His heart is a flame that is the heart of his castle. The walls cave in for his sorrow, expand for his joy, branch and shrink into interlocking pathways when he feels lost, and retreat to a tranquil warm home when he feels hopeful. His space is literally a physical extension of his emotional states. A unique portrait of the intimate and delicate relationship between space and its inhabitant is illustrated in Hayao Miyazaki’s film—Howl’s Moving Castle.

The main character, a wizard called Howl, lives in a castle of his own creation that is operated magically by a personified flame. Both are bound together by a curse that unfolds through the events of the story, and towards the end, his lost heart is found in the flame. The castle has a steampunk aesthetic, and moves on four legs like a living creature. It walks, settles, and alters locations and modes according to its master’s needs and desires. It is an idealistic and artistic conceptual metaphor of ‘humanized architecture.’

In the real world, most spaces are passively designed because almost everything is standardized, including people’s needs, which produces objectified places. In contrast, in the fantasy realm of films, storytellers must construct an immersive world where the story takes place, a process called ‘world building.’ The mise-en-scène is constructed with active and specific considerations of motion, spatial configuration, props, sound, light, and color to convey a character’s personality, mood, and interests. All come together to produce a subjectified space explicitly designed to narrate a visual story. Within the confines of the screen, every frame is a painting, thus every detail matters. Such an active and holistic design approach demonstrates the substantial relationship between people and their places. Films, like Howl’s Moving Castle, exaggerate and bring this relationship to the foreground where spaces play an active role in everyday life, and so they should.

The castle becomes a literal representation of Howl’s emotions and creates a unique interactive relationship, providing a conceptual foundation and idealized inspiration for humanizing architecture. The architect Hoberman explains: “In developing ideas like mine, it makes the most sense to start on the fantasy end of things and work toward the reality end.” Howl’s Moving Castle is the fantasy end of what the future architecture could be.