Breaking the Spell
DEPARTING FROM THE DISTINCTIVE VISUAL STYLE THAT MADE THE COMPANY FAMOUS, STUDIO GHIBLI’S FIRST 3D-ANIMATED FEATURE FILM – DIRECTED BY GOR ō MIYAZAKI AND ADAPTED FROM A BOOK BY DIANA WYNNE JONES – NONETHELESS CARRIES ON THE SENSIBILITIES OF PREVIOUS WORKS: MAGIC-FILLED SETTINGS, DETERMINED CHILD CHARACTERS AND SYMPATHETIC ANTAGONISTS. AS ANTHONY CAREW WRITES, THE JOURNEY OF THE FILM’S ORPHANAGE-RAISED PROTAGONIST FROM SERVITUDE TO MUSIC-INSPIRED SELF-DISCOVERY IS A CLASSIC TALE OF LIBERATION.
In the closing credits of Earwig and the Witch (Gorō Miyakazi, 2020), the twenty-third feature from Studio Ghibli connects with the legendary Japanese animation studio’s past. It features a host of stills, painted in watercolour, that show future adventures: a kind of credit-roll postscript that functions as a what-happened-next epilogue. It’s a direct homage to the credits of the classic My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988), a reference doubled down on with a drawing of one of Earwig’s demons holding a fuki leaf over its head as an ad hoc umbrella, mirroring one of Totoro’s most famous images. There are further nods to the past – or ‘Easter eggs’, to use the fanservice parlance – when characters are shown watching Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004), a bit of meta-Ghibli stream crossing that carries double reference: like that film, Earwig and the Witch is adapted from a book by the late English author Diana Wynne Jones.
These credits feel like a self-conscious attempt to connect with the past, given that is, otherwise, a, there was a huge outcry – beyond the regular low-level outrage-at-everything of the contemporary internet – about its visual presentation. Here we had a Japanese animation that looked nothing like anime, and one whose embrace of 3D CGI was highly symbolic: a portent of what’s likely to come as the torch of the Ghibli family business is passed down from the iconic father (Hayao, eighty) to the failson (Gorō, fifty-four, maker of the least loved of all Ghibli films, 2006’s ). This provoked enough negative reaction that, upon its release, was routinely called ‘controversial’.
