Earwig and the Witch is the least Studio Ghibli Studio Ghibli movies ever produced. It doesn’t have that studio’s sense of fun, imagination, creativity, or charm. It’s a surprisingly boring, uneven mess of a film that I desperately hope is a temporary detour on the way to future greatness.

Earwig and the Witch is another Ghibli film based on a book by YA author Diana Wynne Jones (the other being the far superior Howl’s Moving Castle). It’s about an unlikable orphan girl who is taken in by a witch who needs an extra set of hands to help her with her spells. They don’t get along so well with the little girl wanting to learn magic and the witch having no interest in teaching.

The film is created by Goro Miyazaki, son of famed Hayao Miyazaki and should be a case study in why nepotism should be avoided. I’ve seen his Earthsea film and it was… merely ok. Not to Ghibli’s standards either but it wasn’t the mess this film is (unless considered as an Earthsea adaptation but that’s a longer conversation).

The film is famously or infamously Ghibli’s first CGI production. I’m not going to say it’s the biggest problem with the film, but it IS a big problem. There’s just something off with the style they came up with… mainly in the character faces. They seem to turn the traditional anime facial features into unconvincing, almost plasticy 3D models… it just doesn’t work. I’m not say anime-in-CGI can’t work… but what Ghibli did in this movie doesn’t. It’s almost unsettling, certainly it’s unconvincing.

But, no, the biggest problem with this film is that its disjointed and boring… and the main character is a manipulative, unlikable brat. I’m all for a female character who uses her brains and charms to get way… but this character just comes off as smug and entitled. Just unlikable. On top of that, the storytelling is jarring and disjointed and flails between different ideas too quickly. A black cat suddenly talks, out-of-place rock music suddenly becomes important, the girl’s real parentage suddenly matters out of nowhere. The film is poorly written on top of being ugly to look at.

And it’s also not charming, not creative, not inventive, and unimaginatively bland. None of that special sauce exists to make you smile, be nostalgic, tap your toes, or even cringe in deliberately unsettling way. The movie is just rote… by-the-book junk that lacks completely in that special flair. It doesn’t even come across as a generic kid’s film in that way a lot of bad American cartoons can… it doesn’t achieve those highs or lows. It just plops there, barely twitching.

This is certainly the worst allegedly quality anime film and easily the worst Ghibli film I’ve seen. It gets just about everything wrong that the studio is known for and then tries to cram an anime style into poorly thought out CGI that leaves the art style wanting. Skip this one.

Score: 56