Well, I guess it had to happen someday: the burden of twenty-five years of success was going to overwhelm the shoulders and buckle the knees of some poor soul at Japan's Studio Ghibli. Too bad that person happened to be head honcho Hayao Miyazaki's son, Goro. The directorial debut of the landscaper-cum-storyboard-artist, Tales from Earthsea was supposed to be a (nepotistic) passing of the torch to the next generation, but instead this plodding, uninteresting animated blob is the studio's first definitive blunder.
An adaptation of elements from four of the acclaimed Earthsea Cycle, author Ursula K. Le Guin has carefully guarded the property for years and only allowed Ghibli to use the material after being impressed by Spirited Away. Now, I harbor no illusions about the ease, or lack thereof, of adapting written material to film. The Lord of the Rings trilogy had 683-minutes to lay out the events of three novels and even Peter Jackson had to snip or alter bits here and there to make the leap from ink to film flow (earning him the ire of many a Tolkien loyalist). The young Miyazaki, however, seems to want his cake and eat it too: Earthsea moves at the leisurely pace of a book, but tries to stay faithful to the source material by cramming the highlight reel from four separate novels into a two-hour film. It's not a pretty sight.
We enter the realm of Earthsea to a ship being tossed about at sea; the impotence of its weather controlling wizard to calm the storm plus the dragons fighting to the death high above indicate that the planet is in magical turmoil. A "balance" has been disrupted by something or somebody and all goodness is being leeched from the world. The ship, it turns out, is a royal one, carrying the king and his son, Arren. For reasons that aren't well articulated, Arren stabs his father, steals his magic sword and flees the ship, ending up in a desert being chased by wolves. Resigning himself to be dog chow, the young man is instead saved by Sparrowhawk, an itinerant wizard who is among the few to retain some power. On a quest to find out what's disturbing the balance, Sparrowhawk invites Arren to join him and the pair set off it the direction of the bustling seaside city of Hortown.
Hortown is your typical walled city from countless fantasy novels: within its crumbling stone walls are exotic bazaars, slave markets, fountains and narrow alleyways jammed full of mystery and delight. Mind you, we don't really get to see much of that as Sparrowhawk and Arren hardly stop for a second glance at the wonders and instead mope around what can only be described as The Boring Quarter until the prince runs afoul of a local gang of thugs when he helps a girl, Therru, who's about to be sold into slavery. That gang's boss, however, isn't just any common criminal, he's a powerful dark mage named Cob and an old foe of Sparrowhawk. As it turns out, Cob is the one somehow causing the imbalance within nature by meddling with the veil between the worlds of the living and dead in an effort to achieve immortality (because longer life is, like, the worst possible crime a human can commit apparently) and Sparrowhawk must put an end to his endeavor before it's too late.
With wizards and magic swords, dragons and decaying walled cities, Earthsea has so much potentially exciting material to work that it's almost painful to watch most of it be squandered. After Arren pisses off the local thugs Sparrowhawk's ladyfriend, Tenar, takes them in at her farm and here the movie stalls for a good long while as the characters plow the fields (literally--this is not some figure of speech), eat soup and exchange sparse, cryptic dialog about the troubles of the world. Even after the inevitable endgame between Cob, Sparrowhawk and Arren is set I was so thoroughly unimpressed with the world of Earthsea that I didn't know who to root for: it's such a boring place maybe Cob's tipping of the scales is just the shake up this planet needs.
Even Ghibli's usually arresting visuals--that preternaturally warm aura that emanates from almost all their films--are absent. Once Sparrowhawk and Arren enter Hortown for for the first time I was expecting a cacophany of noise and action reminiscent of any of the bathhouse scenes in Spirited Away, but instead the environment is so stale and motionless that the pair look like they're walking in front of a matte painting at times. The paucity of detail is so pronounced in comparison to virtually every genre film the studio has released that I must assume there's some long, tragic backstory to the whole thing.
If there's a silver lining to the whole thing it's Disney's choices for the English voice cast, which includes both well known actors ( Timothy Dalton, Cheech Marin, Willem Dafoe) and some not-so-well-known names ( Matt Levin, Blaire Restaneo) who all fit their characters well. Marin was particularly entertaining as Cob's obsequious henchman, Hare, and delivered his lines with the perfect amount of oily sleaze. I also enjoyed Dalton's noble Sparrowhawk, but I think it was more for the images my imagination conjured up in the vacuum of any other stimulation of a staff-wielding, spell-slinging 007 squaring off against Robert Davi as the drug dealer Sanchez in License to Kill. Oh, where the mind will roam.
Unfortunately, a quality voice cast just can't dig Tales from Earthsea out from the very, very deep pit it's fallen into. There was a sort of morose End of an Era quality to the whole viewing experience that I could see on the faces of every Totoro shirt-clad, Ponyo purse-clutching audience member in attendance that day. I too am a fan of the ever-versatile Studio Ghibli's work, but in this case there isn't a magic spell in all the fantasy landscape that could make me give half a damn about anything going on in this movie.
An adaptation of elements from four of the acclaimed Earthsea Cycle, author Ursula K. Le Guin has carefully guarded the property for years and only allowed Ghibli to use the material after being impressed by Spirited Away. Now, I harbor no illusions about the ease, or lack thereof, of adapting written material to film. The Lord of the Rings trilogy had 683-minutes to lay out the events of three novels and even Peter Jackson had to snip or alter bits here and there to make the leap from ink to film flow (earning him the ire of many a Tolkien loyalist). The young Miyazaki, however, seems to want his cake and eat it too: Earthsea moves at the leisurely pace of a book, but tries to stay faithful to the source material by cramming the highlight reel from four separate novels into a two-hour film. It's not a pretty sight.
We enter the realm of Earthsea to a ship being tossed about at sea; the impotence of its weather controlling wizard to calm the storm plus the dragons fighting to the death high above indicate that the planet is in magical turmoil. A "balance" has been disrupted by something or somebody and all goodness is being leeched from the world. The ship, it turns out, is a royal one, carrying the king and his son, Arren. For reasons that aren't well articulated, Arren stabs his father, steals his magic sword and flees the ship, ending up in a desert being chased by wolves. Resigning himself to be dog chow, the young man is instead saved by Sparrowhawk, an itinerant wizard who is among the few to retain some power. On a quest to find out what's disturbing the balance, Sparrowhawk invites Arren to join him and the pair set off it the direction of the bustling seaside city of Hortown.
With wizards and magic swords, dragons and decaying walled cities, Earthsea has so much potentially exciting material to work that it's almost painful to watch most of it be squandered. After Arren pisses off the local thugs Sparrowhawk's ladyfriend, Tenar, takes them in at her farm and here the movie stalls for a good long while as the characters plow the fields (literally--this is not some figure of speech), eat soup and exchange sparse, cryptic dialog about the troubles of the world. Even after the inevitable endgame between Cob, Sparrowhawk and Arren is set I was so thoroughly unimpressed with the world of Earthsea that I didn't know who to root for: it's such a boring place maybe Cob's tipping of the scales is just the shake up this planet needs.
If there's a silver lining to the whole thing it's Disney's choices for the English voice cast, which includes both well known actors ( Timothy Dalton, Cheech Marin, Willem Dafoe) and some not-so-well-known names ( Matt Levin, Blaire Restaneo) who all fit their characters well. Marin was particularly entertaining as Cob's obsequious henchman, Hare, and delivered his lines with the perfect amount of oily sleaze. I also enjoyed Dalton's noble Sparrowhawk, but I think it was more for the images my imagination conjured up in the vacuum of any other stimulation of a staff-wielding, spell-slinging 007 squaring off against Robert Davi as the drug dealer Sanchez in License to Kill. Oh, where the mind will roam.
Unfortunately, a quality voice cast just can't dig Tales from Earthsea out from the very, very deep pit it's fallen into. There was a sort of morose End of an Era quality to the whole viewing experience that I could see on the faces of every Totoro shirt-clad, Ponyo purse-clutching audience member in attendance that day. I too am a fan of the ever-versatile Studio Ghibli's work, but in this case there isn't a magic spell in all the fantasy landscape that could make me give half a damn about anything going on in this movie.
