Earwig and the Witch (2020)

-Written by John Cajio.

It would seem that director Gorō Miyazaki only gets every other film he makes right. His debut, Tales from Earthsea in 2006, was a bust. His followup, 2011’s From Up on Poppy Hill, is a singular delight that I will forever recommend. Nine years pass and Miyazaki’s team at Studio Ghibli releases a film that’s dead on arrival. Earwig and the Witch does have a few things to offer, but they are held back by a flat story with flat characters, horrid animation and art direction, and uninspiring music. 

This is Studio Ghibli’s first (and I hope only) film to be fully animated with computer-generated 3D images. There isn’t a single hand drawn frame in sight. Studio Ghibli is not a total stranger to CGI. The studio has incorporated CGI into virtually every film since 1994’s Pom Poko, though it wasn’t until 1997’s Princess Mononoke that they started doing the CGI in-house. My previous writings on the studio’s films have frequently commented on the minor distraction that I find they personally cause because of the discrepancy in how smoothly the CGI elements animate relative to the hand drawn elements. I know that I may be in the minority on that point. 

Earwig and the Witch released in 2020, but looks more like an early Pixar film. Cut scenes in early PlayStation 3-era games had more texture, detail, and soul than what we see here. Backgrounds are flat and boring. Character designs are simple, uninspired and lack detail and expression. There is a black cat familiar in the film named Thomas (Gaku Hamada/Dan Stevens) that frequently looks more like a black blob than a feline. Jiji, the black cat in Kiki’s Delivery Service (drawn entirely by hand and released in 1989), is far more detailed, expressive, and catlike than anything we see from Thomas here in Earwig and the Witch.

The story is flat and seems to offer up the wrong message to its intended primary audience. Earwig (Kokoro Hirasawa/Taylor Paige Henderson) is an orphaned girl that has a grand old time at St. Morwald’s Home for Children. Everyone, including the adults, basically does what she wants and she is treated like a queen. One day, however, she is adopted against her will by a strange couple, Bella Yaga (Shinobu Terajima/Vanessa Marshall) and Mandrake (Etsushi Toyokawa/Richard E. Grant). It turns out Mandrake is a powerful demon who does not wish to be disturbed whilst pursuing surprisingly mundane activities, and Bella Yaga is a very busy witch in need of an extra pair of hands while crafting her potions and spells—which is where Earwig comes into play. Both Mandrake and Bella Yaga are one note characters. There are sparks of life in Mandrake that are short-lived and ultimately don’t do enough to adequately develop his character. All Bella Yaga does is abuse and threaten the hell out of Earwig (and her black cat familiar, Thomas). When we finally get to the end of the mercifully brief 82-minute film, it (a) quite abruptly ends just as it actually starts to finally develop something interesting, (b) quite easily paints Earwig in an unlikeable light, which is probably not what the filmmakers were aiming for. There is an interesting B-plot buried in the rubble of this film’s demise, but it’s not explored to any depth, which is a shame because it would have offered the viewer something positive to really latch onto. Instead, it’s abandoned in much the same way as our proffered protagonist.

The music by composer Satoshi Takebe is as one-note and uninspired as the rest of the film is. Inspired by rock operas, the rock heavy music sounds vapid and vacuous, lacking depth throughout. The music is as empty as the film is. That might not entirely be his fault. One thing that can likely be put at his feet is the fact that the excellent vocal performance by Kacey Musgraves is so low in the mix as to render it practically unintelligible.

Earwig and the Witch is a rare miss for Studio Ghibli. However, if my prediction at the start of my review is correct, I will be looking forward to Gorō Miyazaki’s next film. Until then, we have to suffer with this stinker. Earwig and the Witch is a film that sucks. 

Directed by Gorō Miyazaki. 

Written by Keiko Niwa and Emi Gunji.

Starring: Kokoro Hirasawa/Taylor Paige Henderson, Shinobu Terajima/Vanessa Marshall, Etsushi Toyokawa/Richard E. Grant, Gaku Hamada/Dan Stevens, etc.

2/10 = AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS (IT SUCKS)