As a result of not getting around to as many films this year, I in turn haven’t had as many chances to go out of my way to see films that have gotten… mixed reactions, let’s say. And with this one in particular, it seems a little too easy to see the problem with it, even before I started watching it. This is the first feature to come out of the fabled Studio Ghibli since When Marnie Was There six years ago, and it’s also their first attempt at 3D animation. Part of me is tempted to just chalk up the whole thing to a bad experiment or, more pointed, maybe it’s just a result of critics being unwelcome to Ghibli trying something new. However, the problems with this go much deeper than the surface. Well, as deep under the surface as there is room to get with something like this.
The animation quality itself isn’t bad, per se. I mean, one of my all-time favourite shows is Popee The Performer, and that has some of the most objectively hideous 3D animation in any medium; this would have go a lot further to get on my bad side. But I must be honest, when looking at the film, the first thing that came to mind wasn’t Popee; it was the Postman Pat movie. Considering this film first premiered on Japanese television, that kinda makes sense, but as much as the point has been beaten into the ground for so many years, Ghibli is a name with a lot of weight behind it, and this kind of sub-standard quality doesn’t match it.
And it’s not like the story itself is outside of Ghibli’s usual wheelhouse. It’s adapted from a book by Diana Wynne Jones, who also wrote the source material for Howl’s Moving Castle (not one of my favourites from Ghibli, but still a solid film), and it’s all about an orphan who is adopted by a witch and turned into a servant that helps with her spells. The film’s take on magic is a lot more mundane than I’m used to seeing, with Vanessa Marshall’s Bella Yaga casting spells to make people win at dog shows or to create a storm so that a village fete is ruined; that kind of weirdly-specific stuff. While the idea is alright in concept, what it ultimately ends up doing is making the whole notion of magic in this world appear to be incredibly boring. Bella Yaga threatening to give everyone worms is only slightly humourous the first time round, let alone it being her only threat of power in the entire film.
To that end, most of the characters also aren’t very interesting. Bella Yaga herself is rather bland as far as witches go, Richard E. Grant as the Mandrake has a nice guttural growl to his delivery but isn’t given much to do, and Taylor Paige Henderson as Earwig herself is just plain annoying. She’s like Matilda taken to the most “them young people today” extreme, with her character arc mainly consisting of getting Bella Yaga and the Mandrake to do her bidding because she’s so used to getting her way at the orphanage. That’s about it, really, and even her involvement with magic is so minimally involved as to seem beside the point.
And yet, none of that is my biggest issue with this whole
thing. No, what turned out to be the most distracting thing is something that,
at first, seems like a minor complaint, but ends up revealing just how
mishandled this whole production turned out: The lip sync. Studio Ghibli has
maintained such a strong reputation in the West because they’ve always had
top-notch voice talent for the English localisations; they are the exception
for anime fans who get snooty about the idea of watching something with
anything other than the original Japanese audio. Of course, such things are easier
when dealing with 2D animation, since being able to make character more
expressive also creates more room for error in tampering with what accompanies
it, and the lip sync here is pretty darn bad. Where this gets confusing is
that, between the all-English text throughout the film, the film being set
in England, and the Netflix release only having the English-language
option, it feels like it was meant to be presented like this. Which only begs more questions about this production.
To put things as painfully simple as possible, this is a film that includes a coven of witches that are also in a rock band (with a pretty kick-arse soundtrack to back up that idea); it has no excuse for being this dull to sit through. Not only that but, since the original book was released after Diana Wynne Jones’ death, I suspect that it wasn’t finished as she intended, since the plot here is quite thin and ends very abruptly. This is the kind of situation where screenwriters would need to step up and contribute something to fill that gap, but like so much of the rest of the production, the effort wasn’t put in the right places. It just doesn’t work, and as easy as it would be to blame all of that on the step into new territory with the animation style, that is far from the worst of this film’s problems.
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