For Fans of Howl's Moving Castle

Sophie spends the first act desperate to be unremarkable. The witch's curse, which turns her old overnight, paradoxically frees her: she stops apologizing for taking up space. Miyazaki is not subtle about this, but he is generous. The film argues that self-possession is its own kind of spell, and that growing into yourself is not a tragedy.

Miyazaki added the war almost entirely himself. In Jones's novel it is minor texture; in the film it presses in from every direction, blimps and bombs appearing whenever the romance threatens to become too comfortable. He was making an antiwar film, he said, at a time when he felt powerless to stop one. That urgency is audible in the score and visible in every shot of the burning sky.

Most people who love the film have never read the source. Jones's Chrestomanci and Howl novels are genuinely sui generis: funny, structurally audacious, and brimming with the kind of magic that follows its own logic rather than a handbook. She invented a corner of British fantasy that nobody else occupies. Castle in the Air and House of Many Ways extend Sophie and Howl's world in directions the film never goes.