5/28/2023 0 Comments Earwig and the witchBella Yaga’s familiar, a talking black cat named Thomas, is similarly reminiscent of Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service. But the few familiar elements include Bella Yaga’s wild, overripe design, which recalls the similarly extreme visual caricatures of Howl’s Witch of the Waste and Spirited Away’s intimidating witch Yubaba. Bella Yaga’s frequent threat to infest Earwig with purple-and-green worms if she doesn’t behave is fairly intimidating, and so are the frequent stormy rages from The Mandrake, a creature who changes size and shape when he’s annoyed, and gets annoyed very easily.Įarwig and the Witch doesn’t look much like a Ghibli movie, and not just because of the comparatively stiff, simple, plastic-textured CG animation. Where Jones’ books usually have a distinctive voice that isn’t quite like any other author’s, Earwig and the Witch reads a lot like a Roald Dahl story in the vein of Matilda or James and the Giant Peach, with comically awful adults whose misbehavior justifies equally outsized kid vengeance. Earwig’s open two-faced behavior would make her a minor villain in most kids’ stories, rather than the hero.įortunately, she’s up against outsized evils that balance out her selfishness. Ghibli protagonists are usually notable specifically for their sincerity: even the rare villains are straightforward about their desires, and fully immersed in their beliefs. Ghibli films are full of genki girls who roll up their sleeves and put in the hard labor that produces good outcomes from bad situations, but they aren’t ordinarily this conniving and smug about it.Įarwig’s methods of control - wide-eyed insincerity, lavish compliments for her targets, and sneering behind their backs - doesn’t make her any more appealing. It’s quite another to have her openly boast in the film to her best friend, Custard, that she “controls” everyone at the orphanage, or to watch her later proclaim that controlling Bella Yaga and The Mandrake is a natural next goal. It’s one thing to have an omniscient narrator in the book proclaim, a little judgmentally, that she likes the orphanage because so many people do exactly what she wants. Earwig thinks of Bella Yaga as a chance to learn magic and gain even more power.įrom the start, one of the movie’s biggest problems is that Earwig isn’t a particularly appealing protagonist. Bella Yaga thinks of her as a slave who will need to be threatened into submission. Then a witch named Bella Yaga and her eerie companion The Mandrake show up at the orphanage and adopt Earwig for use as a witch’s assistant, grinding rat-bones and slicing snake-skins for Bella Yaga’s spells. As a young girl, Earwig has learned to manipulate adults and kids alike, and she maintains her dominion over her orphanage through obsequiousness and favors. Plucky protagonist Earwig is a witch’s daughter, abandoned at an orphanage in infancy by a harried mother being chased by 12 other witches for reasons never explained in either version. Published just after her death in 2011, it’s barely more than a short story, and Ghibli’s adaptation adds little to the stripped-down narrative. But where Howl is one of her best and liveliest novels (which is saying a lot, given her deep bookshelf of terrific fantasy work), Earwig may be her simplest and most unrewarding. Like Ghibli’s traditionally animated 2004 feature Howl’s Moving Castle, Earwig is based on a novel by British novelist Diana Wynne Jones. The problems with Earwig and the Witch go beyond the animation, which lacks the visual depth and sophistication of recent Japanese CG features like Lupin III: The First. Knowing Earwig was a cautious trial run for new technology won’t make this 82-minute film feel like a Ghibli classic, but it should temper some of the fears fans have expressed that this minor work represents the height of the studio’s future ambitions, and prep them for the project’s limitations. Director Goro Miyazaki consciously chose the small scale and simple story to make the project manageable for the largely freelance team who produced it, while Ghibli’s traditional animators were working on the next project from studio co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. Longtime Ghibli fans who go in hoping for a theatrical masterpiece on the order of Spirited Away are setting themselves up for disappointment, and even expecting one of Isao Takahata’s risky Ghibli style experiments is setting the bar too high.Įarwig and the Witch is the first CG feature made under the Ghibli banner, and it’s clearly aimed at small children rather than an all-ages audience. Before watching Studio Ghibli’s new movie Earwig and the Witch, it pays to set expectations.
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