I know there was a lot of criticism about Earwig and the Witch when the trailer first came out online, seeing that was 3D animated rather than Studio Ghibli’s traditional drawn animation was very surprising and felt out of the blue. Plus the movie itself did not look anywhere near as good as the other films, despite this I wanted to give it a try and see that maybe it could be decent….it wasn’t. The main issue here is hardly anything ever happens, the writing just does not have a whole lot of material. It’s the type of movie where someone clearly had a somewhat interesting idea but then decided to water it down quite a bit. It feels like a movie that needed more time to be worked on, the animation is not that great either. While it’s not as bad as some people said it was it’s definitely not inspiring at all. With a lot of Studio Ghibli’s films you feel magic in the film, through the characters and animation….you just don’t get that here at all, it feels like someone who spent like 15 minutes of watching a Studio Ghibli film idea of what a Studio Ghibli film is like. I completely understand they were trying to go for something different with this movie, but it heavily backfired pretty badly and it’s a shame too. There’s a few scenes here and there that work, I do find some of the film charming as well, but it’s really not enough to save this movie from being a disappointment. It’s a movie with absolutely no substance.

3/10 D-

I’m going to be completely honest here….I’m not exactly sure what Bliss was supposed to be. What I do know is this was a dreadful start for Amazon Prime Video’s original movies for this year. It’s absolutely no wonder this had nonexistent advertising, the only reason why I found out about this movie is because I occasionally check the “list of Amazon Prime Video Original Movies” Wikipedia page and saw it listed. Anyway the movie itself is dreadful, a lot of the movie feels like a bunch of different ideas from other movies blended into one gigantic mess. Owen Wilson feels completely out of place here, I’m all for Owen Wilson trying different things (heck I actually really liked No Escape) but this just does not work at all. Salma Hayek definitely tries her best but it’s just not enough to save this movie, this is most definitely one of her weaker roles. The script feels very empty with no direction and very little idea of what it wants to truly be, there isn’t any passion or anything showing that anyone cared about this movie at all. The best compliment I can give it is maybe some of the filming is okay but even then it’s not that great. Most of all Bliss just felt like release date fodder, my guess was this movie was just laying around somewhere and they had to release it eventually. Overall really not much else to be said here, it’s a terrible movie that I recommend skipping.

1/10 F