Howl's Moving Castle Review

The castle is the best character in the picture, a lurching heap of turrets, chimneys and chicken legs that wheezes across the hills with a personality no dialogue has to explain. Miyazaki animates it with an attention to weight and mechanism that almost no computer would bother to supply, and the flying sequences, especially Howl walking Sophie through the air above a market square, are among the loveliest images in his work.

Joe Hisaishi's waltz carries more of the romance than the script does. The trouble arrives in the second half, when the war Miyazaki invented for the adaptation simply stops rather than resolves, and Madame Suliman folds up her ambitions in roughly thirty seconds. Diana Wynne Jones wrote a tighter puzzle; the film keeps her curse and discards her plotting.

The English track is uneven too. Christian Bale plays Howl with a soft, wounded vanity that suits the character, and Jean Simmons gives the old Sophie real warmth, but Billy Crystal's Calcifer keeps reaching for a joke the scene has not set up. Watch it for the scarecrow hopping through the rain and for the bacon frying in a fire that talks back.