Director Goro Miyazaki set out to make Earwig and the Witch with the intention to encourage children and cheer up adults. The premise seems simple enough: an orphan is adopted by a strange couple, and she is forced to become a witch’s assistant. It sounds like the ideal children’s story rife with mischief and wonder. It is unfortunate, then, that Earwig hardly lives up to its potential.
An adaptation of the novel by Diana Wynne Jones, Earwig is a foray into the world of magical realism. Earwig (Kokoro Hirasawa) the titular ten-year-old, and her foster parents, live in a magical cottage settled in the middle of an unsuspecting English town. Bella Yaga (Shinobu Terajima), the imposing and domineering witch, recruits Earwig to be an extra pair of hands in her workshop. Earwig sees this as an opportunity to manipulate the situation to her advantage; she concocts a plan to convince Bella Yaga to teach her magic. They also live with the Mandrake (Etsushi Toyokawa), a lanky, looming presence in the house that Earwig is threatened time and time again to never disturb, lest she face his wrath.
Although the story seems charming at first glance, there are numerous problems that make Earwig’s adventure disappointing. A glaring issue is that of the animation style. It is Studio Ghibli’s first endeavor into three-dimensional animation. Like many people on the internet, I chafed at my first glance at the film when the trailer was released. However, I remained optimistic and hoped that this new look would be a gateway to a delightful aesthetic. This was not the case.
Earwig’s animation is simple and plain. The characters’ proportions and designs are an uncomfortable marrying of the traditional 2-D Ghibli style with forced 3-D realism. The result is a film full of oddly proportioned, at times grotesque looking, characters that feel stiff and lifeless. They’re detached, almost like mannequins. Their expressions hardly change, and when they do, it seems like their bugging eyes or large smiles are being restrained by the limits of real human anatomy. It is a cartoon that doesn’t seem to want to admit it is a cartoon. Any fantastical displays or illusions fall flat and muted.
Beyond the distracting nature of the subpar animation, the story is not much to get invested in either. The pacing is horribly slow and redundant, focusing mostly on Earwig’s tasks under Bella Yaga’s hand. The film cannot decide whether or not Earwig’s situation is a Cinderella story of sorts. Her tasks are menial and sometimes stressful, but she is not beaten or starved or taken advantage of. She is fed regularly, given a bedroom and bathroom all to herself, is allowed to explore most of the mysterious cottage freely, and even the supposedly fierce Mandrake treats her warmly. As such, Earwig’s complaining and foul moods seem random and baseless.
In fact, the core of the film’s problem is Earwig herself. At ten, she toes the line between precociousness and playfulness like you would expect from any pre-teen. However, her interactions with the world and her conversations with herself reveal a kind of maliciousness that sucks the enjoyment out of her exploits. She is constantly talking about how, both at her orphanage and in her new home, she seeks to establish a hierarchy where people do as she says at all times. When speaking to most adults, she is sugary sweet and polite. Yet it feels like a facade when, in her private moments, she is uncomfortably nasty. This reaches its peak when she befriends Bella Yaga’s familiar, a cat named Thomas (Gaku Hamada). She belittles him and yells at him, all while he risks his own wellbeing to aid her in her plans.
Earwig’s motivation throughout the movie is that she wants Bella Yaga to teach her magic. Yet, this desire seems completely superfluous. She does not want to use it to discover information about her past, or her mother, she does not have any magic-related hobbies, and she only finds out magic is real when she is suddenly adopted. She wants to learn magic simply…because. She and all the other characters spend most of the movie portraying little depth or interiority.
The monotony is only broken far too late, in the final minutes of the movie. At long last, the final scenes explore Earwig’s connections to her mother, Bella Yaga, the Mandrake, and how magic and music tether them all. This interesting shift in dynamics and relationships comes far too late for Earwig, however. The entire movie is spent with a confoundingly mean-spirited little girl who undergoes no real change or faces any consequences for her bad behavior. At the end of the film, she gets everything she set out to acquire, but there is no sense of growth or development. Compared to other Ghibli protagonists, especially Chihiro from Spirited Away, Earwig seems like a poor addition to this pantheon of girl characters. Chihiro may begin the film as lazy, whiny, and impolite, but her trials teach her important lessons, and she learns and matures throughout her journey. Compare this with Earwig, who is just as troublesome all throughout the movie and at no point seems apologetic or thoughtful.
There are some things to enjoy throughout the film. Thomas the cat is a fun bit of comedic relief, both in his light-hearted jokes and expressions that break through the plastic-looking animation. The rock music that is Earwig’s connection to her unknown mother is a lively genre, never truly explored by Ghibli before, and it makes for some colorful sequences that stand apart from its boring surroundings. There are small flashbacks into Bella Yaga and the Mandrake’s past that accomplish more emotional non-verbal storytelling than the entire rest of the movie, and I ached at not getting to see more of it. In fact, the Mandrake is secretly the best character in the film. Details about him are revealed in subtle ways, such as newspaper headlines or his choice of dinner.
Some of the most enchanting moments Earwig has to offer come in the form of adorable drawings littered throughout the end credits. It is only there that Earwig, Bella Yaga, and the Mandrake seem truly alive, caught in snapshots of their curious little family as they interact with each other. It is not enough to soothe the thought that the previous ninety minutes were setting the scene for a truly magical story we never get to see. Earwig is all table setting and no feast. It is frustrating, leaving far too much hidden for any meaningful connections to be made to any of these characters. The animation cannot offer any awe-inspiring images that will stick in the brain for long. Earwig and the Witch, despite the best intentions, is hollow and lackluster.
