Review by Michael O’Malley
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. When asked what it felt like to have failed, he reportedly replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that don’t work.”
The moral: never give up; always try new things; failure is just a step toward success. 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.
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). It’s just not good.
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. 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. 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. 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. Neither of these extratextual expectations is fair for Earwig and the Witch, nor are they the film’s fault.
But 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.
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. 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. So for Ghibli to put out a movie that completely eschews that style in favor of polygons is a serious departure.
In this sense, Earwig is an intensely unfamiliar viewing experience for someone looking to get high off that hand-drawn Ghibli magic again. 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. 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. There is a boldness (or alternately, a hubris) to that.
On the other hand, calling Earwig “bold” is probably overselling the extent to which this movie is something new for Ghibli. 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. 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). 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). It’s a familiar story for Ghibli, if not particularly well-told. Even putting aside the clichés, it’s just a bland, uninspired story, and the movie ends on a perplexing ellipsis that feels like the filmmakers just did not care to give this movie a true ending.
But more than anything else, the biggest concession to familiarity is Earwig’s animation itself, ironically. Though the movie’s technical elements are going out on a limb with the computer animation, the artistic vision for the movie fits squarely within the Ghibli tradition: the environments and character models are made to look exactly like their 2D antecedents, only in 3D, with detailed, overwhelmingly green and rustic backgrounds contrasting the cartoonish proportions, big eyes, and outsized hair of the characters.
This is a profoundly weird aesthetic. Trying to recreate Ghibli-type visuals within CG environments has the disorienting effect of making Earwig feel like an adaptation of something that doesn’t exist, like it is its own tie-in video game – a bizarre and cheap association that the usually cozy and warm Ghibli aesthetic would never court intentionally. And if that weren’t bad enough, the movie continues to layer baffling decision upon baffling decision on top of this already questionable foundation.
Take, for example, how each moving object in the film, human characters included, is made to look as if it is one single object formed from the same material. Hair and skin are only differentiated by their color and shape, and there is no meaningful difference in texture between them – almost as if the animators had considered each 3D model synonymous with a cel in hand-drawn animation. But computer animation is not the same as cel animation, and the tangible effect of treating it as such puts a plastic-like artificial gloss over everything that makes the characters look like stiff toys come to life rather than living creatures. Pixar, when creating the first fully computer-animated feature, Toy Story, famously chose to have its characters made out of actual plastic in order to accommodate the limitations of the animation technology in rendering the textures of organic material. With Earwig and the Witch, the effect seems to have been unintentional, and of human characters presumably not meant to look like toys – an embarrassing and shocking faux pas coming from such a seasoned studio.
This is compounded by the way that the animation moves. Ghibli’s hand-drawn animation style (and the style of a lot of anime) usually relies on a somewhat limited frame rate compared to American animation; American animation tends to prioritize fluid movement at the expense of visual complexity, whereas Ghibli instead opts to make every frame consist of a striking and informationally dense image that advances the motion in a meaningful way, even if this means that there cannot be as many individual images. Earwig and the Witch attempts this same technique. But within an animation engine built on 3D polygons, it’s difficult to achieve the same effect that the hand-drawn animation does, since such an engine runs on a much higher frame rate than even American hand-drawn animation tends to have. Bafflingly, Earwig’s animators address this difficulty by filling in the extra frames with uncannily even motion, having the characters transition with robotically smooth movement between the much more visually considered frames that would usually comprise 100% of a traditional Ghibli picture. It looks terrible and sucks from these characters whatever life is remaining after their translation into plasticy CG textures. I had to actively work to get my brain to recognize these characters as the flesh-and-blood humans they are meant to represent – a complete death knell for animation, which relies on intuitive visual shortcuts that allow our brains to find life in an illusion.
The nail in the coffin is the dubbed English dialogue. The issue of whether or not to have an anime’s dialogue be subtitled over its original Japanese audio or to have an English audio dubbed over the film is a contentious issue among anime purists, but typically, I prefer dubs myself, as I’d rather be given as much opportunity as possible to look at the animation without distraction. But I had never watched a CG-animated movie that was dubbed before, and apparently, this makes all the difference. The limited animation of cel anime is reasonably forgiving of dubbed English audio, as there aren’t as many visualized mouth articulations for the dialogue to match up with. The fluid mouth movements of CG animation, however, consistently highlight the fact that the words you are hearing are not the words that are coming out of the characters’ mouths. It’s distracting and dissociative and makes the animation even more uncanny. This one isn’t strictly the Japanese filmmakers’ fault, as the original movie is in Japanese. But HBO Max has no option for Japanese audio, so viewers in the United States are stuck with this unfortunate effect.
Given the usual technical achievements of Ghibli’s animation, Earwig and the Witch betrays a shocking level of technical incompetence. Gorō has claimed that he is the only Studio Ghibli artist who understands how CG animation works, but Earwig is striking evidence that nobody at Studio Ghibli understands CG animation, Gorō included (despite the fact that he has worked on CG animated projects before, none of which I have seen). This particular mix of the familiar and unfamiliar creates something that looks uncanny and unpleasant, and the entire project of mapping CG animation onto their traditional cel-animated visuals shows a pretty serious miscalculation of just what computer-generated animation is to begin with. CG animation is not simply another way to render cel animation; it is an entirely different technique.
In Earwig, I was hoping to find an interesting experiment in pushing CG animation into new forms. Computer animation is barely three decades old, and the potential of the medium is hardly exhausted. But what I found was something much less engaging: a misunderstanding of the fundamental mechanics of the medium. To bring this back to the lightbulb, this would be like Edison trying to put a candle into a vacuum tube – not just “finding a new way something doesn’t work” but failing to recognize the basic principles at play in the production of light.
Plus, it’s not as if Ghibli is attempting to do something on the magnitude of inventing electric light. At this point, there have been many examples of how the cartoonishness of hand-drawn animation can be evoked in 3D polygons. Look at the rich skin textures and hair rendering in something like Disney’s Moana or the cartoonish-yet-believable movements of the human characters in Pixar’s Soul – there is plenty to critique about the outsized influence that both of those studios wield over the animation industry, but they have at least established that it is possible to approximate the cartoonish flexibility of hand-drawn animation within the ultra-smooth, information-rich medium of computer-generated animation without plunging its imagery into the uncanny valley. There have even been successful experiments at taking traditionally 2D, hand-drawn characters and rendering them with polygonal computer-generated animation, and in studios much less well-endowed than the Disney-Pixar machine: DreamWorks’s Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie does this convincingly for the expressive sloppiness of Dav Pilkey’s illustrations in the source novels, and Blue Sky Studios did the same for none other than Charles Schulz’s Peanuts in 2015’s The Peanuts Movie. Because CG animation has fundamental differences from hand-drawn images, neither Captain Underpants nor The Peanuts Movie transcribe the imagery of their sources with complete fidelity, but what they do is much more impressive, managing to suggest the spirit of their hand-drawn counterparts in a way that bridges the aesthetic differences of the two different media.
What Gorō Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have done with Earwig and the Witch is the exact opposite: faithfully converting hand-drawn imagery into computer animation while retaining none of the spirit of the former. It’s mind-boggling to think that the studio could allow such a disaster to be released, and it’s absolutely no fun to report that this is a wretched failure. But it is one. Lucky for HBO Max subscribers, the rest of Ghibli’s much more robust back catalogue is available to stream, and I would recommend revisiting the masterpieces within that catalogue--or even just From Up on Poppy Hill, the lovely (if not masterpiece-level) previous feature by Gorō.
As for Earwig and the Witch, I guess we now know several things that don’t work, but here’s hoping that Ghibli has none of the tenacity of Edison with this little experiment. Give this thing a quiet, anonymous burial, and let’s move on.