Film · 2004 · Films · 2000s
Howl's Moving Castle
Scored from 479 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
A young woman named Sophie is cursed by a witch and transformed into an elderly woman. Desperate to break the curse, she seeks refuge in the mysterious wizard Howl's moving castle, which is itself fleeing from a distant war. Working as a cleaning woman in the castle, Sophie becomes entangled in Howl's world of magic and political intrigue.
Howl's Moving Castle is a 2004 fantasy, animation and adventure film directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Takuya Kimura, Sumi Shimamoto and Baisho Chieko head the billed cast. Its country of origin is listed as Japan. It runs 1h 59m. It plays in Japanese. Its certificate is PG.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 479 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 502 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Howl's Moving Castle lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2000s (7,847 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 479.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
