"Earthsea" via Miyazaki
Nov. 12th, 2007 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138When I was an urchin, Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" books were a trilogy whose world was firmly categorized with the likes of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, CS Lewis' Narnia, and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain. In 1990, LeGuin unexpectedly resumed the series with Tehanu, which I rather liked as (imho) an elegiac postscript of both sorrow and hope, but which was widely execrated at the time by male readers on Usenet who thought that it "emasculated" the main hero from the original trilogy. Eventually, there was a fifth novel, The Other Wind, and a collection of short stories, Tales from Earthsea, but neither of those later books really clicked into my brain cell.
A few years ago, the SciFi Channel produced an execrable miniseries that was hashed together as a loose approximation of the first two books. It was produced by the same people who murdered MZB's The Mists of Avalon into a similarly distorted miniseries, and a lot of the same character types and plot twists seemed very familiar wrt that previous adaptation. By contrast, anything else would be an improvement, which I suppose is how I have to describe the anime movie Gedo Senki, whose bootleg DVD at our usual rental place was titled in English Tales from Earthsea but which is really a combination of the third and fourth books rather than anything much to do with the aforementioned anthology, and which therefore I'll continue to refer to by the Japanese name.
Gedo Senki is a Miyazaki movie, but not from Miyazaki Hayao, who was behind Nausicaa and Totoro etc; instead, the director was his son, Miyazaki Gorou. By comparison with the father's most recent film, Howl's Moving Castle, there was much more obvious use of CGI and the visual character designs didn't seem as distinct. Both movies had certain puzzling plot holes, esp. wrt their divergences from the source material (the original book Howl's Moving Castle was written by Diana Wynne Jones, who also wrote a loosely connected sequel, Castle in the Air, which afaik has no plans for animation by anyone), but I think HMC's characters felt more well-rounded and human, whereas GS's were relatively generic yet cryptic. In particular, Gedo Senki has a major plot point that's taken straight out of Tehanu, but whose foreshadowing and setup were largely absent; I have no idea how much sense it would've made to someone unfamiliar with the book(s).
(I watched this with the wombat-consort, who isn't hugely familiar with any of the Earthsea books. He seemed to regard the film as passingly entertaining but not worth putting much thought into, so I couldn't get much feedback out of him about it.)
WRT absolute faithfulness of adaptation, Gedo Senki has about the same relation to The Farthest Shore and Tehanu as SciFi's "Earthsea" had to A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, i.e., some but not lots. As artistic works in their own right, both of them end up being relatively genericized examples of their particular dramatic genre, following certain set tropes of character and plot rather than what LeGuin wrote, but at least Gedo Senki has a different set of tropes than SciFi's "Earthsea".
Incidentally, I was fairly impressed by the pirate subtitlers in Taiwan (or wherever this bootleg came from), in that in certain passages that actually were closely adapted from the books, they referred back to LeGuin's original dialogue instead of differently retranslating it into English.
Summary: one paw up-- imho not worth a great deal of effort to hunt it down (apparently because of licensing conflicts with the SciFi Channel, Gedo Senki can't be legally released in the US until 2009), but if you happen to run into it somewhere and it doesn't cost very much to rent, hey, might as well watch it. I don't think it's worth buying, although writing this up makes me think I might as well go read Tehanu again.
A few years ago, the SciFi Channel produced an execrable miniseries that was hashed together as a loose approximation of the first two books. It was produced by the same people who murdered MZB's The Mists of Avalon into a similarly distorted miniseries, and a lot of the same character types and plot twists seemed very familiar wrt that previous adaptation. By contrast, anything else would be an improvement, which I suppose is how I have to describe the anime movie Gedo Senki, whose bootleg DVD at our usual rental place was titled in English Tales from Earthsea but which is really a combination of the third and fourth books rather than anything much to do with the aforementioned anthology, and which therefore I'll continue to refer to by the Japanese name.
Gedo Senki is a Miyazaki movie, but not from Miyazaki Hayao, who was behind Nausicaa and Totoro etc; instead, the director was his son, Miyazaki Gorou. By comparison with the father's most recent film, Howl's Moving Castle, there was much more obvious use of CGI and the visual character designs didn't seem as distinct. Both movies had certain puzzling plot holes, esp. wrt their divergences from the source material (the original book Howl's Moving Castle was written by Diana Wynne Jones, who also wrote a loosely connected sequel, Castle in the Air, which afaik has no plans for animation by anyone), but I think HMC's characters felt more well-rounded and human, whereas GS's were relatively generic yet cryptic. In particular, Gedo Senki has a major plot point that's taken straight out of Tehanu, but whose foreshadowing and setup were largely absent; I have no idea how much sense it would've made to someone unfamiliar with the book(s).
(I watched this with the wombat-consort, who isn't hugely familiar with any of the Earthsea books. He seemed to regard the film as passingly entertaining but not worth putting much thought into, so I couldn't get much feedback out of him about it.)
WRT absolute faithfulness of adaptation, Gedo Senki has about the same relation to The Farthest Shore and Tehanu as SciFi's "Earthsea" had to A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, i.e., some but not lots. As artistic works in their own right, both of them end up being relatively genericized examples of their particular dramatic genre, following certain set tropes of character and plot rather than what LeGuin wrote, but at least Gedo Senki has a different set of tropes than SciFi's "Earthsea".
Incidentally, I was fairly impressed by the pirate subtitlers in Taiwan (or wherever this bootleg came from), in that in certain passages that actually were closely adapted from the books, they referred back to LeGuin's original dialogue instead of differently retranslating it into English.
Summary: one paw up-- imho not worth a great deal of effort to hunt it down (apparently because of licensing conflicts with the SciFi Channel, Gedo Senki can't be legally released in the US until 2009), but if you happen to run into it somewhere and it doesn't cost very much to rent, hey, might as well watch it. I don't think it's worth buying, although writing this up makes me think I might as well go read Tehanu again.
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no subject
on 2007-11-13 07:07 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-11-13 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-11-13 04:42 pm (UTC)It's a shame it wasn't either more faithfully or more imaginatively adapted. Earthsea seems like the kind of thing that /could/ cinematize very well.