That said, I can't recommend the film highly enough, since bad Miyazaki is still leagues better than anyone else. Until ''Howl's Moving Castle" starts collapsing under its own weight, it touches on deep wellsprings of myth and fairy tale, and it features one of the more refreshing heroines in modern movies: a girl who is magically transformed into an old lady and decides she likes it. Even after the film devolves into busy shards of private meaning, many of those shards are worth keeping.
One caveat: While ''Castle" will be showing at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and the Kendall Square in both an English-language dub and a subtitled Japanese print (check theater listings for specific times), only the former was made available for preview by Disney, the film's distributor. Because critics weren't able to see the original version, it's impossible to tell whether the translation is at fault. My guess is that it's not, and that the dense layers of symbolism and archetype that overwhelm the story are the filmmaker's doing. (The Loews Boston Common will show only the dubbed version.)
''Castle" takes place in deepest Miyazaki-land: a vaguely European, vaguely late-19th-century world of Victorian architecture, outlying villages, and futuristic airships hovering against mountainous landscapes. The local bogeyman is a young mystic-noble named Howl (voiced by Christian Bale or Takuya Kimura, depending on which version you're seeing), who lives in a ramshackle mansion that traverses the countryside on giant chicken feet. Right there is a detail even the gurus at Pixar couldn't come up with.
Howl is rumored to tear the hearts out of young women, but an adolescent hat maker named Sophie (Emily Mortimer/Chieko Baisho) isn't scared, even after she bumps into him one dark and stormy night and the handsome wizard takes her for a walk on air, the better to escape several menacing black glop-creatures. Sophie knows she's too plain-looking to attract Howl's interest.
