Earwig and the Witch (PG)

The end credits feature a montage of still illustrations done in traditional pencil and ink style, unlike the preceding 80 minutes of CG animation. These static drawings show events that happen after the end of the movie. A similar technique was done in an earlier Ghibli movie, My Neighbor Totoro (1988). In one of them, Earwig is seen watching on her brand new TV another Studio Ghibli animated movie, Howl's Moving Castle (2004).

In the original, English-language version of the source novel by Diana Wynne Jones, the protagonist is named "Earwig", or "Erica Wigg".In the novel's Japanese translation by Kaoruko Tanaka, the same character is named "Ayatsuru" (which can mean "manipulate" or "influence", similar to one of the meanings of "earwig" in English), or "Âya Tsûru", and is usually referred to as just "Âya".In neither the Japanese translation of the novel, nor Studio Ghibli's movie, is her name changed to the Japanese name "Aya", as numerous English-language news articles have claimed, and the movie does not relocate the story to Japan. The official Japanese plot summary specially mentions that it is set in the UK in the 1990s.

Studio Ghibli's first primarily CGI-animated feature. It follows their CGI TV series "Ronja, the Robber's Daughter (2014)" and Ghibli-Museum-exclusive short "Boro the Caterpillar (2018)".

"What on earth is going on with today's animation industry?" is the secondary headline on the front page of an issue of "The Kajino Daily", the newspaper where one of the main characters, "The Mandrake", reads the reviews of the books he writes. The headline is illustrated by a poster of a dinosaur and a giant robot rampaging through London while a semi-destroyed Big Ben collapses in the background.The name of the newspaper, "The Kajino Daily", is a reference to Kajino-cho, the Tokyo-adjacent town where Studio Ghibli's HQ is located. Also, "Studio Kajino" is the name of Studio Ghibli's subsidiary specialized in live-action films.The main headline on the same front page makes reference to the planned construction of an "Anime Mecca" on a place called "East Kajino Station" causing the mistrust of the local residents towards a "dubious land reorganization project".

The music performed in the movie by the band Earwig was in real life and composed, along with the instrumental score, by Satoshi Takebe, with lyrics by screenwriter and director Gorô Miyazaki, and performed by a specially-formed supergroup, consisting of Indonesian singer Sherina Munaf on vocals, Hiroki Kamemoto of Glim Spanky on lead guitar, Kiyokazu Takano of Mrs. GREEN APPLE on bass, Kavka Shishido on drums, and Takebe himself on keyboards.