Tales from Earthsea (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Tales from Earthsea arrived in Japanese cinemas on the 29th of July 2006, carrying more weight than most debut films. Its director, Gorō Miyazaki, was making his first feature. His father, the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, had not once looked at his son's storyboard during the entire production. The two men had remained on non-speaking terms throughout. And the author whose beloved novels the film drew from, Ursula K. Le Guin, had agreed to the project only after being told the senior Miyazaki would have oversight, then discovered that oversight was far more limited than she had understood. What unfolds from this knot of complicated relationships is a Studio Ghibli film unlike any other: a work that reached number one at the Japanese box office, won a Raspberry Award for Worst Movie, was selected for the Venice Film Festival, and left the woman whose imagination built the world of Earthsea feeling she had watched an entirely different story enacted by people with the same names as her characters.

• 2. A Long Road to Adaptation

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  Some 20 years before the film's release, Ursula K. Le Guin received an inquiry from Hayao Miyazaki, passed through the bookseller Iwanami Shoten. He wanted to adapt her Earthsea series into anime. She turned him down. Her reason was not about Miyazaki specifically; she had not seen any of his work and associated animation with the output of the Walt Disney Company. Time changed her mind. After seeing My Neighbor Totoro, released in 1988, she came to appreciate what Miyazaki could do. Around 2003, she relayed her change of heart through the translator of her works, signaling she was now open to an adaptation. By then, Miyazaki had completed several major projects, including the Oscar-winning Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. He no longer felt the enthusiasm for animating Earthsea. He had already made many works inspired by it and was inclined to decline. Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki saw an opportunity. He devised a plan to have Hayao's son Gorō direct the film in his father's place. Hayao's initial response was blunt: he said his son could not possibly handle directing and probably could not even draw. Suzuki had already been working behind his back. He showed Hayao the storyboard Gorō had drawn, using it as a direct rebuttal. The deal was signed, and Hayao accompanied the signing, meeting Le Guin and her son in person in June or August 2005. Le Guin was greatly disappointed that Hayao would not be directing, but she agreed, on the understanding that he would have oversight. The producer later recalled that Hayao only agreed to be held entirely responsible for the script. Producer Suzuki contributed one of the film's most striking creative choices: the opening scene in which Prince Arren kills his own father, a gruesome departure from Le Guin's novels, was Suzuki's idea.

• 3. Building the World

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  Gorō Miyazaki drew on a sprawling set of source materials to construct his Earthsea. The film pulls characters and plot elements from four of Le Guin's novels: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu. Alongside these, it draws from Hayao Miyazaki's own graphic novel, Shuna's Journey, with many direct references, especially in character development. The resulting story centers on Prince Arren, described as a seventeen-year-old boy shadowed by a mirror image of himself, a projection of his fear of death. His companion for much of the film is the archmage Sparrowhawk, voiced in Japanese by Bunta Sugawara and in the English dub by Timothy Dalton. The villain is Cob, described as a maniacal androgynous warlock voiced in the English dub by Willem Dafoe, who seeks eternal life by opening the door between life and death. Years before the film's events, Sparrowhawk had already defeated Cob once, banishing him to the Wastelands. Tenar, voiced in the English dub by Mariska Hargitay, carries her own history with Sparrowhawk: when they were young, she was a priestess at the Tombs of Atuan until he guided her to freedom. The character of Therru, voiced in Japanese by newcomer Aoi Teshima and in the English dub by Blaire Restaneo, is introduced as a seventeen-year-old burn victim abused and abandoned by her birth parents. Her true nature as a dragon, concealed until the film's climax, is the plot's central revelation. The English title of the film is taken from Le Guin's 2001 short story collection of the same name.

• 4. Sound and Score

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  Tamiya Terashima composed and managed the soundtrack, which was released as a multichannel hybrid SACD-CD on the 12th of July 2006 by Tokuma Japan Communications and Studio Ghibli Records. The album contains 21 tracks. Carlos Núñez contributed to 11 of them, playing ocarina, whistle, and Galician gaita, a type of bagpipe. His presence gives the score an Irish and Galician folk character that one reviewer described as "Irish-tinged." Kyle Smith, writing in the New York Post, credited the score with making even scenes in which characters merely stand quietly in rustling fields feel fraught with somber majesty. Aoi Teshima, who also voiced the character of Therru in the Japanese cast, sang in two of the tracks. It was among her earliest public work. A follow-up album titled Melodies from Gedo Senki was released on the 17th of January 2007, including unreleased tracks from the original soundtrack alongside new compositions by Núñez. The son of Le Guin, Theo Le Guin, viewed the Japanese theatrical trailer before release and said of it: "The images are really beautiful. The song too, it's not like something from Hollywood, but felt really like Ghibli."

• 5. Release and Box Office

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  In Japan, the film reached number one at the box office in its opening week, grossing over 900 million yen, or approximately 7.7 million US dollars. It pushed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest to second place and held the top position for five weeks. By the end of the year it was the fourth-highest-grossing film in Japan overall and the year's highest-grossing domestic Japanese production. Its path through international markets was considerably rougher. In Australia, the film premiered in Brisbane on the 15th of April 2007, then traveled through Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth on a single print tour. Unusually for a Ghibli release, it screened only in subtitled form in Australian cinemas. In the United Kingdom, Optimum Releasing brought the film to just 23 venues starting the 3rd of August 2007, earning a total of £23,300. The United States release came even later, when Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures opened the film on the 13th of August 2010, in only five theaters. The delay had a specific cause: a non-compete arrangement with RHI Entertainment, which had held North American rights to Earthsea adaptations and produced the 2004 miniseries Legend of Earthsea. RHI, then known as Hallmark Entertainment, had granted a specific rights reversion for Studio Ghibli in 2004, but those rights did not expire until December 2008. The American release also carried a PG-13 rating for some violent images, making it the first and only animated film released under the Disney name to receive that rating. It was the second Studio Ghibli film to receive the rating, after Princess Mononoke in 1997.

• 6. Father, Son, and a Walking Father

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  During a screening of the finished film, Hayao Miyazaki walked out for a smoke break and offered a comment that circulated widely afterward: "You shouldn't make a picture based on your emotions." When asked for his thoughts on the film more directly, he said, "I was looking at my kid. He's not an adult yet. That is all." He later wrote a brief message for Gorō: "It was made honestly, so it was good." The critical establishment in Japan was less restrained. Gorō was presented at the Bunshun Kiichigo Awards, Japan's equivalent of the Raspberry Awards, and won Worst Director. Tales from Earthsea itself won Worst Movie at the end of 2006. The reception outside Japan was similarly divided. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 37 percent of critics gave the film a positive review based on 41 critics, with an average rating of 5.4 out of 10, making it the lowest-rated Studio Ghibli film on the site until Earwig and the Witch, released in 2020 and also directed by Gorō. On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based on 11 reviews. Radio Times found it lacking the technical sheen and warm sentimentality of earlier Ghibli films. The Daily Mirror called it "ploddy, excruciatingly slow." Empire magazine countered that it was "well worth watching." The Guardian described it as "an engaging piece of work." Despite winning a Japan Raspberry Award, the film was also nominated for the Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year in 2007, losing to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and was selected for the Out of Competition section at the 63rd Venice Film Festival.

• 7. Le Guin's Verdict

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  Ursula K. Le Guin's first public response to director Gorō Miyazaki was carefully measured: "It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie." But she later made clear that this statement did not reflect her true feelings. She explained that taking bits and pieces of her work out of context and replacing the storylines with an entirely different plot had left her feeling she was watching an entirely different story, confusingly enacted by people with the same names as her characters. Le Guin's deepest objection was moral rather than narrative. She wrote that evil in the film had been "comfortably externalized in a villain" who could simply be killed, solving all problems. In her view, modern fantasy, both literary and governmental, too often treats killing as the solution to the conflict between good and evil. She had not conceived her Earthsea books in those terms and felt the film imposed exactly that framework onto her work. She also found the production values a step below those of films directed by Hayao Miyazaki and felt the film's excitement was too focused around violence. She praised certain depictions of nature and acknowledged that much of the film was beautiful. The film is noted as the first anime adaptation of any part of the Earthsea series. Gorō Miyazaki, who later also directed Earwig and the Witch, went on to direct The Red Turtle in 2016 as a co-production with Wild Bunch, marking a continued if complicated relationship between his career and the legacy his father built.