Ear­wig and the Witch

In Mami Sunada’s insight­ful doc­u­men­tary The King­dom of Dreams and Mad­ness, direc­tor Gorō Miyaza­ki is shown dis­cussing plans for From Up on Pop­py Hill – his sec­ond direc­to­r­i­al fea­ture – and express­ing a lack of enthu­si­asm to make anoth­er tra­di­tion­al Stu­dio Ghi­b­li feature.

He’s less attached to the old ways of ani­mat­ing than his col­leagues – his tele­vi­sion series Ron­ja, the Robber’s Daugh­ter used cel-shad­ed com­put­er ani­ma­tion to cul­ti­vate a more expan­sive world. It makes sense that if any­one was going to play with 3D com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed imagery at Ghi­b­li, it was going to be Gorō.

Used to the lus­cious hand-drawn ani­ma­tion of Hayao Miyaza­ki and Isao Taka­ha­ta, it’s easy to see why the knee­jerk reac­tion for many see­ing Ear­wig and the Witch has been to recoil in hor­ror. By piv­ot­ing to CG, this new gen­er­a­tion have tak­en the exag­ger­at­ed lines of their fore­par­ents and fleshed them out into a more tan­gi­ble world.

At first we appear to be in famil­iar nar­ra­tive ter­ri­to­ry, as the sto­ry is based on an unfin­ished nov­el by Diana Wynne Jones, who also wrote Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle. It’s about a young girl called Ear­wig who begs her fos­ter mum, Bel­la Yaga, to train her as a witch – with mag­i­cal hijinks and talk­ing black cats aplen­ty. But there are signs that Gorō is let­ting go of the past – the yel­low Citroën 2CV from Hayao Miyazaki’s debut fea­ture, The Cas­tle of Cagliostro, gath­ers dust in the witch’s basement.

Ear­wig may fol­low in the foot­steps of Kiki or Nau­si­caä as a head­strong Ghi­b­li hero­ine, but she’s dis­tinct­ly mis­chie­vous, even cru­el in her behav­iour, with­out any clear arc of moral change, mak­ing for a more com­plex, mod­ern characterisation.

Gorō’s taste is less neat and clas­si­cal than his father’s, as he crafts lay­ers of grime in Bella’s lab­o­ra­to­ry to bring the back­drops to nau­se­at­ing life. In con­trast to the sym­phon­ic swellings of Ghi­b­li main­stay Joe Hisaishi, Satoshi Katabi’s score uses elec­tron­ic pro­to-rock to accom­pa­ny the punk aes­thet­ic. It’s far from vio­lin-mak­ing and John Den­ver in Whis­per of the Heart, but Ear­wig is sim­i­lar­ly appre­cia­tive of the pow­er of music – it’s just cel­e­brat­ing a dif­fer­ent genre, one which lends itself more obvi­ous­ly to the psy­che­delia CG ani­ma­tion is capa­ble of.

Ear­wig and the Witch sim­i­lar­ly uses the sen­so­ry capa­bil­i­ties of 3D to evoke more con­vinc­ing­ly its British set­ting. Opt for the anglo­phone dubs and you’ll be met with the famil­iar dul­cet tones of Dan Stevens and Richard E Grant, fit­ting for a milieu replete with pubs, orphan­ages, and whole­some home-cooked meals. Indeed, when you think of food in the films of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, you’re more like­ly to pic­ture steam­ing bowls of ramen than eggy bread, fish and chips, or shepherd’s pie.

In its strik­ing British­ness, Ear­wig and the Witch is akin to Hiro­masa Yonebayashi’s Stu­dio Ponoc debut, Mary and the Witch’s Flower, based on Mary Stewart’s children’s book. Doing his part to keep his father’s work alive and rel­e­vant, Gorō Miyaza­ki steers the Ghi­b­li ship even fur­ther away than Yonebayashi dared, result­ing in the studio’s most cheer­i­ly rad­i­cal film to date.

Ear­wig and the Witch is released in cin­e­mas on 28 May. For more info vis­it elysian​film​.com