Hayao Miyazaki's latest, Howl's Moving Castle, Establishes Director as Reigning Monarch of Imaginative Realm

You don't need to be well versed in Japanese anime or in Hayao Miyazaki's formidable oeuvre-or be a child, for that matter-to appreciate the magic within this auteur's latest film, Howl's Moving Castle .

Miyazaki's work is indeed childlike: but only in the sense that it draws out the innocent and pure in his audience, stripping away its layers of cynicism and bewitching it with his simple, yet splendid visual compositions.

One of these is the charming rural town where wizards, sorcerers, demons, and witches serve the King along with devoted human subjects. Here also lives the dreamy but resourceful young heroine Sophie (voiced by Emily Mortimer), whose dead father and fickle family have left her in charge of his hat shop.

Not having learned the lesson that the customer is always right, she mouths off to an imposing matron who walks in after closing hours one night and who turns out to be none other than the glamorous, if morbidly obese, Wicked Witch of the Waste (a wonderfully nasty Lauren Bacall) whose dripping chins and sagging jowls are Miyazaki at his caricaturist's best.

Needless to say, the witch is not one to put up with smart talk: she promptly places a curse upon Sophie that the latter cannot speak of. Within seconds Sophie is transformed from plain-Jane young girl to wrinkled ninety-year-old woman (Jean Simmons), admittedly one still sprightly despite her stooped back.

But looks aren't everything, and Sophie's shy personality likewise morphs into one with a slyer sense of humor, a more adventurous outlook on life, once given the strange liberties that age, if only superficially speaking, can confer.

Knowing that she cannot remain in the town in her current state, she packs up, leaves, and quickly finds work in the eponymous castle as a maid-of-all-trades: cook, housekeeper, babysitter. And before long she meets the owner of the castle, the vainglorious Howl (Christian Bale): a regular Casanova of a wizard who has been summoned to the King's service and must decide whether to fight a mysterious royal war or his own demons-or both.

In time, Granny Sophie and Howl accumulate a number of motley stowaways: the unmasked Wicked Witch of the Waste, a loyal scarecrow (affectionately christened Turnip-Head after his mute bulb of a brain) whose unfailing devotion to Sophie is established early on, and an old wheezing messenger-dog whose role is more to provide the requisite cute-animal comic relief than anything else.

Another trusty, albeit more crucial, sidekick is Calcifer (voiced by Billy Crystal, hamming up the role to full effect), whose intimate ties to Howl provide the backbone and power source of the castle.

Comparisons will be drawn-most likely have already been drawn-between the movie and the castle itself: the rickety, lumbering contraption composed of disparate pieces that somehow manages to cohere with a little bit of magic and a little bit of heart.

Somehow all the disjointed details of the film, all of its logical and chronological inconsistencies, manage to link up with each other in a way that makes sense-as far as a Miyazaki movie can really make sense, that is. Both castle and movie are crammed with unexpected discoveries and random surprises, like Easter eggs hidden in a sprawling field.

The lovely, sweeping score-it makes you want to stretch your arms out and dance, if not fly-complements the epic tale with a perfect and moving grace. In each landscape Miyazaki's wondrous visual palette conjures up a blend of the organic and the mechanical, evoking everything from the fire-and-brimstone hell of a war-torn battlefield to a veritable Garden of Eden filled with flowers, drenched in serene pastel and falling stars.

Admittedly, the film does tend to buckle-though it always catches itself before imminent collapse-under the torrent of sheer possibility. Certain characters' motivations and their ensuing actions remain murky even after extensive pondering in the context of the entire film, to say nothing of the premise of the war between the neighboring kingdoms.

What momentous feud, what age-old curse, could possibly warrant such destruction and disruption of peaceful civilian life? Perhaps the inexplicably flimsy nature of this conflict is but a dash of social commentary spooned into the cauldron that is Howl's Moving Castle .

As all-is-right-with-the-world endings go, this one is abrupt-almost makeshift, and consequently almost comical. The snickers are not helped by dialogue that becomes positively cringe-worthy at times, though the actors hold up gamely; collectively they do a laudable job of making dubbing less than odious.

And even though Sophie, once plain and dowdy, does not exactly undergo the painfully predictable metamorphosis into stunning femme fatale , she gives her heart away, as so many others did with unrequited love, to one whose identity everyone will no doubt guess within five minutes.

Screenplay and cheese notwithstanding, the endless marvels in Howl's Moving Castle further confirm Miyazaki as the reigning monarch of an imaginative realm that only Sylvain Chomet ( The Triplets of Belleville ) has yet come close to matching. What can this scatterbrained inventor possibly create next? The world waits eagerly.