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Working from an English children's book, anime master Hayao Miyazaki has created a witches-and-wizards tale that's also explicitly modern and antiwar. The setting is a European-looking land with 19th-century cities and clanking, smoke-belching vehicles and primitive aircraft. A senseless war is brewing, and it quickly expands into bombing of civilian targets. Amid all this, Howl's Moving Castle tells a coming-of-age tale in which a young girl leaps all the way to old age as a result of a corpulent witch's curse. This forces her away from home on a quest that quickly becomes complicated and full of fascinating characters. What makes the story especially rich is that so many of the characters evolve: the witch, the handsome wizard, the wizard's boy apprentice. The backstory is too complex for a 119-minute film, but its complexity creates a wonderful air of mystery along with the tale's strange, highly detailed setting. In its design, Howl's Moving Castle takes the Japanese fascination with gingerbready European bric-a-brac such as early 20th century stained glass and pulls out all the stops. The castle itself, a towering conglomeration of "charming" architectural pieces that trudges mechanically around the countryside, is like something Mary Poppins would use to defeat Godzilla. At its heart, Howl the wizard's bedroom is a monument to excess, literally bristling with colorful magic geegaws. Yet nostalgia is not this movie's game, as the world that invented steam power and chemical dyes uses technology to destroy itself in increasingly grim battles. Don't expect to follow it all, but do go along for the ride. And don't be afraid of the English dub, which despite mismatched accents is very good overall.