As Earwig tries to learn the magic of Bella Yaga and her partner Mandrake — with the help of a talking cat, of course — Goro’s film finds some fun, rambunctious humor, but never gets a rhythm.
After his father’s retirement in the wake of The Wind Rises, Goro Miyazaki took over his legacy and released this adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Diana Wynne Jones. It contains several of the themes of Ghibli, but it doesn’t really feel like Ghibli, in part because it’s the company’s first computer-animated fantasy film. Of course, progress is laudable, but the Ghibli aesthetic is so closely associated with hand-drawn beauty that this one just feels off right from the beginning. It might have helped if Goro had found the heart of this tale of a child named Earwig who is adopted by a witch named Bella Yaga when she is 10. As Earwig tries to learn the magic of Bella Yaga and her partner Mandrake — with the help of a talking cat, of course — Goro’s film finds some fun, rambunctious humor, but never gets a rhythm. And it just always looks a little wrong too, with characters that look somehow less expressive and realistic in three dimensions than the rest of the Ghibli characters look in two.