Whimiscal wizardry and war drama

Rating: 8/10 (5 March 2005)

After the Oscar-winning Sprited Away by Hayou Miyazaki, the skates are high for his next animated feature. His adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones' 2001 book Howl's Moving Castle is no doubt an unrivaled animated feature featuring sorcery and wizards against the backdrop of war and a sweet romance.
While the animation is lively and the effects are stunning, the whimsical adaptation suffered from too much layering of plot. There may be occasions where one may be lost in the plot. Though this definitely does not affect my enjoyment of the movie, I thought it would have benefited from better continuity. I have not read the original book but it's surely not an easy task to bring a book to life through the painstaking process of animating every single frame.