Howl's Moving Castle
dir. Hayao Miyazaki
Opens Fri June 10.

My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke-when it comes to animation gods, there's Hayao Miyazaki, and then there's everybody else. Although reportedly considering retirement after completing the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, Miyazaki was apparently intrigued enough by the prospect of adapting a novel by children's author Diana Wynne Jones to return to the drawing board. (Literally, in his case, as he generally personally pens the lion's share of animation in his films.) Now that the collaboration has finally made its way to the States, the results show that the material might actually have been too perfect a match for the director's patented sensibilities. For the first time, the Master's wondrous imagination feels slightly... familiar.

Set within a timeless village replete with steamboats and fluttering airships, the story follows a workaholic teen yearning for something different. After being transformed into an elderly lady by a jealous witch's spell, she falls in with a handsome, vain wizard who roams the countryside inside a clanking RV of a castle. This is all well and good from a fantasy standpoint, but it dovetails a little too neatly with the filmmaker's previous explorations of nature duking it out with society.

Thankfully, the small details prove more than capable of overcoming any narrative rut. Pixar chief John Lassiter, handling the English adaptation, gets terrific vocal performances from the likes of Christian Bale, Lauren Bacall, and Emily Mortimer. (Heck, even Billy Crystal, as a cute lil' shtick-dispensing fire demon, doesn't chafe nearly as much as usual.) Against both the acting and the director's incredibly detailed curlicues-bad-guy blobs sporting identical bowler hats, a perfectly designed dog with a smoker's cough that I could watch for days-the nagging plot Xeroxing ceases to matter much in the long run. After all, even Zeus probably had a bit of an off day now and then.