“A heart’s a heavy burden.”

Howl’s moving castle is a heavy, clunky thing; we first see it spewing smoke into the countryside fog and then climbing — hissing and creaking step by laborious step — up a hill. Its tiny legs carry an immensely heavy load.

In spite of its somewhat menacing, decrepit appearance, girls in a nearby town get excited when they see the castle moving in the distance. One of them giddily asks the others if they heard about a girl named Martha down in South Haven. “They say Howl tore her heart out,” she reveals, before hastily following up with a jab and a joke: “Don’t worry. He only preys on pretty girls.”

Sophie, the film’s protagonist and their older sister, overhears them. Immediately after, we follow her as she walks outs into the town, where two men dressed in military uniforms stop her in an alley. Their flirtation quickly becomes menacing. Howl rescues her.

“I’ll be your escort this evening,” he says as he magically forces the soldiers to walk away with a wave of his hand. Bulbous, black, bubbly creatures wearing hats emerge from the walls; Howl lifts Sophie up into the air and flies her back to the town square to escape them. He makes sure that Sophie is safe, wishes her well, then disappears into the crowd below.

“He was so kind to me,” Sophie tells her sister. Her sister is convinced that he just wanted to tear her heart out. Sophie — and we — are not so convinced.

It’s a beautiful character introduction. Howl remains an entrancing mystery to us — and to Sophie — in a way that keeps us engaged in the story, yet we know several important things that we need to know to understand what he is all about in just a few brief scenes.

He lives in a castle that is always on the move, and is known for breaking hearts; the castle is an obvious metaphor for a man who runs from place to place out of a fear of commitment and abandonment, and shields himself away within a fortress of his own making. But while he has a reputation as someone who “preys on pretty girls,” his protectiveness toward Sophie and his tender, respectful exit after rescuing her makes us question if his intentions are actually intentionally bad — or if he is just a wounded soul who leaves whenever he starts to feel attached.

Throughout the film, Howl runs away from responsibility; a major plot thread focuses on his draft evasion, as he takes on multiple personas and hides from troops in order to avoid being sent off to fight in a war that he doesn’t believe in. He often keeps to himself, disappears mysteriously, and comes back to the castle wounded. When he is hurt, he hides away until he is better, preferring to heal on his own instead of accepting the compassion of others. However, he takes care of others quite intensely when he is around them.

Late in the film, after he begins to develop genuine feelings for Sophie, Howl journeys with her to a beautiful field of flowers. Sophie inquires about a cottage nestled in the middle of this beautiful, peaceful paradise. “That was my secret hideaway. I spent a lot of time here by myself when I was young,” Howl reveals. “You were here alone?” she asks. “My uncle, who was a wizard, gave me this place as my private study.”

He smiles and tells her that she can have a wonderful life in this place, but that he must leave her. She is confused. A few scenes later, we see a flashback to Howl’s childhood; in this field, as a kid, he loses his heart.

Hayao Miyazaki keeps Howl’s backstory vague enough that it leaves much open to interpretation, and reveals personal information about Howl late in the movie, keeping intrigue and suspense up throughout the film as we wonder where Howl came from and why he acts the way that he does. It isn’t until he falls in love with and trusts Sophie that he feels comfortable opening up to someone else; it makes sense, then, that we don’t learn more about him until that moment, too.

In the film’s dramatic conclusion, Sophie rescues Howl’s heart — literally — and describes it as “warm and fluttering.”

“It’s still just the heart of a child,” Calcifer, the fire demon intrinsically linked to Howl, replies. This is thematic line of dialogue ties up Howl’s arc with a neat bow.

We learn early on in the film that Howl has a propensity for breaking hearts and avoiding commitment, in spite of his kindhearted nature. Much later, it is revealed to us that he grew up largely abandoned, first by his parents and then by his uncle. Childhood trauma stunted his growth; his heart never had time to mature before it was ripped out of him.

“I feel terrible, like there’s a weight on my chest,” Howl says to Sophie when he wakes up in the end, with his heart intact. Sophie’s reply drives home the thematic point that he feels terrible because he is finally allowing himself to feel again, after running away from commitment for so long — but that is just part of accepting a life filled with love. “A heart’s a heavy burden,” she replies. Then, she pulls him up and they stand side by side.

Howl’s primary character traits are established clearly at the start of Howl’s Moving Castle, but we don’t fully grasp what they mean until the very end — and yet we stay engaged in his character’s journey from start to finish. This indicates how intelligently his character arc is written, and how beautifully creative the visual metaphors, from the Castle to Calcifer, are that represent his traits.

But like many of Miyazaki’s best movies (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke), Howl’s Moving Castle doesn’t only make its point through one character’s arc. The themes of this film, as well as many of Miyazaki’s others, are best exemplified in one character’s journey but codified as the sum of many whimsical parts.

The film’s villainous Witch of the Waste, for example, is revealed to desperately crave love, though because she doesn’t get it, she uses her powers to lash out and make others suffer. It isn’t until kindness and compassion are shared with her — and she gets a taste of her own medicine when a spell is placed on her — that she lets down her guard and shows compassion toward others. Sophie is the reason for her growth as much as she is for Howl’s; the Witch of the Waste only gives Howl’s stolen heart over to her after Sophie hugs her and emotionally tells her how much it means to her.

Turnip Head, on the other hand, is under a curse but chooses kindness and compassion from the first scene in which we meet him. His curse is broken when the results of his kindness and compassion make someone — again, Sophie — love him.

Sophie, too, learns to love herself by loving others and never becoming bitter in spite of her own curse and misfortune.

Howl’s character arc forms the spine of the film, but all of these other characters’ stories flesh it out; together, they add up to something more universally meaningful than any one of their stories would have been on its own. Howl and the Witch of the Waste seek love, but go about it in ways that alienate others; Sophie and Turnip Head, however, show them — and us — that the way to be loved is to be vulnerable enough to show kindness and love to others first.

There is a beautiful curiosity to the way in which Miyazaki explores the themes that interest him to the absolute fullest. His films are so interesting not just because they are filled with creative, whimsical characters, creatures, and locales, but because they explore the same theme from multiple angles, often represented in the journeys of multiple characters — as well as in the societies in which they live.

The thematic explorations in Miyazaki’s films often extrapolate the learnings of the individual to society at large (most effectively in Princess Mononoke). In Howl’s Moving Castle, Miyazaki continues this storytelling tendency by having a subplot unfold in the background of the story to show what societies do — and become — when they choose hate over love.

At the beginning of the film, it’s clear that a war is raging outside of the town borders — tanks roll by underneath bridges and fighter planes soar in the skies overhead. Danger seems to surround the townspeople — but they ignore the machines of war, accepting that their society is doing the right thing, until it is too late. Meanwhile, the war raging around them is admitted to be idiotic by their leaders, and leads to nothing but destruction and chaos while turning promising individuals (represented here as wizards) into mindless, hateful drones (seen in battle as militaristic winged beasts).

Love leads to meaningful, healthy change. Hate brings nothing but chaos.

Howl’s Moving Castle is beautiful to look at and its characters are charmingly whimsical. But aesthetics aside, the film exemplifies great storytelling in that it explores a simple, universal theme from multiple perspectives — metaphorical, micro, and macro — to say something more profound than a single take on an idea ever could.