Another classic from Studio Ghibli

Rating: 9/10 (9 June 2008)

Once again Hayao Miyazaki has provided us with a beautifully animated film which can be enjoyed by people of most ages; very young children might find one or two scenes a little scary though.
As with all of his films the animation is stunning and the characters are interesting. Once again the main character is a girl, in this case Sophie a young hat maker. One day when she is out she gets slightly harassed by two soldiers but is rescued from this predicament by the wizard Howl who it turns out is fleeing from strange blob-like creatures sent after him by the Witch of the Waste. They escape by flying away from them but soon after the witch visits Sophie in her shop and turns her into an old woman.
After being cursed she heads out in to the wastes where she finds a scarecrow who brings the moving castle of the title to her. The castle is a wonderful creation that is hard to describe, it is a bit like a building that has been constructed by lumping several other buildings together and putting them on legs so it can walk about.
Once inside sits by the fire to get warm and discovers it is no ordinary fire but a fire demon called Calcifer and that it is he who powers the castle after being trapped by Howl in exchange for his heart. Calcifer recognises that Sophie is cursed and offers to beak her spell if she can break his and thus free him.
The castle has a strange door that opens into a variety of places including two cities that are in countries that are at war. In one city they think the wizard Jenkins lives behind the door and in the other they think it is the wizard Pendragon, of course both these are in fact aliases of Howl. Rather awkwardly for Howl both "Jenkins" and "Pendragon" are summoned by the kings of the respective countries to help with the war effort. Obviously there are plenty more things that happen but I don't want to spoiler the whole film.
Howl isn't the standard cartoon hero, in fact he isn't that heroic at all, he is incredibly vain and he wants nothing to do with the war apart from to end it although he does fight against attacking planes.
As one would expect from Hayao Miyazaki there are plenty of exciting flying scenes involving aircraft that could only work in an animated film. I can't really comment on the English voices as I haven't seen the whole film in English, I did however watch a few scenes out of curiosity and they sounded pretty good.