Tales From Earthsea (Screen Daily Review)

[dleedlee]

http://www.screendaily.com/story.asp?st ... 688&r=true

Tales From Earthsea (Gedo Senki)

Lee Marshall in Venice 14 September 2006

Dir: Goro Miyazaki. Jap. 2006. 114mins.

Hayao Miyazaki has passed the director’s mantle on to his son Goro for Tales From Earthsea, Studio Ghibli’s latest feature-length 2D anime. Based on the series of books by fantasy author Ursula Le Guin, this dragon and wizard yarn is drawn – at least as far as the backdrops go – with the same painterly hand associated with Ghibli, but it lacks the sheer visual magic and kooky humour of Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. Earthsea is cinematic in its level of detail but not in the sketchy development of its characters and story, which seem more suited to small-screen anime.

But this will not necessarily scare audiences off. Released in its native Japan in July, Earthsea has already overtaken Howl’s gross, notching up almost $60m after seven weeks. Beyond Japan, Spirited Away and Howl’s were too out-there for smaller kids and too fairytale based for most teens, instead making a lot of their business from the adult crossover market. Earthsea, though it has some violent scenes, will play well from age seven up, and its period fantasy setting will help it to catch a ride on the skirts of two other recent literary fantasy adaptations, Lord Of The Rings and The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.

However, although Disney has a US distribution deal with Ghibli, Stateside audiences won’t be able to see Earthsea until 2009, when the copyright on the Sci-Fi Channel’s Earthsea TV series (the subject of much criticism by Le Guin) runs out.

Goro Miyazaki and co-writer Keiko Niwa based their screenplay mostly on The Farthest Shore, the third book of Le Guin’s ongoing series. A queasily atmospheric opening sea tempest scene states the premise. This distant land, with its medieval architecture and technology, is a world out of joint: cattle plague roams the countryside (and has started to cross over, BSE-like, to humans) and two dragons – who normally keep to their regular haunts in the west – appear in these eastern skies, tearing each other apart. Which is not like Earthsea dragons at all, we learn, in one of the plodding expositions of background and message that pepper the dialogue.

In the royal palace, all is not well either: Prince Arren (Junichi Okada), a mop- haired anime scamp, kills his father, the king, and flees. Wandering in the badlands, Arren bumps into Sparrowhawk (Bunta Sugawara), a wise and paternal magician who is on a quest to restore the Balance that has been lost in the world. This search will take Arren and Sparrowhawk to a farm run by lady farmer and former priestess Tenar (Jun Fubuki), an old friend of the magician. From there they embark on a second-act rural idyll together with the fourth member of this eco-friendly manage, Therru (Aoi Teshima), a fire- scarred young girl who Arren earlier saved from a bunch of evil slave- traders.

There’s little character development, particularly in the case of Arren, whose cute-kid manner and fierce sense of loyalty are difficult to reconcile with the bloody patricide he commits at the beginning; when an explanation of his behaviour is finally given, it’s supernatural and abstract.

The spirit of Le Guin’s books is also betrayed not just by the fact that all the characters look pretty Caucasian (in the books, they were Native American in hue and physiognomy), but also by the portrayal of Lord Cob – Earthsea’s Sauron-like bad wizard, portrayed in the film as an absurd androgynous Goth – whose role as Sparrowhawk’s alter ego is glossed over in the film, making both characters thinner and less resonant.

The settings are more rewarding than the characters themselves, especially the bustling port of Hort Town, which feels like a decadent corner of Byzantium after the Romans packed up and left, with makeshift hovels clustering at the base of massive ruined arches and a Smyrna-like bazaar full of scam merchants and drug dealers.

The soundtrack features two sentimental themes songs performed by rising Japanese pop talent Aoi Teshima, who also voices Therru.

Production company
Studio Ghibli

International sales
Wild Bunch

Producer
Toshio Suzuki

Screenplay
Goro Miyazaki
Niwa Keiko
from the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin

Production design
Yoji Takeshige

Directing animator
Akihiko Yamashita

Supervising animator
Takeshi Inamura

Colour design
Michiyo Yasuda

Music
Tamiya Terashima

Main cast (voices)

Junichi Okada
Aoi Teshima
Yuko Tanaka
Teruyuki Kagawa
Jun Fubuki
Bunta Sugawara