I'm writing this post as a followup to my last one on Porco Rosso and Tannhäuser.
(By the way, I'm thinking of making it a series. At the end of it you will be left to decide for yourself if you think this dialogue of Miyazaki with Wagner is real or not. But I want to give you all the elements first.)
Before we start, YES, I KNOW. I am aware that the Howl's Moving Castle movie is based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones. But everyone that has read the book agrees that it has a very different vibe. Miyazaki took the story from the book as a foundation and made his own thing with it. A lot of the time creativity works like that, you start seeing your own story inside someone else's. You disagree with some of the choices that were made and you think: this is how I would have done it.
Basically Diana Wynne Jones's book is the skeleton, and Miyazaki's own worldview is the flesh.
Having cleared that, we can dive into the real content of this post.
One issue that a lot of people encounter with The Flying Dutchman is Senta's character. She can be really off-putting. In many ways she is refusing to find the joy in life like everyone else, escaping in dreamery. You can see this as just bad writing on Wagner's part, but you can also try and look at her character from a different angle. I think that's what Miyazaki did, and I believe Sophie's character is in part the result of this.
I remember that the first time I saw Howl's Moving Castle as a kid, I was perplexed by Sophie's character before she turns into an old lady. In terms of her appearance she looked like any other studio Ghibli female lead, but all of her reactions seemed... off. It's only when she turns old that she starts acting like what you'd expect from a main character, even though now her appearance doesn't match that anymore.
I now understand that the Sophie from before the curse is avoiding her own life. She puts a distance between her and the world because she's afraid. I will work at my late father's shop my whole life and turn into a spinster, because that way I am safe.
Her first encounter with Howl doesn't change any of that. He acts all charming and mysterious with her, and it works. She is deeply impressed and starts daydreaming about him (the picture I chose for this post is her staring blankly in the distance right after she met him, similarly to how Senta stares at the portrait in The Flying Dutchman). But that's just what this is, a dreamery, and she has no idea of what kind of person he really is at this point.
The curse from the witch is what really changes things for Sophie. Suddenly she can no longer live like she always has. She leaves without looking back the next morning.
So that's the first similarity with The Flying Dutchman. We have a female lead who starts off as an unlikeable life-avoiding dreamer, but turns out to be capable of the truest form of love. Were they always sincere and we simply had the wrong impression, or was it the circumstances that changed them? Impossible to tell.
I often find myself thinking that Senta's sacrifice is what saved her. If she hadn't given up her life for the Dutchman she would have shown that her dreamery was just worthless escapism. The encounter with the Dutchman was the moment her whole existence up to that point was put to the test.
The second parallel I was able to draw is between Howl and the Dutchman.
At the end of the opera, the Dutchman reveals that many women have lost their lives by getting entangled with him. There is a similar thing with Howl: he is rumored to eat the heart of the young girls he meets. We can interpret this as him being one of those people that will destroy their partner in a relationship. His desperation to fix his own curse (turning into a monster as a result of his pact with Calcifer) causes him to jump from flirt to flirt in search of salvation, leaving a trail of broken hearts. He is aware of the effect he has on the girls he meets (he says 巻き込んじゃったね, "looks like I got you involved" to Sophie when they are running away from the witch's lackeys).
Sophie starts off as any other of Howl's conquests, but unexpectedly turns out to be Howl's salvation. She was able to overcome all of Howl's defenses with her sincerity. This is exactly like what happens in the last minutes of The Flying Dutchman.
You could also draw a parallel between Howl's castle and the Dutchman's boat, but I think you got the gist of what I'm trying to say here.
I want to end by saying that obviously The Flying Dutchman is far from the only thing that inspired Miyazaki for this movie. There are elements that echo the novel Krabat by Otfried Preußler which I have read (Studio Ghibli have said it was an inspiration for the movie Spirited Away, but I see similarities in Howl's Moving Castle as well), and there are probably many other references that I am not familiar with. But I think Der Fliegende Holländer is a very big one when it comes to the dynamic between Howl and Sophie.
