Japanese animation artist and director, Hayao Miyazaki, won an Oscar for Best Animated Film for Spirited Away, an extraordinary tour-de-force of imaginative storytelling with continually mesmerising design and colour.

Well, perhaps it was not a tour-de-force because he also made Princess Mononoke in 1997 and now seems to have outdone himself with the imaginative creativity of Howl’s Moving Castle.

The plot comes from a British children’s author, Diana Wynne Jones. It seems somewhat culturally odd (as it did in the equally impressive Japanese animation film, Steam Boy) that a Japanese artist would take an English story and bring it to life. Not that it looks particularly English. Howl’s Castle (which one writer imaginatively described as part Terry Gilliam, part Hieronymus Bosch) floats over European landscapes and cities. We are in a fairyland, but one that is peopled not only by the nice but un prepossessing Sophie (who is transformed into an old woman) and Heen the dog, but by witches and Madame Suliman the sorceress and the demon, Calcifer, let alone the mysterious Howl himself.

On the one hand, you have the sensible town. On the other, you have the hovering castle with its bizarre staircases and fireplaces, sinister and happy rooms. Trying to put this altogether with the adventures of Sophie and Howl, requires constant attention. And then there is the war. The film makes a great deal of the destruction wrought by deadly aircraft and bombings. So, on the one hand again, you are in the 19th century and then, on the other, you are in the 20th. It’s a great temptation to describe the film as a creative phantasmagoria – so, why not?

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