Rolling hills and tidy city streets give way to whirling celestial battlefields, and moments of exquisite tenderness alternate with scenes of violence and destruction. His images have a richness and delicacy that is almost too much to take in at one viewing, as the mood shifts from pastoral quiet to operatic spectacle. Miyazaki's capacity for narrative invention has yet to find its limit, and this movie is filled with strange and marvelous creatures and incidents, some inspired by the book, others entirely of his own devising.

There is certainly plenty of adventure in store. At first horrified by the change, she comes to embrace it as a liberation from anxiety, fear and self-consciousness, and discovers in herself a new zest for adventure. His heroine, Sophie, starts out as a shy 18-year-old hat maker, but then a witch's curse transforms her into a stooped, gray-haired 90-year-old. Miyazaki encountered in Japanese translation a few years ago, allows him to combine these two types into a single character. During their journeys, they often encounter wise older women who sometimes serve as foils, sometimes as mother figures. Miyazaki's heroines tend to be plucky young women who combine guileless decency with tough-mindedness.

For newcomers to his world, 'Howl's Moving Castle' is a fitting introduction to one of modern cinema's great enchanters. 'Howl's Moving Castle,' freely adapted from a children's fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones, is the latest animated tour de force from Hayao Miyazaki, the director of, among other masterpieces, 'Princess Mononoke,' 'My Neighbor Totoro' and 'Spirited Away.' Admirers of his work, which is wildly imaginative, emotionally intense and surpassingly gentle, will find much to appreciate in this film because it demonstrates, once again, his visual ingenuity and his sensitivity as a storyteller.

Howls moving castle movie visuals