Fresh from adapting Diana Wynne Jones’ “Howl’s Moving Castle,” Studio Ghibli is planning on releasing their next project, “Tales from Earthsea” this July.
Now, considering how the Sci-Fi Channel butchered Earthsea in their version, one would think that Ursula K. LeGuin would be loath to sign away the rights to another attempt at a filmed version. Indeed, according to the minimal information on Nausicaa.net, she did turn them down at least once. But Goro Miyazaki (son of Hayao Miyazaki) apparently made a personal, face-to-face appeal, and well, here we are.
It looks like it could be…interesting. Certainly the preliminary poster art looks nice. But I dunno…this is Miyazaki’s first effort at directing a feature film, and he’s doing it on what seems to be a much shorter schedule than typical for a Ghibli film. I also seem to recall reading somewhere that Hayao Miyazaki wasn’t all that enthusiastic about this one (I’ll look for a cite, I could be mis-remembering). There isn’t any hype about this one yet here in Japan, so…who knows. The first trailer comes out on the 24th, so we’ll soon have a first look.
(oh, and it appears that the voice actor for Ged is going to be a 72 year old man…)
If it was Hayao Miyazaki directing, I’d be pretty excited about it, since he has a fine grasp of “warts and all” storytelling, where protagonists aren’t 100% good and antagonists aren’t entirely unsympathetic. I know nothing about his son, though.
I dunno. I guess as long as Ged is portrayed as his flawed self and they don’t add a bunch of crap that wasn’t in the book series, I’ll be Ok with it.
I’m a big fan of Earthsea (only the original trilogy) and a big fan Miyazaki. So I should be thrilled about this project. However the tagline: Once Man and Dragon were one.
Man chose Land and Sea,
Dragon chose Wind and Fire.
doesn’t sound like anything from the books. So I’ll just pretend it’s unassociated with Earthsea and expect a usual Miyazaki-quality fantasy tale.
I’ll assume his son will get enough advice to put together a good film.
The Farthest Shore is a great story, and I hope they do it justice.
On the contrary. While it’s not fleshed out until the series went sort of dull (around book 4, though there were some interesting things in book 4), this is canon Earthsea, and this is even hinted at in the main triology. Using it in the 3rd story isn’t really necessary to the plot, but it wouldn’t necessarily hurt to have it there either. It would help the audience understand a bit more why the dragons are affected by, and silenced by, what’s going on.
