might move, which led to the image of a castle on chicken legs. The complex moving castle changes and rearranges itself several times throughout the movie in response to Howl's eccentricity and the various situations. The basic structure of the castle consists of more than 80 elements including turrets, a wagging tongue, cogwheels and chicken legs, that were rendered as digital objects. Mamoru Hosoda of Toei Animation was originally selected to direct the film, but quit the project after Studio Ghibli's executives rejected many of his concept ideas. The film was shelved until Miyazaki took over. The project resumed with production in February 2003. It was scheduled to be completed in the spring of 2004, and released in the summer of that year. Miyazaki went to Colmar and Riquewihr in Alsace, France, to study the architecture and the surroundings for the setting of the film. Additional inspiration came from the concepts of future technology in Albert Robida's work. Commentators have stated that Miyazaki's imagery was influenced by his fondness for the "illusion art" of 19th century Europe. Suzuki stated that unlike many Western films, in which the imagery went "from the general [to] the specific," Miyazaki employed a uniquely Japanese approach, frequently beginning with a very specific image and moving from there. However, Howl's Moving Castle, and Miyazaki films in general, have a focus on realistic imagery in a way that other anime films do not. The film was produced digitally, but the original backgrounds were drawn by hand and painted prior to being digitized, and the characters were also drawn by hand prior to scanning them into the computer. The 1400 storyboard cuts for the film were completed on 16 January 2004. On 25 June the in-between animation was completed and checking was completed on 26 June. Studio Ghibli used digital technology to run many copies of the still portions of a scene, a process which avoids inconsistencies between various still frames, but can create an impression of artificiality. Therefore, the studio chose to manually retouch the digitally altered images, recreating the "feel" of a hand-drawn image. Like with the other Studio Ghibli movies, the film was co-produced with other companies, which were Tokuma Shoten, the Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Mitsubishi and Toho. Comparisons between film and novel The film has several differences from the novel, partly due to the different requirements of the two