted from front cover to back cover.