'Earwig and the witch': washed out from start to finish

It is still paradoxical that the person in charge of breaking with the essence of the irreducible Japanese of the Ghibli studio, with the traditional two-dimensional animation style, and approaching 3D for the first time and the execution of the drawing through the computer, is Hayao Miyazaki's son.

In his third animated fiction feature film, Goro Miyazaki, who is not some rebellious youngster with an pretense of

but a 54-year-old veteran, has composed

under the now preponderant digital textures, with sporadic echoes of the cinema of his teacher, but with abundant irregularities in the narrative.

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There are flashes of brilliance amid excessive boredom and disorder in

based on a novel by London-based writer Diana Wynne Jones which Hayao adapted in the imaginative

Along with an excellent portrait of its four main characters, both in their personal peculiarities and in the drawing itself (one of them, The Mandrake, with obvious nuances of

Fujimoto

the film nevertheless stumbles forward, without a clear structure, without narrative solidity or

any

in a story of classical substance: a girl accustomed to the orphanage who is adopted by a sorceress from a common past with the true mother of the child.

Although it has been supervised by the author of the masterful

and

the unevenness of its lines and even its concepts is surprising: beautiful hyper-realistic designs, such as the sky at sunrise in the beautiful opening sequence or the objects in the house, with the music cassettes as a symbol of union between the present and the past, next to almost crude visual calligraphies, represented by the horrendous approach and execution of the role of the cat.

From time to time the spark of joy jumps, especially with the formidable musical moments, but it is never understood what Miyazaki intends with the story itself, washed away from beginning to end.

EARWIG AND THE WITCH

Direction: Goro Miyazaki.

Genre: animation fantasy. Japan, 2020.

Duration: 82 minutes.