Up in the Air

this bold house: The title character of Howl's Moving Castle.

Hayao Miyazaki rewrites the rules with the dizzying Howl's Moving Castle.

by Sam Adams

Clanking through the mist like a mechanical boar, the titular stronghold of Howl's Moving Castle doesn't look much like a castle at all. But then, if you've seen one of Hayao Miyazaki's creations before, you know that normal rules, even the rules of fantasy, don't apply. Miyazaki's is a world of sudden shifts, where a heroic character may suddenly turn comically vain, or a wooden door may open onto an inky void rather than a cobblestone street. The dislocations in Howl's Moving Castle, adapted by Miyazaki from Diana Wynne Jones' novel, are sudden and unheralded enough to earn the Japanese animation master the title of honorary surrealist. But Miyazaki isn't interested in the jolts of surrealism so much as imbuing his audience with the idea that reality can change at any moment, and change back just as quickly.

As dislocations go, Castle starts with a doozy. Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer), a prim, responsible young woman who makes hats in a village shop, is accosted by soldiers on a lonely street when a dashing, cocksure fellow with a mane of blond hair comes to her rescue. She's stunned, flattered and a little embarrassed by his attentions, but there's no time to savor the moment. No sooner have the soldiers marched off like marionettes than a swarm of oily black blobs in straw boaters emerge from the walls, and the mysterious man has whisked her up into the clouds, eventually depositing her on a convenient balcony before whooshing off into the sky.

It doesn't take Sophie long to figure out that her mystery man is the wizard Howl (Christian Bale), whose castle she has glimpsed from her window. Unfortunately, she's not the only one to realize whom she's met with. That night, as she is closing up shop, a massive, gelatinous woman bars the door, and, after insulting Sophie's "tacky" appearance, turns her into a wizened crone, now with the voice of Jean Simmons. The Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall) does not take kindly to those who consort with her enemies.

In truth, the wastes, where the aged Sophie now ventures in search of Howl, don't look like such a bad place — a little overcast, perhaps, the mountain brush a little scraggly, but far more hospitable than the raging inferno her small town is about to become. Sophie's predicament is a thorny one, but it doesn't amount to a hill of beans next to the fact that her world is on the brink of war.

In Howl's Moving Castle, war comes without warning or explanation. (A brief, overheard reference early in the film is apparently an addition to the American version.) It's not even entirely clear who's at war with whom, although echoes of both world wars turn up on occasion: Sophie's clothing is vaguely Victorian, written languages are English and German, and the incendiary bombs which drop on her village could evoke the Blitz or the firebombing of Dresden (or, just as easily, Tokyo). The story has no fixed time or place, but Miyazaki doesn't want to venture so far from the real world that his terrain becomes unrecognizable. Although the destroyers that dispense them look like armor-plated trout, bombs still look like bombs, and their effect is no different.

Sophie's adventures, which eventually take in an apprentice wizard named Markl (Josh Hutcherson) and a garrulous blob of living fire named Calcifer (Billy Crystal, yukking it up), never take on a political cast, but they encompass the war all the same. Attempting to restore her youth as well as save Howl from his own literal and metaphorical demons, she visits the palace of the king, where his security chief, Suliman (Blythe Danner), has summoned all the kingdom's witches and wizards, including Howl, to report for duty. Howl, who has been turning himself into a bird to fight the wizards who have turned themselves over to the cause, is paradoxically too cowardly to report himself, so he sends Sophie to pose as his mother, a ruse that pays off when it emerges that Suliman is more interested in stripping wizards of their powers than using them in the fight. Indeed, although the war does turn out to have at least a viable pretext, it's left open that Suliman may have exploited the conflict for her own ends.

At once leisurely paced and briskly plotted, Howl's Moving Castle offers less visceral excitement than some of Miyazaki's earlier films; you're as likely to be enchanted by dappled light on a wooden wall as any fantastic beastie. At the end of two hours, you feel as if you've lived a massive and somewhat draining experience, as if your hair, like Sophie's, might have turned white in the interim. The film has the impressionistic beauty of any other Miyazaki, but it's always darkened by the knowledge that a bomb might drop.

Howl's Moving Castle Adapted and directed by Hayao Miyazaki A Buena Vista release Opens Friday at Ritz East recommended