For Studio Ghibli, Earwig And The Witch Conjures New Possibilities

By Erica Russell


For nearly four decades, Studio Ghibli has captured the hearts and imaginations of global moviegoers. Co-founded by celebrated Japanese auteur Hayao Miyazaki in 1985, the Tokyo-based studio has produced dozens of iconic films, including 1988’s beloved My Neighbor Totoro and 2001’s Academy Award-winning Spirited Away. Its photos deliver whimsical adventures at once sweeping and small-scale, unforgettable characters, breathtaking animation and music, and complexly layered narratives that resist to talk down to even its youngest audience members. Ghibli’s latest providing, Earwig and the Witch, is no different — except in one major way.


Based on the 2011 children’s book of the same name by Dianna Wynne Jones — author of Howl’s Moving Castle, adapted to film by Ghibli in 2004 — the movie centers the magical misadventures of a young orphan named Erica (the titular “Earwig”) following her adoption by a unconventional pair of supernatural beings: haughty, blue-haired witch-for-hire Bella Yaga and The Mandrake, a demonic entity who’s slightly far less intimidating than his menacing scowl and glowing red eyes propose. Unbeknownst to them, the three share a mysterious connection. Directed by Hayao Miyzaki’s son, Gorō Miyazaki (Tales From Earthsea, From Up on Poppy Hill), Earwig marks the studio’s first feature-length release in nearly six years. It’s also the studio’s first-ever 3-D, CGI film.


In the grand tradition of Ghibli, Earwig delivers delightfully outlandish characters, distinct visuals, and an enchanting story, however the film enters uncharted territory for the studio. Ghibli is widely regarded as a bastion of established animation, an art form that has waned in popularity at the cinema since the early 2000s — particularly in the West, where movies from DreamWorks, Illumination, and Blue Sky Studios reign supreme in a glossy, post-Pixar, computer-generated landscape.


Any time the film was first reported in June 2020, the notion of a computer-animated Studio Ghibli movie was not universally well-received by some longtime Ghibli fans accustomed to the studio’s legacy of customary animation. However Miyazaki had an even tougher challenge to face than apprehensive viewers nostalgic for hand-drawn animation. “We didn’t have a system to make full 3-D CG in our studio to start with, so it began with [finding] the people, tools, and required systems,” Miyazaki tells MTV News. “We had to prepare much of that from scratch. The preparation took a long time and was a very hard experience.”


Working as showrunner on Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter, a cel-shaded and computer-animated anime series made accessible to stream on Amazon in 2017, helped the director defeat the technical hurdles presented by Earwig, which took four years to prepare. He credits the series with “making me hope to do a computer-animated film any time Whenever I came back to Studio Ghibli.”


The next challenge could be translating Ghibli’s unmistakable artsy aesthetic via new medium. Influenced in equal measure by classic Western animation and customary Japanese anime, the studio’s universally recognizable fashion balances captivating realism with buoyant cartoonishness. Picturesque scenery and meticulously perplexing landscapes form immersive, fantastical environments — even more grounded, everyday locales often incorporate quirky flourishes, like an antique shop in 1995’s Whisper of the Heart — that are juxtaposed with simplistically designed, however eye catching characters.


In Earwig, the Ghibli fashion manifests by way of the inviting, fancy CG backdrops, like Bella Yaga’s eye catching, cramped apothecary, a mesmerizing space that recalls Howl’s regal, maximalist lair (Howl’s Moving Castle) or Fujimoto’s phantasmagoric potions room (Ponyo). In contrast, the digitally rendered characters were inspired by stop-motion animation and appear more tangible, plasticky, and occasionally stiff. The design permits for finer renderings of small specifics, as with the freckles on Erica’s cheeks or the textured fabrics of characters’ clothing.


“I discovered that there really are a lot of people who are talented in their own fields, in the world of computer animation,” Miyazaki says of his experience working with fresh, digitally skilled talent on Earwig. “Meeting these people and working with them was an incredible experience for me. The fact that I was able to watch them work was very, very inspiring.”


This eagerness to experiment is trademark Ghibli. Across its decades of operation, the award-winning studio helped usher in an air of cultural prestige for animation through intelligent storytelling as well as a high regular of artsy good quality, influencing renowned animation studios in the process. Former Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter has been vocal about his longtime reverence for Hayao Miyazaki’s work, and Ghibli characters have even made cameos in the company’s films, like because the Totoro plush in Toy Story 3. More recently, while working on their acclaimed 2020 film, Wolfwalkers, respected Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon (The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea) found creative inspiration in 2013’s Academy Award-nominated The Tale of Princess Kaguya.


Ghibli also helped reshape public perception of Japanese animation, both at house and abroad. “[Ghibli co-founders] Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki changed people’s perspectives towards anime,” Miyazaki says. “Before them, anime was something for children, however they made films that even grown-ups could like. That led to a new generation of Japanese animation, which requires complexity and depth both in the storytelling and in the visual form. I think [being able] to achieve those two things has led to the success of Studio Ghibli so far.”


Ghibli’s success depends similarly on its memorable characters. Like so several of the studio’s on-screen heroines before her, from Kiki’s Delivery Service’s hard-working Kiki to Spirited Away’s strong-willed Chihiro, Earwig’s Erica is a tenacious young girl. Still, she’s unexpected inside the canon of Ghibli characters: Yes, she’s precocious and brave, nevertheless she can also be impish and, any time pushed to her limits, outlandishly vindictive. This polarity of well-meaning mischievousness makes the little would-be witch surprisingly endearing as she manipulates the adults around her to get by in the world. As Miyazaki puts it, “I like the fact that she’s not necessarily your usual good girl. She’s very charming along with a lot of fun to watch.”


Witches have enjoyed a recurring presence in Ghibli’s fantastical filmography over the years, popping up as lovable protagonists (the aforementioned Kiki), multidimensional villains (Spirited Away’s Yubaba, Howl’s Moving Castle’s Witch of the Waste), and friendly allies (Spirited Away’s Zeniba). In Earwig, witches are multifaceted females. There's Erica, a cheeky young witch in training; her cryptically absent mother, a rock star on the run from a coven; and Bella Yaga, an at-first cruel adoptive mother figure with a tumultuous past. Nevertheless for Ghibli, witchcraft resembles more than just a plot device.


“When you have people flying sky, in the event you tell them that it’s magic, then you don’t need any further explanation,” Miyazaki says. “It’s very fun to portray these things as a creator and director. I think people feel that there’s something special about witches — magic gives us human beings a special power to do extraordinary stuff.”


Embracing all things extraordinary has habitually been piece of the Ghibli tradition, as has innovation. In a playful reference to his famously stubborn father, Miyazaki jokes that, at its core, Studio Ghibli is “a very tough person, who is a rebel at heart, who doesn’t wish to do what other people do.”


As Ghibli looks forward, nevertheless, its talented crew may be further tasked to adapt their storytelling for a CGI-dominant landscape in a task to keep up with international requires. While Earwig is an imperfect film — though the digital worldbuilding is lush and that quintessential Ghibli food looks as mouth watering as ever, some critics have mentioned that the character renders need refinement and that the story ends also abruptly — the studio definitely seems up for the challenge.


Studio Ghibli is in the midst of transformation, as evident from the medium of their latest film to their newly launched social media accounts and expansion to global streaming platforms, a signal that the esteemed Japanese animation residence is becoming more digitally minded. Fear not, though, Ghibli purists: Miyazaki says the company’s dedication to the art of established animation is hardly a thing of the past.


“There’s no definite future set for Studio Ghibli. Personally, I love hand-drawn animation. A lot of Japanese fans and people around the world love to be able to see hand-drawn animation, so I’m sure that Ghibli will continue to do that. On the other hand, globally, we do visualize that 3-D CGI is becoming an enormous trend. I hope that we’ll have the ability to work in both worlds to enable us to have more possibilities.”