glorious visuals

Rating: 8/10 (27 August 2006)

What do you get when you combine the master Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki ("My Neighbor Totoro," "Spirited Away") with the British sci-fi novelist Diana Wynne Jones? The answer is "Howl's Moving Castle," an enchanting (if not altogether understandable) animated feature, filled with beauty, imagination and magic.
Sophie is a shy young girl, working in her family's hat shop, who falls under the spell of a witch who turns her into a decrepit old woman. At a loss as to what to do, Sophie decides to leave home and try to find a cure for her condition in the mysterious land of wizards and witches that lies just outside her city. Not long after she arrives, she encounters the mysterious "moving castle," owned by the enigmatic wizard known as Howl, that not only roams freely around the countryside but seems to exist in any number of different dimensions at the same time. It's when she passes through the castle door and discovers what awaits her inside that the really surreal adventure begins.
There's little point in trying to figure out all the fine details of the story, which often feels as if it is being made up as it goes along - and not always in a way that is completely satisfying to those of us who are trying desperately to understand it. Yet, there is a certain fascination in the way the film chooses to defy all the rules of time and space and feels no real compunction to explain how all of it is supposed to work. The movie asks us to merely accept what we are seeing at face value and to go along wherever it is it wants to take us. This is an easy thing to do, primarily because the film's incredible beauty seduces us into accepting the slightly weird alternate reality the movie has set up for us. Although the animators are all Japanese, the characters themselves are Occidental and the film appears to be set sometime in the late Victorian or early Edwardian era of a century ago. The visuals are so exquisite in every detail that it is virtually impossible for us to turn our eyes from the screen even for a split second. Like the best animated films, it transports us to a world that is both utterly fantastic and strangely familiar at the same time.
In bringing the characters to life, the English-language version employs an impressive cast of voices, including veterans Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall and Blythe Danner, along with Billy Crystal, Emily Mortimer and Christian Bale.
With its occasionally incoherent storyline and deliberate pacing, "Howl's Moving Castle" may disappoint and frustrate those accustomed to the more simple, hectic and frenetic animated films churned out regularly by Hollywood. But if you're in the mood for a calmer, more relaxing trip to a world not your own, "Howl's Moving Castle" provides just the right vehicle to take you there.