With the inclusion of these two new techniques for scoring, I wanted to take ideas from them and use them where I felt they fitted most relevantly within the clip. When it came to using mickey-mousing, I felt that it may have not fitted with the overall aesthetic of ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ and instead I opted to use sounds synced up with action on screen at different intervals, keeping the influence of mickey-mousing without making it feel too goofy. Whilst ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ is an animation, it addresses themes of war, the process of growing old, family, loss etc and I felt that Mickey-Mousing would take away from these subjects. 

One place where I used some influence from Mickey-mousing is at the beginning of the clip when we see Sophie flying through the sky. During this section she suddenly realises she is flying over her old home town. At this moment, I added a piano playing an Eb7sus4 chord. I wanted this chord to evoke a sense of a past which is both troubled but also missed. The perfect fourth places the chord in a space which leaves it neutral, neither major nor minor and therefore places us between the two. After this moment we get another shot of the town where I used another chord with no clear rooting in the major or minor.    At the end of this section, we see Sophie flying away from the town looking back. Here I used an Fm7 chord. I felt that at this point, using a routing in the minor rather than the ambiguity of something else made sense. This routing in the minor reflects Sophie’s feelings on screen as for her, this may be the last time she’s sees her home town, a reminder of a simpler life where she was not cursed and still a young girl. I think it would be a stretch to call these elements mickey-mousing. However, I do think they hold a similar purpose of matching what we see on screen with music and sound at specific hit points. 

Similarly at the point of the crash, I used spiccato strings to emphasise the point of impact. I would argue this is more similar to Mickey-Mousing then the piano which came earlier as the piano reflect the feelings of Sophie whereas the spiccato strings reflect the action of the crash. 

I felt with this scene it was difficult to find a point in which a leitmotif fitted. Whilst small piano glimmers we see with Sophie’s character do reflect on her character, they do not hold a strong enough theme to be a leitmotif. I decided to try and use a leitmotif for when Howl re-enters the castle at the end of the scene. In its current state, the music that accompanies Howl’s re-entering is too ambiguous to be a leitmotif. However, I feel it could be reinterpreted with slightly different chords to make it a leitmotif, and this point could be a section where the leitmotif returns but creating a more twisted and menacing feeling.