“I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”
–The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
When I was a kid, I was fortunate to stumble onto Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy (it’s longer now, but I actually haven’t read beyond the original trilogy). I remember The Farthest Shore, the third book in the series, was particularly mindblowing to me. I’d never read such an exploration of simple beauties, nor seen any book for children that confronted mortality so squarely. When I was in 11th grade, I returned to Le Guin, doing a year-long project on her work.
So when I heard that Studio Ghibli, the people behind films like “Princess Mononoke,” “Spirited Away,” and “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind,” were making an Earthsea film, I was very interested. I’ve been making it a point to occasionally check the evil illegal bittorent websites for a copy ever since the film came out in Japan about a year ago. Sadly, the film won’t be legally released in the US for at least a couple of more years: the license for the execrable Sci-Fi Channel miniseries of the books prevents it.
Well, now I’ve seen it. Sort of. When I finally found a copy, it was actually a French-dubbed screener. But I also found a file of subtitles in English. Well, I don’t know if you can call it English, exactly. The translation looks like it may have been performed primarily by babelfish. Without the visuals and prior knowledge of the story, I don’t think I could have divined any meaning from these sentences. Whoever translated it had particular difficulty with genders; characters are constantly being referred to as “it.”
So I just watched an adaptation of an American book made by Japanese people, dubbed into French and subtitled back into something vaguely resembling English. Quite the international project.
I was also curious about the movie because of its director. This film was directed by Goro Miyazaki. This is the son of Hayao Miyazaki, who directed all those other amazing films I mentioned above. But prior to this film, he’d never had any experience with animation. He’d avoided it, because of his complex relationship with his father.
There’s plenty I could complain about the movie. It is not up to the standard of Mononoke or Spirited away, the elder Miyazaki’s masterworks. But this is a faint criticism. I don’t think that there’s anyone on the planet who is making traditionally animated films on that level today. And even Hayao Miyazaki didn’t pull it off with his first film.
It also isn’t a faithful adaptation of the books, by a long shot. For one thing, the “sea” in “Earthsea” seems to have been lost somewhere over the Pacific. The plot of this story derives mostly from the first and third books, with borrowings from later stories as well. Both of those books involve large amounts of travel over the sea, which is one of my favorite things about them. The film takes place almost entirely on dry land, with locations that are separated by months of sailing in the books being just a few days walk from one another. Actually, the film feels less like an adaptation and more like a crazed mash-up of beautiful things. A lot of those beautiful things, though by no means all of them, derive from a series of books that also lent their name.
But all that is really beside the point. If I wanted the books, I’d read the books. They’re sitting about four feet from me right now. What I got was a beautiful experience. I got scenes of cityscapes and beautiful ruins, ominous castles and very expressive people. And marvelous dragons. In fact, if I had to sum up the film, this is what I’d say:
“I do not care what comes after; I have seen dragons on the wind of morning.”
Sometimes an apeshit mash-up of beautiful things is exactly right.
EDIT: I found what looks like much much better subtitles available here, in case anyone else wants to watch it.
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