Re Studio Ghibli’s "Tales from Earthsea"is this part of some larger narrative or is the plot really as confusing and jumbled as it seems? There are some major plot points such as one of the characters killing his father at the beginning of the film that really doesn’t seem tied to any rationale other than possibly mental illness, and the girls transforming/reincarnating/whatever into a dragon after her supposed death.
The animation is often gorgeous but the plot and script seems very flatfooted and clunky for Studio Ghibli effort.
Astro, I saw it too, and was surprised at how little it seemed to make sense or hang together. However I never read the original Earthsea books, so that might have something to do with it.
I think I heard initially that Hayao Miyazaki was going to do it - he’d been begging Ms. LeGuin for years - but she kept putting him off. When she finally agreed, he was busy and/or fed up and handed the project to his son, who is not as experienced as his father at film making.
As to why it’s quite so disjointed, it’s anyone’s guess. Maybe they intended a longer movie and it had to be cut, or tried to fit too much into one movie.
There’s a Wikipedia article about it if you’d like more info. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.
I’m a ginormous fan of the Earthsea books. The idea of a Ghibli interpretation of them is very exciting to me, but Le Guin’s comments about them pretty much ruin all that excitement.
Something you should understand about Studio Ghibli: they don’t so much adapt works as they RIP AND TEAR. They more or less rape the original work and then vomit out some half-digested bile-covered filth, which is generally warmed-over quasi-pacifistic bullcrap.
Their original works have been genius.’
OK, OK, I exaggerate. Hell, I think the onyl adaptations they’ve done are Tales of Earthsea and Howl’s Moving Castle. However, yeah, those are perhaps the worst they’ve done and neither has anything remotely to do with the original works they’re supposedly based off of.
It’s been years since I read the Earthsea books, but from your description and the Wikipedia article it seems like the movie is loosely based on the last two books in the series. So even if the movie were faithful to these books (and it sounds like it wasn’t) then it would probably be pretty confusing.
Ursula Le Guin was against making movie adaptations of the Earthsea books for a long time but relented because she loved Hayao Miyazaki’s other movies. However, she has called the Ghibli adaptation “disappointing” and “entirely different” from the books. Apparently they took bits of book 3 and book 4 of the series and didn’t take along any of the backstory that’s established in books 1 and 2.
She didn’t like this version either. “When I saw the script, I realised that what the writer had done was kill the books, cut them up, take out an eye here, a leg there, and stick these bits into a totally different story, stitching it all together with catgut and hokum. They were going to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.” (Locus Online: Ursula K. LeGuin Earthsea Essay)
I thought the books were really good when I read them about 15 years ago, by the way. Something different from cookie-cutter fantasy.
