Howl's Moving Castle: Sub or Dub?
One Japanese actress plays Sophie at every age; Disney's dub splits her between two. Both casts and ANN's verdict on the two tracks.
Howl's Moving Castle has one English dub, produced for Disney's 2005 North American release. Against it stands the Japanese track with English subtitles. This page sets out who is in each, what Anime News Network's reviewer said about the two, and which to pick.
The short answer
Either. ANN's Theron Martin gave the dub and the subtitled version the same grade, B+, and called the dub “solid but not spectacular.” Pick the Japanese track if you want one actress playing Sophie at every age, which is how the film was made; pick the dub for Jean Simmons as old Sophie, the performance Martin singled out.
The Japanese track
The film premiered in Japan on November 20, 2004, according to ANN's encyclopedia entry, which is user-edited. The same entry lists Chieko Baisho as Sophie, Takuya Kimura as Howl, Akihiro Miwa as the Witch of the Waste, Tatsuya Gashūin as Calcifer, Ryūnosuke Kamiki as Markl and Haruko Katō as Madam Suliman. Martin's review confirms the key casting choice: “The Japanese vocal cast used a single actress to voice both young and old versions of Sophie.”
The Disney dub
ANN's encyclopedia credits the English version to directors Pete Docter and Rick Dempsey, with John Lasseter among its executive producers, and lists a US premiere screening at the El Capitan on June 10, 2005. The principal cast, as named in Martin's 2014 ANN review and the encyclopedia:
| Role | Japanese | English |
|---|---|---|
| Sophie (young) | Chieko Baisho | Emily Mortimer |
| Sophie (old) | Chieko Baisho | Jean Simmons |
| Howl | Takuya Kimura | Christian Bale |
| Witch of the Waste | Akihiro Miwa | Lauren Bacall |
| Calcifer | Tatsuya Gashūin | Billy Crystal |
| Markl | Ryūnosuke Kamiki | Josh Hutcherson |
| Madam Suliman | Haruko Katō | Blythe Danner |
What the review says about the two tracks
Martin, reviewing Disney's Blu-ray and DVD combo in November 2014, splits Sophie's verdict: Emily Mortimer “functions reasonably well as a younger-sounding version of the British-accented Simmons,” and Simmons “suits the role perfectly.” He found Christian Bale fine as Howl and Lauren Bacall “great as the Witch of the Waste,” but wrote that “Billy Crystal never quite seems like a good fit as Calcifer.” On the script: “The English script plays quite loose in places but only rarely says something entirely different.” He graded both versions B+.
How the English lines differ
The loose script shows up in how the film's lines circulate. Wikiquote transcribes Sophie's late line as “A heart is a heavy burden”; Looper's ending explainer prints it as “A heart's a heavy burden.” Neither says which track it transcribed, so treat the difference as a reason to check a remembered line against the version you watched, not as evidence about either one. Our best Howl's Moving Castle quotes use Wikiquote's film transcription throughout, and our page on subtitles, captions and dub dialogue explains why the same scene reads differently across releases.
Releases
Martin notes that Disney first released the film on DVD in 2006 and later on Blu-ray from a new digital master. In 2017 the North American home video rights moved to GKIDS: ANN reported that GKIDS would re-release Howl's Moving Castle on Blu-ray and DVD on October 21, 2017, and that “Ghibli will provide the English subtitles for the Japanese audio on all the releases.” We have not checked where each track currently streams, and availability changes by region.
Which to pick
There is no wrong choice here, which is unusual. The subtitled track keeps a single performer carrying Sophie across every age the curse gives her, and the subtitles on GKIDS's 2017 discs are Ghibli's own. The dub swaps that for two actresses, one of them the performance a critic called perfect, and a Calcifer that critic thought miscast. For what happens at the end in either language, see the ending explainer.