Howl's Moving Castle

Howl's Moving Castle is Miyazaki's loose adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones' beloved novel — a film of extraordinary beauty and deliberate narrative opacity that works better as a visual and emotional experience than as a conventional story. Sophie, a young hat-maker cursed to old age by a witch, finds refuge in the magical moving castle of the vain, glamorous wizard Howl, becoming his unlikely housekeeper as a war escalates around the magical world they inhabit. The animation is among Ghibli's most technically ambitious: the castle itself — a clanking, improbable assemblage of chimneys and towers — is a triumph of mechanical imagination. The film's anti-war sentiment, more explicit here than in most Miyazaki works, is woven through the visual fabric rather than stated directly, which is characteristic of Miyazaki at his most artistically confident. Hisaishi's score is one of his finest.