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Howl’s

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Introduction

In the film, Howl’s Moving Castle, Howl’s family member Sophie, is the focus of the show. This is a non-traditional, multigenerational family as Howl and Sophie are not married yet. Sophie works at her family’s hat shop and encounters Howl br iefly. When she returns to the hat shop, she gets cursed by the Witch of the Waste. On her journey to break her curse, she meets Turnip Head, the lost prince of the neighboring nation, who guides her to Howl’s moving castle. There she meets Calcifer, Markl, and Howl again. She then declares herself the cleaning lady of the castle and is allowed to stay.

After meeting Howl and the rest of the family, she gets embroiled with his resistance of not joining the war cause. Howl sends Sophie to meet the King in his stead, there she meets Suliman, the King’s head sorceress, Heen, and the Witch of the Waste, again, who’s powers get drained away from her. Howl ends up showing at the King’s palace, is trapped, but Sophie saves him. T hey escape with Heen and the Witch of the Waste in tow.

Sophie learns that Calcifer has Howl’s heart, and the Witch of the Waste wants it but is denied the chance of eating it as Sophie stops her. She frees Howl and Calcifer from their contract through her love which means that the castle can no sustain itself and falls apart. Turnip Head is also with them and tries to stop the castle from killing them all. Sophie gives Turnip Head a kiss on the cheek for saving them and frees him from his curse too. The war comes to an end as Turnip Head, Prince Justin, is found. Even though there was a lot of controversy between each family member, they came together in the end, through Sophie’s love and efforts.

Meet the Family

Age: 18 Married couple (beginning)

Family Role & Dynamics: Sophie is the one who brings the family together. She is a very timid person, who dresses in plain drab clothes, but has the courage to face the many adversaries that come her way. She also sees herself as just an ordinary person who cleans the house. Even when she is faced with family members who are aggressive and makes her life hard, she does not treat them with disrespect. She shows them the compassion and care that each member is due.Age: 27 Married couple (beginning)

Age: unknown

Howl

Sophie Markl

Family Role & Dynamics: Howl loves his freedom. He portrays himself as a playboy so that he is not seen as a responsible person. He is a powerful magician who has a contract with Calcifer. He thinks that the war is terrible and transforms himself into a huge bird that destroys both sides of the armies. He is also a very dramatic individual who makes issues seem bigger than they appear. He learns to love Sophie for who she is on the inside and does not care that she is “not beautiful”.

Calcifer

Family Role & Dynamics: Calcifer is a fire demon who has a contract with Howl. He is the heart of Howl’s moving castle as he controls everything about it. He does not like to follow anyone’s orders besides Howl’s. In the end, Sophie was able to to brow beat him into doing what she wanted. Even though Sophie was more forceful with him, she still did things to make him happy such as leaving firewood near him so he can reach it himself.

Age: 10 Families with school-age children

Family Role & Dynamics: Markl is Howl’s wizard apprentice and likes to follow rules. He makes sure Howl’s customers get their orders when Howl is not in residence. He is very rude to Sophie at first because she kind of just forces her way into their home (the castle), but slowly warms up to her. Sophie then becomes a mother figure to him as she takes care of his daily needs such as food, laundry, and emotional support.

Turnip Head (Prince Justin)

Family Members Cont’d

Age: 25

Families with young adults

Family Role & Dynamics: The neighboring country’s prince who was cursed to be a scarecrow. His disappearance was the cause of the war between the two nations. He showed Sophie the way to Howl’s castle. He always gets stuck upside down in something. Sophie is the one to usually help right him. He shows joy and care when he plays with Markl and helps around the house. He sacrifices himself to save the family leading to Sophie breaking his curse with her love.

Witch of the Waste

Age: 273 Aging families

Family Role & Dynamics: The root cause of Sophie turning into an old woman. She lost her heart to a demon and wants Howl’s heart now. She loses her powers from Suliman’s scheming and now her figure portrays her actual age. She follows Sophie to Howl’s castle and becomes a grandma who needs care and help with her activities of daily living. She gets the chance to eat Howl’s heart, but Sophie stops her, saving Howl and Calcifer’s life.

Heen

Age: Unknown

Family Role & Dynamics: Suliman’s familiar who is supposed to keep an eye on Howl. He becomes Markl’s companion. He does not report anything back to Suliman until the end when everything has been resolved helping end the war.

Condition: Inferiority Complex

Sophie has signs of inferiority complex: feelings of inadequacy and insecurity derived from actual or imagined physical deficiency resulting in timidity (American Psychological Association, n.d.).

She dresses in plain, frumpy styles, and does not believe that dressing prettier will make her beautiful. She also has a very timid personality.

From the scene on the left, she tries on a hat and thinks that it makes her look a little prettier however, on the third panel she thinks that, no, it doesn’t make her beautiful at all.

The next scene is when she is cursed to be an old lady. Even though she is shocked, she believes that this age matches her dressing style better.

Culture & Religion Communication Practices

This family does not really follow a religion however, they strongly believe in magics and technology as noticed by the aircrafts, wizards, and witches. Howl’s family follows the culture from the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, as seen with their clothing style. Sophie dresses in a Victorian wrapper dress throughout her journey while the rest of the family dresses in peasant style blouses of the Edwardian era.

Before Sophie lived in the castle, there was no open communication between family members. Markl and Calcifer pretty much followed the rules set down by Howl and did not deviate from it as they respected him as the head of their family.

Once Sophie came, many family members were drawn to her and started showing their true personalities and were openly communicating with her about their feelings. Each family member also showed their reactions of joy, sadness, or dejection through their facial expressions and body language which are nonverbal communication signs.

Strengths & Challenges

Howl’s family believes in one another when facing life-changing challenges such as Calcifer trusting his life to Sophie when she wanted to put Howl’s heart back. Their will is also very strong because they chose to stay with each other instead of run ning away like everyone else when war came to their town. Last, they have the strength of sharing their emotions with each other because they are not afraid of being ridiculed for sharing them.

The biggest challenge that this family face is the age gap between each member. It varies from young adults to the elderly.

Which means that each of them have their own beliefs. When these beliefs are crossed, it takes some convincing from Sophie, to change their outlook. They also have different personalities which makes it very hard for them to understand each other. For example, Sophie always feels inferior to others and does not believe anyone will want to stay with her while Howl is dramatic and loves to ma ke a mountain out of a molehill. When these two types of personalities clash, it is hard for them to come to an agreement without one of them being brought to tears (mainly Sophie).

Family Systems Theory

Family Systems Theory allows nurses to understand and assess families as a whole and as individuals while maintaining stability even when families are constantly changing in response to stress and strain. Change in one family member affects all members in the fam ily (Kaakinen et al., 2015).

All Parts of the System are Interconnected – When Sophie ran away after a fight with Howl, all members of the family were affected. They were scared and did not know what to do with Howl as he started releasing goo everywhere and would not listen to anyone.

The whole is more than the sum of the parts – Howl’s family cannot function without Sophie. When Sophie was not in residence at the castle, Markl only ate bread and cheese while Calcifer was dependent on Markl giving him firewood to survive. However, when Sophie came, Markl was able to eat more nutritional foods while Calcifer was able to sustain himself because Sophie left firewood near him so that he could reach it himself.

All systems have some form of boundaries or borders between the system and its environment – Howl’s castle moves around because he loves his freedom so much that he does not want to have a stationary home,. Furthermore, the castle can open to four different regions through magic giving the family free reign of the two warring nations and other places. As Markl is Howl’s apprentice, he acts as the intermediary between Howl and his many customers from the different nations.

Systems can be further organized into subsystems – As Howl’s family is made up of individuals that have no blood relation to each other, the family is divided into different subsystems like grandparents, to married couples, children, pets, and family friends who can be considered family. Even though there is no blood relation, the family is able to come together and care for each other.

Nursing Process

Problems:

1. Sophie feels inferior when she is beside her beautiful stepsister.

2. Sophie does not believe that anyone can love her for her boring self.

3. Sophie believes she can only get “unworthy” jobs like being a hatter or cleaning lady.

Interventions:

1. Speak to Sophie and identify what is causing this negative self-assessment as body image can have significant effects on self-esteem (Ackley et al., 2020, p. 798).

2. Work with Sophie by using cognitive behavioral therapy focusing on the maintenance of overthinking and working on small achievable goals as this will help improve self-esteem (Langford et al., 2021).

3. Work with Sophie by using cognitive behavioral therapy focusing on strengthening positive selfbeliefs, events, and qualities as practicing new behaviors dismisses disabling precepts (Van der Stouwe et al., 2021)

Outcomes:

1. Sophie verbalizes acknowledgement and understanding of the cause of the negative body image.

2. Sophie will acknowledge and verbalize that she is overthinking and achieve her small goals.

3. Sophie will verbalize increased selfacceptance from positive selfstatements about herself.

References