Tales From Earthsea: Why Does It Have 38% on RT Despite Being Made by Miyazaki?

For decades, author Ursula K. Le Guin turned down everyone who tried to buy the movie rights to her Earthsea fantasy series. Among those she turned down was the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.

He approached Le Guin in the early 1980s, when he was just transitioning from working on TV series to producing full-length anime films, and the author turned him down because she had no idea who he was and did not want the serious, deep, complex Earthsea turned into a typical Disney animation.

20 years later, when Miyazaki won an Oscar for Spirited Away, Le Guin said that the Japanese director was the only one she could trust to adapt Earthsea. The author's words were passed on to Studio Ghibli, whose head Toshio Suzuki soon signed a contract with the writer.

The Inexperienced Goro Miyazaki Was Chosen as Director

However, Hayao Miyazaki was busy with Howl's Moving Castle at the time, and Suzuki made an unexpected decision. He entrusted the production to Goro Miyazaki, the director's eldest son. Goro had a talent for animation but had never worked in the entertainment industry. Before 2006's Tales from Earthsea, his specialty was designing gardens and parks.

Why did Suzuki choose Goro? First, he liked the storyboards that the younger Miyazaki had drawn for the movie when he was first brought in as a consultant. And secondly, the producer didn't have much of a choice.

Ghibli has always suffered from the fact that it was created as a "personal" company for Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, serving two brilliant creators and not providing room for ambitious animators. As a result, talented artists either didn't stay at the studio or didn't work for Ghibli at all.

Of course, it would have been possible to hire an outside director. But Suzuki trusted a "close person" with a famous surname. As we know today, he made a big mistake.

Tales from Earthsea Begins in the Middle of the Original Book Series

How would you go about adapting a five-novel series into a movie? Obviously, you'd start at the beginning, with the first book A Wizard of Earthsea, which introduced readers to the young wizard Sparrowhawk and the wondrous world of magic and dragons that surrounds him.

In a pinch, one could choose to adapt the second novel, The Tombs of Atuan, since it features not only the main character (an older but still young Sparrowhawk) but also the main heroine, a young priestess Tenar who is forced to serve the sinister spirits that lurk in the darkness of an underground labyrinth.

A particularly determined screenwriter might try to combine the first two novels into a single story. In any case, the central character of the movie would have to be Sparrowhawk, the central character of four of Le Guin's five novels, whose spiritual evolution makes up the biggest share of the narrative.

Miyazaki, however, based his movie on the third and fourth books in the series,The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, which serve as the culmination and epilogue of the Sparrowhawk's story. It's the same as if Peter Jackson only adapted The Return of the King.

Tales from Earthsea Doesn't Have Epic Battles or Impressive Special Effects

But it would still be a better movie than Tales from Earthsea. Because at least it would have a lot of special effects and great battles. Tales from Earthsea has neither. It is a slow, mostly conversational movie, and to understand the dialog you need to be well versed in the book series.

For example, the movie does not even explain that in the world of Earthsea, all people have secret "true names" and nicknames known to others. This is crucial to the plot, but it is not clear from the movie – an obvious mistake by an inexperienced writer.

The movie regularly alludes to the events of the first two books instead of showing them, greatly simplifies the narrative of the original, and tries to put Prince Arren in the lead and push Sparrowhawk aside.

As a result, the classic fantasy saga becomes something protracted, barely comprehensible, very primitive, and irritating to both Le Guin fans and those who expect sweeping magical battles from a fantasy animation.

Tales from Earthsea's Main Character Is Not the One You Sympathize With

Tales from Earthsea fails to do even the simplest thing: give the audience a charming protagonist to sympathize with. Sparrowhawk remains too mysterious for the viewers, and Arren is presented as an obsessive psychopath who begins the movie by killing his father, an obviously excellent ruler.

There is nothing like this in Le Guin's books, and the movie never really explains what drove the young man to commit this atrocity. Are you willing to sympathize with such a hero? Yes, he behaves more decently later on, and he is genuinely concerned about his crime. But parricide is too serious a sin to commit without a good reason and expect sympathy.

And what about the graphics and animation, traditionally the strength of Ghibli films? They are not bad, but nothing more. Not comparable to Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away. It turns out that the name Miyazaki is not enough to create an animated masterpiece.