Howl’s Moving Castle is, as you’d expect from a Studio Ghibli film, a visual treat. Drawing as much from the Germanic fairytale tradition as from the Japanese, the world of Howl… is an entrancing stylistic fusion. Striding across the hillside on mechanical chicken legs, the eponymous castle is a steampunk take on Baba Yaga’s house. I could watch its proud, whimsical, wheezing strides all day.

The Japanese artistic tradition can be subtle, complex and beautiful. It can also be overwrought, saccharine, shallow and vulgar. Overall, Howl… hewed more closely to the former list, but as with all of the Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen, it occasionally descended into the latter.

When films go well, we often credit the director, the person whose artistic vision has (we suppose) borne fruit. This is, in many ways, a misconception, but it’s a very natural trap to fall into. The artists whom society reveres are individuals: novelists and painters, Kafka and Caravaggio, loners pursuing their dreams in print or oil. Our model of artistry is that of the individual, not of the group.

And yet, when things go wrong, we never fail to see the failings of the group. When I found Howl’s Moving Castle visually trite or badly written, I didn’t blame Hayao Miyazaki—I thought, “Why did the American translators do such a terrible job?” or “I know it’s a children’s film, but a turquoise lake mirroring a perfect sky is a visual cliché that a ten-year-old could have avoided.”

The first point—about translation—is, to me, the more interesting one. I saw a dubbed version of Howl…, something that I generally try to avoid. Dubbing means you lose the original voice acting, and I suspect it also means that the translation of the script suffers, because the rendition needs to fit fairly closely with the speech patterns of the original dialogue.

But translation is not just changing the words from one language into another. Translation is interpretation: the translator tries to convey not just the more basic elements of meaning, but such intangibles as style. Translation is approximation: phrases, words, perhaps even entire concepts may not have a direct equivalent. Above all, translation is imperfect, and imperfection can enter into it through the failings of the human agents who carry it out. Was the script, in places, that bad in the original Japanese, or was it the translation for the English-speaking (which is to say, American) market that did it? Not knowing Japanese, I can’t say.

Why our—or at least my— instincts vary in their allocation of responsibility depending on whether a venture fails or succeeds, I don’t know. Still, something to think about, non?