Once again there is still room for meaning in the world of charming, animated fantasy.

Rating: 8/10 (9 October 2010)

Director Hayao Miyazaki took Diana Wynne Jones's novel as a basis for his follow-up to Oscar-winner Spirited Away (2001), but adds in his own overriding themes - man's relationship to nature, the futility of war, and the joy of flight. The natural world is beautifully represented as in his previous films, with some absolutely breathtaking mountain and lakeside landscapes. The finest creation of the film, though, is the Castle itself, a cross between Baba Yaga's hut, a Heath Robinson contraption, and one of Terry Gilliam's strange hybrid hens from Monty Python's Flying Circus. The film won a clutch of awards in Japan and overseas, including an Oscar nomination. Howl's Moving Castle is essentially a love story. Talk of magic being used to shield palaces while innocent villages are bombed clues viewers into the deliberate parallels being drawn with the Gulf War of 2003, a conflict that enraged the pacifist Miyazaki during the film's production. If there's one criticism, it's that the overly neat happy ending feels like a cheat after the previous seriousness of the war strand of the story. Yet it remains a complex, rewarding film graced with the acutely observed, colourful and imaginative artwork that is the hallmark of Japan's greatest living national treasure of animation.