Never heard of Earwig and the Witch? You will. 

Who knew that Studio Ghibli was actually pretty active? Yes, we knew that they were hard at work on Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film How Will You Live?, but we didn’t know there was another movie they were making. The announcement came unceremoniously thanks to the Cannes Film Festival. While the festival itself is canceled, it still announced its selection so that studios could use the honor as a promotion tool. One such film included Studio Ghibli’s unexpected entry, Earwig and the Witch.

This movie will come to us from Goro Miyazaki. He’s the son of Hayao Miyazaki and director of Tales From Earthsea and From Up on Poppy Hill. While I wouldn’t consider those movies great examples of Ghibli work, the director did grow between the two of them quite a bit. With that in mind, Earwig and the Witch could be his strongest film yet. According to the report, the animated feature clocks in at a brisk 82 minutes.

It also has familiar source material, as the novel on which it is based was the last work of Diana Wynn Jones. Back in 2004, Ghibli adapted Howl’s Moving Castle for the big screen — so it was clearly a solid fit for them. Also, if Goro Miyazaki’s involvement concerns you, rest easy knowing Hayao Miyazaki planned the movie himself.

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“It is such a wonderful book,” Miyazaki said. “It’s the last work by Diana Wynne Jones, and thanks to the drawings from (Japanese-edition illustrator) [Miho] Satake and the [Tokuma Shoten] editors, it’s become an unspeakably compelling work. I’ve read it cover-to-cover five times.”

Below is the official synopsis for the 2011 novel:

“Not every orphan would love living at St. Morwald’s Home for Children, but Earwig does. She gets whatever she wants, whenever she wants it, and it’s been that way since she was dropped on the orphanage doorstep as a baby. But all that changes the day Bella Yaga and the Mandrake come to St. Morwald’s, disguised as foster parents. Earwig is whisked off to their mysterious house full of invisible rooms, potions, and spell books, with magic around every corner. Most children would run in terror from a house like that . . . but not Earwig. Using her own cleverness—with a lot of help from a talking cat—she decides to show the witch who’s boss.”

Are you excited to see Ghibli putting out another film ahead of Hayao Miyazaki’s? Let us know your thoughts down below!

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SOURCE: io9, ANN, SoraNews24