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	Howl’s Moving Castle Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Written by Hayao Miyazaki, Cindy Davis Hewitt, and Donald H. Hewitt based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones. With the voices of Christian Bale, Billy Crystal, Jean Simmons, Emily Mortimer, Lauren Bacall, and Blythe Danner. A Buena Vista Pictures release (119 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Kendall Square, and the Circle/Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

IN THE ANIMATED WORLDS of Hayao Miyazaki, the border between the domestic and the magical, between the everyday and the astounding, lies no further away than the nearest broom closet or backyard. A fusion of Disney and David Lynch, Miyazaki is the master of ecstatic metamorphoses, uncanny changes springing from the humdrum into the realms of the grotesque and adorable. In Howl’s Moving Castle, however, his protean pace slows almost to DreamWorks level. Maybe he’s constrained by the equally busy imagination of Diana Wynne Jones, on whose novel of the same title the film is fitfully based. Or maybe it’s the borschty voice of Billy Crystal as fire demon Calcifer in this English-language version. Maybe the story is too magical: it takes place in an enchanted setting to begin with, the kingdom of Ingary, leaving little in the way of the mundane to contrast with the more baroque sorcery to come.

As in his 2001 film Spirited Away, Miyazaki’s heroine is a young girl bored with her life of domestic limitations. In this case, though, young Sophie (Emily Mortimer) gets spirited away not by her curiosity but by her passivity. The Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall), a Cruella De Vil sporting an extra 300 pounds, enters Sophie’s hat store and, disgusted with the wares, turns her into a 90-year-old woman. Yet the spell doesn’t disguise Sophie so much as reveal her true nature; she’s impelled to set out and seek her fortune. That comes in the form of the Wizard Howl (Christian Bale), a baby-faced mage whose peripatetic castle is further complicated by a front door that whose address depends on the color the knob is turned to. Howl, it’s clear, is a man unwilling to commit. The Witch of the Waste pursues him, the kingdom wants to enlist him into its nightmarish wars, but you suspect his greatest danger will come from the ornery old Sophie (Jean Simmons) and her domesticating powers.

That’s a simplification of the film’s phantasmagoria — though not as breathtakingly convoluted as Spirited Away, Castle meanders down many mythic blind alleys. But Miyazaki’s precise, otherworldly images save the film from contrivance. A town of gaily colored marzipan surfaces not unlike those of Shrek 2 is a veil for images both nightmarish and familiar. Fleets of flying warships reminiscent of H.G. Wells fill the sky, and a turnip-headed scarecrow hops along the road on its long stick, insisting on revealing its true form.