Howl’s Moving Castle.

I’m a big fan of the movies of film director Hayao Miyazaki, but just got around to seeing his last release, Howl’s Moving Castle. After the triumph of his previous film, Spirited Away, it was a disappointment, although it’s still a strong film when compared to the rest of the field – animated or otherwise.

Sophie is a 19-year-old girl working in her family’s hat shop, but after an odd encounter with a handsome young wizard in the streets of her town, she’s visited by the Witch of the Waste (voiced by Lauren Bacall), who casts a spell that turns her into an elderly woman. She sets out in search of the wizard Howl and his “moving castle,” a building that walks on mechanical legs, powered by the fire demon Calcifer (Billy Crystal). Her hope is that Howl can reverse the aging spell cast on her, but it turns out that Howl and Calcifer both have spell problems of their own.

Howl’s moves along well until its final quarter, at which point the plot becomes needlessly complex and ends up in a horribly clichéd and quick resolution. It’s a shame, because the first three-fourths of the movie is strong and the writers were unafraid to deviate from the normal paths of animated films. (The movie was adapted from a young-adult novel by Diana Wynne Jones.) Howl’s starts out as an action film, then settles into a more deliberate pace to try to explore the psychological drama behind the characters’ various curses, but never fulfills that promise before returning to action-film pacing and rushing to the finish.

As with all Miyazaki films, Howl’s has more than its share of arresting imagery and sheer inventiveness. The design of the moving castle is phenomenal, and it threatens in some ways to become a character in its own right (and perhaps it should have). The landscape scenes are gorgeous and rich, with layers and textures that are more associated with CG on these shores. The folks at Pixar who oversaw the English dubbing made a pair of inspired choices of voice actors in Crystal, who does a sort of poor man’s Robin Williams/Genie with Calcifer, and Lauren Bacall, whose voice is perfect for the evil witch who turns out to be something a bit deeper than that.

If you’re not already a Miyazaki fan, the place to start is with his masterwork, Spirited Away, probably the best non-CG animated movie ever made. I also highly recommend My Neighbor Totoro, which is a little more of a children’s story than most Miyazaki films but makes the application of the word “charming” to any other film seem fraudulent. I also recommend Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke, as well as Whisper of the Heart, a romantic film for which Miyazaki wrote the screenplay but which was directed by a colleague of his, Yoshifumi Kondo, who died just three years after its release.