Howl's Moving Castle

Last night the Film Club (a more ambiguous name) viewed "Howl's Moving Castle". I am usually not a really big fan of anime (sp?) style films, they come off as too cheesy or pretensiously artistic to me. But, I do like this film. They were one or two of the obligatory corny lines ("Sofia, your hair looks just like starlight"), but overall it wasn't too bad. The biggest thing that jumped out to me is what the characters accept. Something humongous happens and they just accept it like it's an everyday occurance. I think that in the story this is used to outline the rules of the made-up world.
I would also like to touch on something that was discussed last night. The characters in this movie are not as visually detailed or complex as the backround. I haven't seen a lot of anime films so I don't know if this is typical, but I think that one reason for this is to make the world of the film more real for the audience. The personal interactions of the characters are something that we can get without much difficulty because we can relate to them. However, we don't know the rules or the normalicies of the world that this film takes place in. For this reason the backround is given more detail and has a higher artistic quality visually than the characters. Or I could just have no idea what I'm talking about.