The Earthsea of Ursula Le Guin is a long way off in this adaptation, and yet not far enough for it to work. As it is, the most entertaining thing about Gedo Senki is the drama that surrounded its inception.
First there was the drama of Miyazaki Goro stepping into his father’s shoes and shadow to make this film, documenting every step of the process on a blog that made it quite clear that he resented both his father’s absence in his childhood and the great expectations now on his shoulders, while of course being grateful and humble for the opportunity to be given a chance to be at the helm of the world’s most respected animation studio. Then came the drama as Ursula Le Guin went to the screening and declared her great disappointment, especially since she’d always hoped Miyazaki Hayao would adapt her books, which was why she’d given the rights to the studio. Both were very interesting for a fan to follow, but also prepared me for what turned out to be a rather tedious and disjointed movie.
How I wish father and son had exchanged projects, Miyazaki Snr. directing this film and Miyazaki Jr. taking on Hauru no Ugoku Shiro, the studio’s other recent disappointing adaptation of an occidental fantasy novel. That way, Goro-kun could have cut his teeth on the project that seemed just a little bit BENEATH Miyazaki-sensei (especially after his career reached its zenith with Mononoke and Sen to Chihiro), while the great man himself could have tamed the epic. While I wasn’t too impressed with Hauru, it at least showed that its screenwriters knew what to take from the source material and where to diverge wildly into original material.
For Gedo is just a mess. It tries to pick the iconic moments from books one, three and four of Earthsea and twist them into a new plot replete with clichés but bereft of the spirit of the novels – and then drops in little references to the source material (like Tenar’s past from book 2) that no-one but an established fan would understand or care about. It’s plain when reading the Earthsea series that book three, The Farthest Shore, is by far the best material for a film, despite its lack of a real antagonist – but that’s because it deals almost exclusively with the relationship between Ged (known throughout the movie, as in the books, by his alias Haitaka – ‘Sparrowhawk’) and Arren, who starts as a hero-worshipping naïf and comes of age on the journey. That gets lost in the film, since they only have a few real conversations, and the focus is shifted to the relationship between Arren and Therru, who in the book was a hideously scarred preteen who would speak to nobody, but here is a teenager with a fetching scar who takes about three scenes of grumpiness to defrost, predictable and inevitable as spam about Viagra in your inbox.
And this is part of the problem of the film – it’s so predictable, so full of ineluctable clichés and unredeemable platitudes. We see some slaves; slavery soon becomes a threat. A pretty girl is saved; she happens to be in the place the protagonists find themselves in. Add to that a totally meaningless and unnecessary plot taken from book one about a doppelganger, and some really dubious ways to get characters from A to B, and you have a mess. The only one who escapes with his dignity is Ged, whose magic remains nicely subtle, although he’s quite useless at the end.
It also seems once again that the only ones given enough time and money in Ghibli to make really top-quality films are Miyazaki and Takahata. While it doesn’t look as rushed and simplistic as Neko no Ongaeshi, this is no visual spectacle on the level of Sen to Chihiro. Characters are simple, all of them looking like they’ve walked out of Nausicaä’s Kaze no Tani, although the one who looks like Kurotawa doesn’t get away with his slimy looks by being a loveable rogue; he just has to be a cackling imbecile henchman, one of the most tiresome antagonists I’ve seen animated since Disney’s 80s slump, once again showing how Miyazaki Goro doesn’t have his father’s skill with undermining expectations. Arren is a typically good-looking Ghibli boy, though his dark side tends to be drawn with increasingly silly levels of exaggeration. The dragons, mostly cel-shaded CG, move stiffly and weightlessly, jarring with the animation and making me remember just how incredible it is to see the eel-like Haku in flight in Sen to Chihiro. And the less said about the way the baddie looks at the end, the better.
The backgrounds almost elevate the standard of art to beautiful. Some are breathtaking. But then mixed in with the ethereally beautiful skies and almost tangible cities are shots of desert sands that are pretty much monochrome, drab, thoughtless banquet halls and brick walls that look like they’ve been dashed off in minutes. Shame.
Shame, too, that the gritty, weather-worn, dark-skinned heroes of Earthsea are such simply-drawn Caucasian-looking figures. It just feels too obvious, too cheap, too much like someone on a board has said, ‘White sells better; stick to what we know.’ And yes, there’s a long debate to be had over whether anime characters are supposed to look Caucasian or Japanese which I’ve gone into at length before, but either way, they certainly ain’t dark-skinned.
Not that changes in an adaptation are a bad thing. I don’t think a straight adaptation of any Earthsea book would work as a movie, and Le Guin’s arrogance is showing when she imagines it would be a good idea to have a film set between two of her books, since everyone’s so familiar with them they’ll understand. But you can’t just use words that sound appropriate to a fantasy setting and assume they’ll have inherent relevance: since the seiyuu for Ged (Kamaji from Sen to Chihiro) sounds like he’s got a very sore throat all the time and the woman who plays Kumo (Eboshi from Mononoke) thinks she’ll sound really creepy and chilling if she just whispers all her lines, the nadir of the show was when they were almost inaudibly huffing at one another about ‘eien no inochi’ (‘eternal life') and ‘Sonzai no tatakau’ (‘battle of existence’) or something, I really did just want it all to end – and at nearly two hours, it’s much too long for the amount of story it contains. When the highlight of the movie is when two old flibbertigibbets are gossiping about the new ‘work’ they’ve seen up at Tenar’s, you know you’re in trouble.
A shame, because this could have been a great epic. But what I find myself really yearning for is for Takahata to make another down-to-earth, affecting story like Omohide PoroPoro.
(originally written 7.1.07)
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