Earwig and the Witch is the worst and I mean absolute worst movie to have Studio Ghibli’s good name attached to it! I came across this by accident on Amazon and picked up the Blu-Ray. I am a huge Studio Ghibli fan, but for whatever reason, this one flew way past my radar so I was very excited to give it a try.
How to Download Earwig and the Witch
You can download or stream the film from a digital platform. Click on the Download button at the end of this review and make your choice. Check out also other Studio Ghibli productions such as The Tale of the Princess Kaguya or The Red Turtle.
The Movie Review
I paid £9,99 for the Blu-Ray of Earwig and the Witch and let me tell you, I feel like I was ripped off big time! As a matter of fact, I am not even sure why I have this in my collection, I should have donated it to a charity store or performed some kind of ritual sacrifice on it to purge my collection of its horribleness as soon as I watched it!
The premise of the movie is ok. We have this ten-year-old kid that was dropped off by her witch mother at an orphanage. The child is called Earwig and she grows up in the orphanage and loves it! She loves living here and does not actually want to get adopted as she is very comfortable with her life and the way that it is.
One day, Earwig is adopted by this rather odd couple, Mandrake and Bella Yaga who turn out to be witches. They want Earwig to pretty much be their slave and work in their home, but they do say they will teach her magic. Of course, they never actually do this and Earwig grows more and more frustrated with what is going on and wants away from this pair.
Earwig is not alone as she makes friends with a cat called Thomas and the two of them work together to make Earwig a real witch. Look, this movie sucks! It is as basic of a plot as you can get and it did have a bit of premise, but it is just so by the numbers and predictable that it is impossible to get sucked into this world or even care about what is going on here.
This is not a movie that is made with that amazing and gorgeous Studio Ghibli style art. This is a CG-style animated movie and one of the worst I have seen in the last ten years. It looks more like a PlayStation 2 game than a movie that had any business being released in a theatre! It is actually shocking just how bad this movie looks! Now, to be fair, the voice acting (well the English one I watched) was not bad, but when the material they are working with is so bad, who cares!
Some movies are so bad that you need to watch them just to see how bad they are, that is not the case here. Earwig and the Witch is just flat-out bad in every regard and I do not see any reason to have this in your collection or even make the effort to watch it at all. I collect most things that Studio Ghibli have their name attached to and this is by far the worst thing I have in my collection!
