Surprisingly, the film’s character designs are effectively expressive. Beneath Earwig’s affable demeanor, however, is a calculating little girl accustomed to getting her way, and while she reluctantly goes along with Bella Yaga’s routine, she plots to transform her situation into something resembling the cushy lifestyle she had back at the orphanage.
Here, Bella Yaga adopts the orphan Earwig (Kokoro Hirasawa) into servitude, immediately putting her to work scrubbing the filthy workshop floor, as well as preparing ingredients like rat bones and bat wings that the witch uses in mundane spells that she sells to the public. Based on a children’s book by Diana Wynne Jones, Earwig and the Witch recalls another of the studio’s adaptations of the author’s work, Howl’s Moving Castle, as both conceive magic users as exceptionally messy people who require the help of children to run a business. Made for television, the film is on a smaller scale than such lavish Studio Ghibli works as Spirited Away, primarily confined to a magical house that the witch Bella Yaga (Shinobu Terajima) shares with the mysterious, volatile Mandrake (Etsushi Toyokawa). And while the resulting film will be hard pressed to sway the naysayers, the problem with Earwig and the Witch has more to do with its confused plotting than its more or less serviceable animation. To hear the most fervent Studio Ghibli fans tell it, Gorō Miyazaki, whose 2006 film Tales from Earthsea is considered the runt of the company’s litter, was dragging his sainted father’s storied legacy down to hell in search of something he was actually good at. Which explains why the announcement that they would be making a full-length CGI film was denounced as if it were blasphemy.
As a vanguard of 2D animation, Studio Ghibli is perhaps the most revered animation studio in the world.
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