Earwig and the Witch

There's a story that legendary Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki hates CG animation, an anecdote that stems from mistranslation about him despising a sequence created by AI. However, in light of Earwig and the Witch, the unengaging first fully-CG film from the studio behind such classics as My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service, the story may as well be true.

It's the second Ghibli adaptation of a work by British children's author Diana Wynne Jones, but not a patch on the 2004 version of Howl's Moving Castle. The project comes in at a disadvantage because it's one of her lesser works, published posthumously and generally regarded as charming but slight. The script, by Ghibli mainstay Keiko Niwa and first timer Emi Gunji, doesn't have much to work from: A baby is left at an orphanage by a mysterious woman with red hair who flies off into the night with a devil-may-care flash. The infant becomes Earwig (Henderson), a feisty, spiky young girl who has no interest in being adopted, even when the sorceress Bella Yaga (Marshall) and her demonic lodger, the Mandrake (Grant), come to take her home. Yet she's determined to make the best of a bad lot, and sets about torturing the witch until she agrees to teach her some magic.

That's pretty much the plot, and in the telling it's even more slight than it sounds. The elements of a classic Ghibli plot are there, even down to a talking black cat (Stevens) and comedic little imps, but there's none of the spark. A baffling subplot about Earwig's mother, Yaga, and the Mandrake being in a band is wedged in to boost the run time, and allow for a boppy little tune ("Don't Disturb Me," sung by Musgraves) for the soundtrack album, but it really doesn't add anything.

The animation only further dents the enchantment. Ghibli has experimented with CG before, fusing it into the Oscar-nominated The Red Turtle, and going the cel-shaded route for its 2014 series Ronja, the Robber's Daughter. The latter was also directed by Gorō Miyazaki, and it summed up a basic aesthetic problem that plagues Earwig. His work has a certain flatness, amplified here by a plastic feel to the animation, most especially on the characters. Combined with the glacially slow and uneventful narrative, the end result feels like a feature by a small, cheap animation studio in 2010 trying to make a Miyazaki-esque cartoon. If Ghibli wanted to make their own mockbuster, then they pulled it off.