It’s a familiar story for Ghibli, if not particularly well-told. Earwig’s plot is also playing in some very well-established Ghibli ideas: in this movie, a girl (Earwig) is adopted by a witch, who puts her to work as an assistant in her magic shop, and Earwig must not only cope with the day-in-day-out drudgery of having a job while also attempting to subvert the witch’s harsh rule in the house – a story that’s reminiscent of both Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service (there’s even a talking cat). For starters, it is an adaptation of a novel by Diana Wynn Jones, a name Ghibli fans will likely remember from Howl’s Moving Castle (another adaptation of a Jones book). Despite the CG, the movie goes out of its way to be deeply familiar to anyone who has followed Ghibli’s output over the years. On the other hand, calling Earwig “bold” is probably overselling the extent to which this movie is something new for Ghibli. There is a boldness (or alternately, a hubris) to that. On the one hand, it’s kind of admirable that Ghibli is willing to diverge so much from its house style, and reportedly Gorō refused to work with any Ghibli veterans because he didn’t feel that their skills were compatible with his computer-generated vision, instead opting to make the film with fresh, new staff. Seeing that iconic Totoro logo followed by a shot of a completely CG world is dissonant and disquieting on an ineffable level, like returning to a childhood home only to find it remodeled with shiplap or “Live Laugh Love” signs or some other late-2010s style. In this sense, Earwig is an intensely unfamiliar viewing experience for someone looking to get high off that hand-drawn Ghibli magic again. So for Ghibli to put out a movie that completely eschews that style in favor of polygons is a serious departure. Though Ghibli has incorporated elements of computer animation into their features as far back as 1997’s Princess Mononoke, in an industry landscape increasingly dominated by exclusively computer-rendered output the studio has often been seen as a bastion for hand-drawn, cel animation, and not without good reason: the hand-drawn elements of their movies, even in minor works like The Secret World of Arrietty and When Marnie Was There, are gorgeous and detailed and expressive in a way matched by few films from other animation studios. This is not an “experimental” movie in the sense of being avant-garde, but within the context of Studio Ghibli, Earwig and the Witch conducts one very out-there experiment: it is crafted entirely out of 3D-polygonal computer animation. Neither of these extratextual expectations is fair for Earwig and the Witch, nor are they the film’s fault.īut what is the fault of the film is what we all see when we hit play on the HBO Max app (the only place to watch it in the United States), and what we see does not work at all – not despite the movie’s being a somewhat bold formal experiment but specifically because of it. Whether it warranted it or not, the release of Earwig and the Witch was doomed to be a Big Deal for certain viewers and subject to scrutiny. Also, the connection of Earwig director Gorō Miyazaki to the legendary Hayao Miyazaki (Gorō’s father) casts an imposing shadow over a movie clearly not reaching for anything like the grand mastery that has defined so much of Hayao’s work. The movie is the first official feature film from Studio Ghibli since 2014’s When Marnie Was There and the first production the studio has been involved in at all after 2016’s German-Dutch co-production, The Red Turtle. It might be easy to feel bad for poor Earwig, a movie weighted with so many steep expectations that it’s unlikely that it would have ever unanimously succeeded with its modest ambitions in the eyes of audiences. I regret to inform everyone that the movie Earwig and the Witch, the latest animated feature from the beloved Studio Ghibli, finds plenty of ways that don’t work – if not ten thousand, then certainly enough for me to call it a failure, Edison be damned (as he should be). Which is nice and all, but you have to wonder if Edison would have been quite so sanguine if all ten thousand of those dead-end experiments had been condensed into a single miserable attempt. The moral: never give up always try new things failure is just a step toward success. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that don’t work.” When asked what it felt like to have failed, he reportedly replied, “I have not failed. The perhaps-apocryphal story goes that when Thomas Edison was trying to invent the lightbulb, he (or, likely, his beleaguered employees) tried over ten thousand different kinds of unsuccessful filaments for the bulb.
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