Earwig and the Witch

Earwig and the Witch follows a headstrong ten-year-old girl who has spent her life at St. Morwald's orphanage, where she quietly gets her way. Her comfortable routine ends when a strange couple, Bella Yaga and the Mandrake, adopt her and take her to a house filled with potions, spell books and hidden rooms. Bella Yaga turns out to be a witch, and the girl becomes her apprentice, scheming with a talking cat named Thomas to assert herself in her new home. The story is based on Diana Wynne Jones's novel.

The film is directed by Goro Miyazaki, his third feature after Tales from Earthsea and From Up on Poppy Hill, and was produced by Toshio Suzuki for Studio Ghibli with NHK and NHK Enterprises. It was made in computer animation rather than the studio's usual hand-drawn style. The Japanese voice cast includes Kokoro Hirasawa, Shinobu Terajima, Gaku Hamada, Sherina Munaf, Etsushi Toyokawa and Yuji Ueda. It runs 83 minutes and was released in February 2021.

Reception was muted across the board. A critics' rating of 4.9/10 from 68 reviews sits close to the audience scores of 4.7/10 on IMDb from roughly 6,900 votes and 5.9/10 on TMDB from 311 votes, with no group rating the film highly.