Featuring the voice of Kate Winslet. Rating unavailable

Animation director Hiromasa Yonebayashi was part of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli before starting his own outfit, Studio Ponoc, and launching it here, as a follow-up to his solo features, The Secret World of Arrietty and When Marnie Was There. While he’s rightly seen as carrying the anime torch for the now-retired master, Yonebayashi lacks that certain something—the edge of offbeat experimentation, perhaps—that made Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro international hits.

Based on The Little Broomstick, a 1971 children’s book by English author Mary Stewart, Mary and the Witch’s Flower fuses elements of Kiki’s Delivery Service with the Harry Potter series and other magic-academy tales. Stewart, who also wrote The Moon-Spinners, the basis for a classic Disney movie, specialized in plucky young heroines who must overcome loneliness and tremendous odds to prevail in perilous situations. The Mary of the title here isn’t alone long enough for that to matter.

Voiced in the A-list English edition by Ruby Barnhill, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s The BFG, Mary’s one of those temporarily parentless tweens you find so often in Japanese cartoons. In this case, the girl, who vehemently despises her own red hair, has gone ahead to start school near her great-aunt (Lynda Baron), whose expansive country garden borders on mysterious woods. Her very first outing has her encountering strange blue flowers exuding a sticky substance that somehow gives wings to an abandoned broom. Quick as you can say “Dumbledore”, she’s transported to a mountain lair that actually holds a secret college of advanced witchery.

The place is overseen by the seemingly bubbly Madame Mumblechook and absent-minded Doctor Dee, voiced by Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent, no less. Ewen Bremner and Rasmus Hardiker are also aboard for this riotous mix of regional U.K. accents, and Louis Ashbourne Serkis—son of Andy, by golly—is a local boy who attempts to help Mary but must instead be rescued by her. There’s delightful scene-setting in the first half of this 100-minute adventure, with special attention to colourful line work. But after Madame realizes Mary’s not a legit witch but an accidental horticulturist, it turns into one noisy chase scene after another, and the occult elements fade. That makes this quasi-Ghibli fare mostly suitable for youngsters to watch—without their parents, of course.