Hayao Miyazaki

Films by Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki are usually characterised as children's movies. It's true that children love the colourful creatures and magical stories that make up his work. But there's more to them than that.

In a somewhat surrealistic way, works such as My Neighbour Totoro and Laputa: Castle in the Sky explore the mindscape of being young - all of youth's dreams, hopes and disappointments. Like the fairy tales that sometimes inspire them, Miyazaki's characters and stories are ripe for Freudian analysis. And later films such as Princess Mononoke don't seem to have been written with children in mind at all.

Howl's Moving Castle, Miyazaki's follow-up to the internationally acclaimed Spirited Away, is his most sophisticated film yet. The story, which focuses on a young magician who doesn't want to fight for his king in a war, is complex. The characters can't be defined as either heroes or villains. Instead, the wizards, witches, servants and spirits that make up the vast cast reflect all the contradictions of real people. In Howl's Moving Castle, everyone is muddling through in a world divided by war, and no one can find an easy solution to their problems. Miyazaki's cartoon creations seem more human than the characters in many live action films.

Miyazaki's earlier work can often be described as surreal. But Howl's Moving Castle, which is based on a novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones, is more a work of magic realism. The setting is a fictional 18th-century city in which magic, witches and sorcerers co-exist with shopkeepers and average people.

Miyazaki builds a system of interweaving interests: a young woman is aged by a spell and falls in love with Howl, the errant young wizard trying to avoid being drafted; a royal sorceress wants to use him for her own Machiavellian ends; and so on. Instead of pitting his characters against each other, Miyazaki delves deep inside them to discover the humanity and compassion that lies within.

Miyazaki is something of an enigma. He never gives interviews or attends film festivals. A well-known workaholic, the 63-year-old director prefers to closet himself away in his Tokyo-based Studio Ghibli, writing, drawing and directing his films.