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Apr 07, 2021 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

After a confusing, magic-infused motorcycle chase, a baby is dumped by the rider on the front steps of an orphanage with a note explaining that witches are after her. Years pass and the baby grows into a precocious ragamuffin named Erica – changed, thankfully, from her birth name: Earwig – who’s the clear alpha orphan. One day a suspiciously weird couple are allowed to waltz in and take home Erica without any sort of background check. What’s clear to everyone except the characters in the film is that this warted woman with purple hair and her spindly, Michael Shannon-looking companion are witches, and Erica is to be their new slave.

The terms of her entrapment are actually pretty mundane. Although a magic spell prevents her from leaving the house and back yard, she’s given a decent bedroom and asked to do things like cook breakfast, pick thistles from the garden, and mash up magical components. Erica doesn’t necessarily want to escape – just to be taught magic, so that she can become a witch herself. Soon, she stumbles upon a cassette tape and record album from a hard rock band called Earwig (who only apparently composed one song, which Erica plays on repeat.) There’s a clear connection between her captors and the band, and even though it’s given away to the audience immediately, we won’t spoil it here because then there’d be even less reason to watch Earwig and the Witch.

If GoodTimes Entertainment was still in the business of making knock-off animated films to sell in supermarket checkout aisles like they did with The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and so many others in the ‘90s, Earwig and the Witch would be their version of a Studio Ghibli movie. If you held your breath and ordered a $3 copy of Kiki’s Delivery Service from Wish.com, you shouldn’t be surprised if they sent you this instead. It covers many of the same bases as Kiki – vague European setting; witches and magic as a matter-of-fact part of everyday life; a plucky, can-do heroine; a wise-cracking black cat – but the execution absolutely lacks any of the, ahem, magic that Hayao Miyazaki – the father of Earwig director Goro Miyazaki – brings to his films.

Earwig and the Witch never goes anywhere, since there’s never any real threat to our heroine, and she’s only ever half-interested at best in getting out of her predicament. The answer to the central mystery isn’t hidden from the audience, so there’s little reason for a viewer to get caught up in it. Even then, the film raises many questions that aren’t addressed. While that’s par for the course with many Ghibli films, in those that feels like the filmmaker playfully leaving things up to the viewers’ imaginations; here, they feel like holes that the screenwriter didn’t know how to cover up, or didn’t bother.

Worst of all is that Ghibli’s beautiful cel-drawn animation has been replaced with a 3D, computer-drawn style. It’s understandable for budget reasons, and been done gorgeously by other studios – but not here. The backgrounds are rich and detailed, but the characters look and feel off. There’s a distracting falseness to the way the characters move, which skews closer in quality to, say, Cocomelon or other children’s TV animation than something you’d see in a Pixar movie. This works for The Mandrake, who is some kind of floaty demon-wizard thing, but not the other human characters.

Overall, the film is a disappointment. The Blu-ray includes numerous background features, though, should you wish to know how this movie came about.

(store.gkids.com/products/earwig-and-the-witch)