EARWIG AND THE WITCH: Childhood Skeletons and Goro Miyazaki’s Emotional Breakthrough
NHKIn the world of animation, Hayao Miyazaki has become somewhat of a god. Not just being a leading voice behind some of the best received animated films of all time, in both a critical and financial sense, but also being partly responsible for revolutionising the anime industry with the founding of Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki has commanded respect and admiration from all. There is one individual who has a relationship with Miyazaki unlike any other, Hayao's son. Goro Miyazaki was born in 1967 and grew up witnessing his father's success first-hand. Yet the Hayao Miyazaki who Goro got to know was not only the externally-perceived image of an inspired artist, but first and foremost a flawed parent.
From long nights when he chose to stay working on films instead of spending time with his family to the limited amount of love he presented to his son, Hayao Miyazaki has openly criticized himself as a father and no-one but Goro Miyazaki felt the consequences of this the most. Through his troublesome and often criticized animation career the strained relationship between Goro Miyazaki and his father has played out often like a soap opera both on and off-screen, but Goro's newest film for the studio - Earwig and the Witch - offers possibly his clearest reconciliation of the situation yet.
Before the themes are discussed, what has to be mentioned is the animation style. For good reason, many have criticised the film's CGI animation style for being off-putting and low quality, but the bold switch from the traditional Studio Ghibli style marks a bigger moment in Goro's career than most people realise. Growing up, Goro rejected the animation field as a career choice and instead went into landscape architecture. Goro would credit this choice to not feeling as if he could live up to the works of his father and, for the majority of his life, Goro seemed at ease with a distance from his father's studio – other than a handful of projects like designing the Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka. His father continued to develop and direct various hits for the studio but hit a roadblock when developing Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea book series into a feature film. Eventually, it was decided that this project would be perfect for Goro's directorial debut, and most of the studio backed Goro stepping up into the director's chair with one major exception – his father. Feeling as if his son was inadequate for the responsibilities of directing the feature, Hayao openly waged war against the feature and Goro's involvement, with him not even speaking to his son during the development of the film.
Still, Goro showed a great amount of tenacity in the project and pushed through, completing Tales from Earthsea, but his turbulent experience with the project was far from over. The film was critically panned and became the near-universal answer for what the worst Studio Ghibli was. Worst of all, his father seemed rather unimpressed. Hayao left the premiere screening multiple times and after seeing the film the only response he could find was the acknowledgement that his son was "not an adult yet." If Goro had hoped that by entering his father's world he could find the validation and love he missed as a child, it seemed like this project would be a deep failure in even more ways than one. The two would find friction in the coming years with limited dialogue between the two, but clearly both would stay on each other's minds. Hayao specifically would start to question his idea of fatherhood with his next feature Ponyo and it seemed like this was the reflection needed to help start to fix the relationship between him and his son. Goro started to work more closely with his father both in animating Ponyo and in the development of his next feature From Up on Poppy Hill, in which Hayao supported Goro. From Up on Poppy Hill would find much more acclaim than Tales from Earthsea, but still proved to be one of the weaker outings for the company.
The largest issue seemed to be Goro's inability to capture the magic found within his father's worlds. These films felt like a shell of the previous Ghibli films, with Goro attempting to recapture the magic of the past rather than find his own voice as a filmmaker. In order to find this voice, Goro did the unthinkable. He left his father's animation company and went off to create Ronja, the Robber's Daughter, a computer-animated anime series that instantly stood out as completely unique to anything found in Studio Ghibli before. This risk paid off, with the series finding large acclaim. It finally seemed as if Goro had found his voice. Although the impact this had on the relationship between himself and his father remained unknown, it seemed like a clear step in the right direction for Goro as an artist. Obviously Studio Ghibli was excited by this development, which paved the way for Goro to return to the studio for his third feature film, Earwig and the Witch. Using a new CGI animation style not seen in the company before, this marked Goro finally stepping out of the shadow of his father's legacy and trying to create his own.
While the quality of Earwig and the Witch remains debatable, when one views its story within the context of Goro Miyazaki's life, it becomes clear that Goro is using this distance from his father artistically to capture his childhood trauma in a quite obvious sense. Within the film, Earwig is taken in by a family of witches who surround themselves in their work while giving Earwig the cold shoulder. Earwig desperately wants to learn magic for herself but no matter how much she tries to get on the good side of the witches she lives with, they never end up giving her the time to actually do this, even when they agree to. One could easily look at this dynamic and find a parallel to Goro's childhood in multiple ways. From the absent father figure who is often locked in his study doing work rather than giving attention to Earwig – who clearly wants to get to know and spend time with him – to the magic which Earwig desperately wants to get involved with but never quite gets the support for which she is promised – possibly like Hayao Miyazaki with animation. The disconnect and frustration from Earwig concerning her parental figures is eerily reminiscent of Goro's childhood.
It is only when Earwig takes the incentive to go against her parental figures' warnings where she finds the art and the magic of their work, which is where the parallels only get more specific. She finds an album from their band in their 2CV car, which was both the car featured in Hayao Miyazaki's directorial debut The Castle of Cagliostro and the car Hayao Miyazaki personally used throughout Goro's childhood. Earwig finding this art opens the door of understanding between her and her parental figures very similar to Goro and his father once Goro got into the world of animation as a director and proved that, even if his father disapproved, he would push on. The film itself also is an adaptation of a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, whose work was previously adapted into Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle and meant a lot to Hayao. Although the film clearly is paying tribute to Jones, who passed away while writing the book the film is based on, it also can be seen as Goro paying tribute to his father in his own unique way.
While this tie might not change the quality of the feature, it does give the film a newfound sense of purpose and belonging specifically within Goro's career. From the technical side of things, with Goro breaking away from his father's image to find his own voice, to the narrative, which clearly is drawing from the emotions Goro faced as a child which has defined his relationship with his father into adulthood, Earwig and the Witch is without a doubt a powerful and important feature for the still-growing director and even if the film lacks quality, it is worth recognising these areas of depth.
