Original title: Gedo Senki

Studio Ghibli’s long-standing problem in nurturing new talent to stand alongside founding directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isa Takahata had so far resulted in the less than stellar Umi ga Kikoeru/Ocean Waves (1993), directed by Tomomi Mochizuki (who didn’t direct for the company again), the excellent Mimi o Sumaseba/Whisper of the Heart (1995) by Yoshifumi Kondō (who tragically died at the age of 47 before his career could take off) and Hiroyuki Morita (director of Neko no Ongaeshi/The Cat Returns (2002) and little else). In the mid-2000s with Miyazaki and Takahata entering into old age and making noises about retirement, the search for new talent intensified and after Miyazaki’s Hauru no Ugoku Shiro/Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) the company once again started looking for fresh blood.

First out of the gate came Miyazaki’s son, Gorō, who picked up a project that his father had been trying to mount for many years, an adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. Initially Le Guin had been unwilling to sell Ghibli the rights to the books but after seeing Tonari no Totoro/My Neighbour Totoro (1988) she decided that Miyazaki was “a genius of the same caliber as Kurosawa or Fellini” (all Le Guin quotes are taken from Gedo Senki: A First Response to “Gedo Senki,” the Earthsea film made by Goro Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli by Ursula K. Le Guin) and relented. By now Miyazaki – who wanted to adapt elements from the first four novels, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972) and Tehanu (1990) – was busy with Howl’s Moving Castle and Studio Ghibli head Toshio Suzuki decided to promote Gorō, who was advising the company in pre-production, to director against Miyakai’s wishes – he felt that his son was too inexperienced for such a large project. In the end he was proved right as Tales from Earthsea gave the world something it hadn’t seen before – a Studio Ghili film that really isn’t all that good.

The world of Earthsea is made up of a vast archipelago of islands, where magic and dragons are a part of everyday life. A strange malaise is spreading throughout the islands, causing people to act strangely – the balance between Man and nature is going out of sync and the usually peaceful dragons are starting to fight each other. Against this backdrop, the young Prince Arren (originally voiced by Junichi Okada and by Matt Levin in the English dub) of the island kingdom of Enlad inexplicably murders his father (Kaoru Kobayashi/Brian George) and flees the castle. He is saved from a pack of wolves by the archmage Sparrowhawk (Bunta Sugawara/Timothy Dalton) (originally named Ged in the books) and they join forces to find out what’s causing the madness that’s sweeping through the arcjhipelago. Along the way they meet a young woman named Therru (Aoi Teshima/Blaire Restaneo) who has a hidden relationship with the dragons, anger the powerful slave trader and warlock Lord Cob (Yuko Tanaka/Willem Dafoe – in the Japanese version, Cob is voiced by a woman and is certainly styled as a female but is voiced in the English dub by a man. In the books, Cob was also male), and try to evade the dark spirit that is pursuing Arren. Lots of other stuff happens, mostly involving dragons and secret identities, but really it’s a terribly uninvolving tale that will likely leave you more baffled than engrossed.

Tales from Earthsea has a terrible reputation, one which it doesn’t fully deserve. It was unquestionably Ghibli’s weakest film to date and its problems are many and varied but it’s not a complete write off. It certainly didn’t deserve the silly Japan’s Bunshun Raspberry Award for Worst Director and Worst Movie accolades it was saddled with though it is, at best, a surprisingly average film that gave Gorō’s fledgeling career in animation (he was previously an architect, helping to design the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka among other things) the most inauspicious of starts though he later redeemed himself with the thoroughly charming Kokuriko-zaka Kara/From Up on Poppy Hill (2011).

To his credit, Miyazaki doesn’t simply ape the look and feel of his father’s films. There are nods in his direction by Junior largely avoids a slavish copy of his old man’s style, bringing a simpler and more contemporary look to the film, a fact that angered his father and led to them not talking during production. The design, colour palette and animation all feel different enough to the Ghibli house style to mark it as the work of a new talent but it does nothing to make up for a dull script that eventually doesn’t really do very much. Based mainly on the third book in Le Guin’s series, The Farthest Shore, Gorō Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa’s screenplay not only feels like we’ve come in part way through a story but in itself is episodic and lacking the grand sweep of Hayao’s best work.

While it’s not the most effective of calling cards for a young animator who had done his best in life not to trade on his father’s name, it’s also not much of an advert for the work of Ursula K. Le Guin. When it’s not dull, Tales from Earthsea tends to be confusing and only occasionally comes close to capturing the essence of the source novels – “Much of it was, I thought, incoherent,” Le Guin said of the film on her blog. “This may be because I kept trying to find and follow the story of my books while watching an entirely different story, confusingly enacted by people with the same names as in my story, but with entirely different temperaments, histories, and destinies.”

The most damning thing one can say about Tales from Earthsea is that it’s almost instantly forgettable, entirely lacking the emotional resonances of Miyazaki Senior’s work. It’s hard to warm to the characters and while it touches on the same concerns for the environment that had run throughout Ghibli’s back catalogue, it does so with none of the subtlety of other films (“I despise anyone who doesn’t care about life!” rants Therru at one point, spelling things out for the thickies in the audience who weren’t keeping up…)

The Sci Fi Channel had already adapted, very loosely, parts of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan into a three-part mini-series in 2004, titled Legend of Earthsea. Le Guin was unhappy with the way that the mini-series had drastically altered the characters and plots of the books and she wasn’t terribly keen on Ghibli’s version either. She was particularly troubled by the film’s tendency towards violence (“Much of it was exciting,” she wrote on her blog. “The excitement was maintained by violence, to a degree that I find deeply untrue to the spirit of the books.”) and was particularly dismayed  by the way that the makers of both adaptations had “white-washed” the stories – in the books, the people of Earthsea are described as dark skinned, the only white-skinned race, the Kargs, being largely marginalised in the original stories.

Though not as awful as some of its critics maintain, Tales from Earthsea is a disappointing film, a rare misfire from Ghibli. One can only wonder what Hayao Miyazaki might have brought to the project if Le Guin had allowed him to buy the rights to the books in the 1980s as he’d wanted, but instead we’re stuck with this. It did well at the Japanese box office – all Ghibli films did at this stage – but it’s nowhere near as beloved as the company’s other productions. After Hayao and Gorō were reconciled after Earthsea was released, Gorō was given another chance and From Up on Poppy Hill won over both critics and fans. In 2020, he was working on Āya to Majo, Ghibli’s first fully CGI animation, a television adaptation of Earwig and the Witch by Diana Wynne Jones, author of the book on which Howl’s Moving Castle had been based.