Character · Howl's Moving Castle
Sophie Hatter
Cursed into a ninety-year-old body on an ordinary afternoon, and mostly annoyed about the stairs.
In Otakana the clue reads: Hatmaker turned into an old woman
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Howl's Moving Castle
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Sophie Hatter trims hats in her late father's shop and has decided, at eighteen, that being the eldest of three sisters means nothing interesting will ever happen to her. Then a jealous witch turns her into an old woman and forbids her to tell anybody why. She looks in the mirror, has a short and practical think about the situation, and walks out of town.
The curse turns out to be the best thing that happens to her. Freed from being a young woman with a young woman's obligations, she says exactly what she thinks, invites herself into a wizard's castle, and appoints herself its cleaner without asking permission. Miyazaki animates the age as a variable. Sophie looks younger whenever she forgets to be defeated, and the film never explains this or needs to.
Chieko Baisho voices Sophie at both ages in Japanese, shifting register rather than handing half the part to a second actor, and it is the performance the film rests on. Jean Simmons and Emily Mortimer split the role in English. Howl's Moving Castle took over 230 million dollars worldwide and picked up an Oscar nomination for animated feature.
Spelling SOPHIE
SOPHIE is six letters and hinges entirely on the PH. It comes from the Greek sophia, wisdom, so the F sound is written with a P and an H, and SOFIE loses the row. The Japanese reads Sofii and gives you no warning whatsoever about that. The game wants the given name; HATTER is her family name and also her trade, a joke Diana Wynne Jones clearly enjoyed.