I have had the Region 2 Japanese DVD of the Miyazaki film Howl’s Moving Castle on preorder from Amazon Japan almost since I’ve been in Japan, and have been looking forward to the day that it would come in the mail to me (it doesn’t help that EVERY store in Japan has a huge display usually with a TV running the same preview on a loop promoting the DVD of this movie), so I was only half surprised when I checked my mailbox today to find that my DVD have finally shipped to me (1 day before its supposed to be for sale) despite the fact that I never got a shipping notice from Amazon Japan. Because I preordered it so early, I was able to get the ‘first pressing bonus’ (a common thing to get with Japanese DVD’s, just think of it as a limited edition item) which was a 1/24 second film cel (that name might sound kinda weird, but really its a film cel that is from a 24 frames-per-second film, thus one cel is 1/24th of a second) encased in acrylic. For the past 3 months I was actually thinking that the film cel was inside of a clear slip cover for the DVD….so I was a little disappointed initially to find it to be a little clear box…but that didn’t last for long. Since I didn’t have very much homework, I was able to go and watch it right after I got it out of the box, in the (surprisingly totally empty) TV room, with only minimal interruptions. The Japanese DVD not only has English subtitles on it, but also the English dub made by Disney, which isn’t have bad. So, since I was doing homework while watching, I decided to watch the dub, and I’ll save the subtitled version for a time when I can pay attention to it fully. Its a good movie, not Miyazaki’s best, but I like it more and more each time I watch it.