Howl : There’s Nothing Wrong With A Little Drama

One of my family’s favourite stories about me could work just as well in a psychiatrist’s office as it does in a family reunion. It goes like this : when I was around five years old, my parents sent me to kindergarten, and I loved it. From my classmates to the activities to the teachers, I couldn't get enough. Life was as close to perfect as it could be… Until one day, when my teacher phoned home.

As my mom soon learned, there was nothing special about that day. We’d been switching between playtime and more structured learning time, as we'd done every other day. But that day, at the start of the structured time, I’d kept playing with a coin I’d found. It wasn’t a huge deal or anything, but it was time to transition, so my teacher calmly asked me to stop playing.

Instead, I put my head down and wept. Worse yet, I kept weeping, hence why my teacher phoned home in a panic.

That’s normally where the story ends - I assume my mother told the teacher it was okay and came to pick me up and calm me down. We never really go into the ending, though, because the story’s point isn’t what happened, it’s what that day signified : an official confirmation that I was a “sensitive” child.

Dramatic, even.

The label isn’t meant as an insult, of course, but it’s definitely not a compliment. I can’t really say my family was wrong, though. In middle school, I wrote a horror story so gory and traumatising that my teacher stopped giving the assignment after that year. I went through an emo phase that still lingers to this day. One of my favourite books is Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, and I suffer from a lingering emo phase to this day.

To be honest, these days I’m quite proud of my “dramatic” nature - I just consider it being authentic to myself and what I feel - but it wasn’t always that way. The problem with being dramatic is that for most people, it’s a bit too much to deal with. For example, I remember tearfully reciting one of my poems in English class, only for my teacher to pull me out of class and yell at me for not “holding it together”. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that I hated how sensitive I was for a long time.

Which is why Howl, the character who showed me that being “extra” doesn’t have to be a curse, is my animated hero (yes, we’re finally getting to the point).

As a child, Howl’s Moving Castle was a revelation for me. The first time I watched it, I was too young to get the anti-war message and too strongheaded to connect with Sophie’s character arc. No, all that mattered to me was Howl, a man who is dramatic and imperfect. Not only was he confidently weird and emotional, he was loved and appreciated for exactly who he was - a reality that was unfortunately was hard for me to believe back then.

Howl oozes drama, from his clothing to his house, but the scene that really stuck with me was when he accidentally dyed his hair black - the scene where he oozes drama a bit more literally. It’s a level of overreaction I can relate to a little too well, and to see the people around him not complaining about his antics or asking him to shut up but instead help him get up and take care of himself… I can’t say I’ve found people like that myself, but the idea of finding them is enough to keep me going.

More importantly, though, it’s because he has “big feelings” that he’s able to be a hero. Normally, dramatic and vain characters are relegated to villains like Scar or Hades, but Howl’s dramatic tendencies help him make big choices to save others. He gives Calcifer his heart simply because he feels sorry for him. He risks his humanity to save his newfound family, including the witch who’d been after him for years. And of course, his love for Sophie makes it so he can’t stand her poor self-image, so he does everything he can to help her see the value in herself.

Without Howl, I might have realised that my flair for the dramatic wasn’t the worst thing in the world… Or maybe I would have been crushed into conformity. In any case, I’m glad he was there for me as a hero of the weird, flamboyant, and yes, dramatic. He might not be the most typical hero, and he's certainly not a perfect one, but he’s the hero I needed, and that's enough.

Or, to put it a bit more dramatically : I'd die for Howl, because he'd die for me.