Category: Films

[My blog this year ends as it began, with anime. This essay was first published in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, Vol. 37, no. 103 (Summer 2008), pp. 53-72. It was written in a white heat, as soon as the film came out in the UK. Ursula Le Guin didn’t like either the movie or my discussion of it, though she enjoyed the other essay I published in Foundation. Her dislike of the film was shared by many, but I still think it’s an honest movie with a fascinating relationship to its source material, both in Le Guin’s great story cycle and in anime.]

Tales from Earthsea was forged in a spirit of contention.[1]  Goro Miyazaki’s famous father Hayao made it clear that he did not want his son to direct it.[2]  Ursula K. Le Guin, on whose Earthsea books the film is based, expressed her disappointment with it on her website.[3]  And Japanese filmgoers – who made it the fourth highest-grossing movie of 2006 – found themselves fiercely divided as to its merits.[4]  Disagreement dogged the project from inception to release; and much of this disagreement seems to have sprung from the decision of Toshio Suzuki, president and chief producer of Studio Ghibli, to name Goro as its director, despite his total lack of experience or training in the art of film-making.

The film anticipates these divisions from its opening sequence.  The captain of a ship labouring in heavy seas appeals for help to his weatherworker, one of those trained wizards of Le Guin’s Earthsea whose power consists in learning the ‘true names’ of things and thus gaining a degree of control over them.  But the weatherworker’s powers desert him and he cannot calm the waves.  We are in a world where age-old certainties have crumbled and been replaced with an inner turmoil that keeps breaking out in bloodshed.  Soon afterwards, a pair of dragons fight to the death in territory not their own (they have flown farther East than ever before in living memory – a detail picked up from the third and fifth books of Le Guin’s Earthsea sequence).[5]  And in the following scene a boy kills his royal father for no reason.  Toppling to the palace floor, the dying king calls out his son’s name, Arren, as he dies.  Generation is at war with generation, and the only communication between them is a name thrown into the dark after the retreating footsteps of a teenage assassin: a name unattached to any visible body, as if to symbolize the predicament of Earthsea, where names have begun to lose their meanings.

For readers of Le Guin – and Le Guin herself – this unmotivated murder seems to be the most disturbing aspect of the film.  This is partly because it has no equivalent in the books (in The Farthest Shore Prince Arren leaves home with his father’s blessing);[6] and partly because we are never given the comfort of an explanation for it.  Our hope for an explanation reaches its height much later in the movie, when Arren discusses the murder with a girl called Therru.  Given that Therru’s parents abused and tried to kill her – a violent past she carries about with her in the visible form of a burn-mark across her face – she naturally assumes that the prince’s deed was an act of revenge for similar abuse.  But no: his father, Arren tells her, was a ‘great man’, whose qualities made the youngster feel inadequate (though he never claims that this is why he stabbed him).  Dissatisfied with this half-hearted effort to supply the prince with motivation, the audience casts about for a better way of accounting for the killing.  By the end of the film, for instance, we might assume the king’s assassination to be one more sign of the universal malaise brought to Earthsea by the deadly magic of the corrupt witch/wizard Kumo or Cob.  But Arren himself never seeks refuge from responsibility by claiming any such thing, and at the end of the film he sets off on the journey home to Enlad to face the consequences of what he has done: consequences we can only assume to be dire ones.  Debates about the film’s quality (as against the identity of its director) tend to centre on the question of why Goro Miyazaki chose to introduce the startling new element of parricide into Le Guin’s series, and on the extent to which viewers find themselves satisfied by any possible answers to this question.

Le Guin was clearly not satisfied by any explanation on offer.  For her, the excitement of the film was ‘maintained by violence, to a degree that I find to be deeply untrue to the spirit of the books’; and this reliance on violence to stimulate the audience’s attention is a widespread phenomenon in modern fantasy, ‘literary or governmental’, which offers ‘killing people’ as a solution to the ‘so-called war between good and evil’.[7]  She regrets that the reason for Arren’s initial act of violence is so belatedly and so tersely given, and concludes that ‘the darkness within us can’t be done away with by swinging a magic sword’, while lamenting the fact that in the film ‘evil has been comfortably externalized in a villain, the wizard Kumo/Cob, who can simply be killed, thus solving all problems’.  Interestingly, her objections to the movie are couched in terms of a malaise in the ‘real’ world not unlike the kind that pervades Goro Miyazaki’s Earthsea: a malaise in this case sustained by the propagandistic simplifications of the War on Terror, which is represented as a ‘war between good and evil’ where evil can be ‘comfortably externalized in a villain’ – Saddam or Osama – and ‘killed’ with every pseudo-magic weapon at the disposal of the Good Guys.[8]

Le Guin’s objections are understandable, but do the film less than justice.  For one thing, the level of violence it contains is no higher than that found in the Earthsea books.  Every violent act in the film has its equivalent in Le Guin’s series, with the sole exception of the killing of Arren’s father.[9]  In addition, the film-makers eschew simplicity as strenuously as she does, and seem to view physical assault with equal distaste.  The wizard Kumo/Cob is precisely not killed with a blow of Arren’s magic sword.  His identity as an arch self-deceiver is merely made manifest by the blow, as he loses his wizard’s staff and with it his ability to sustain his youthful appearance; but his strength remains undiminished by the loss.  Indeed, one might question whether Cob is actually ‘killed’ at all.  As he staggers towards the dragon Therru/Tehanu in his final moments, he clearly sees her as possessed of the eternal life he craves, since she has just revived from apparent death by strangulation.  He begs her to bestow that life on him, and she gives it him in a puff of breath.  But a dragon’s breath is made of fire; so he is destroyed by what he asked for.  The implication is that it’s his craving for an artificial extension of his earthly existence that kills him, rather than an act of violence on his enemies’ part.  And his death precisely does not ‘solve all problems’.  Arren must still return to Enlad to face trial for murder.  And before this happens, as the last few wordless scenes of the film remind us, the ploughing of a field must be completed and it must be sown with seed, or there will be no harvest.

Le Guin’s view of the film has some intriguing affinities with Goro’s account of his own early response to the Earthsea books.  He first came across them, he tells us in his blog, as a High School student in the early 80s, when he found himself identifying enthusiastically with the ambitious young wizard Ged of the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), quite against the grain of the book’s insistence that Ged is a surly teenager who is himself responsible for calling up the Shadow he must confront at the climax of the narrative.[10]  Re-reading the book in his late thirties, Goro tells us, he found his sympathies changed.  Now he identified not with Ged but with the older generation, those patient sages who are always telling the boy to have patience, to do only what he must, to learn thoroughly the way things work before seeking to control them.  In other words, in the process of revisiting the Earthsea books Goro’s own mind became a site of generational conflict, where his younger self as reader existed in radical opposition to the readings of his older self.  And Goro went on to make his film the site of a similar conflict, capable both of being read as Le Guin reads it and mined for a subtler reading.

Young Prince Arren behaves at several points in the movie as if he were just the sort of brainless sword-wielding hero Le Guin takes him to be.  With reckless abandon he attacks a band of slavers who are about to rape Therru, declaring as he does so that ‘life is nothing to me’ – a position traditional romances might well acclaim in their protagonists.  Later, he thrusts himself in front of the farmer Tenar when she is confronted by the same thugs, attempting no doubt to shield her from harm as (male) heroes are always expected to shield women on such occasions.  Later still, he overcomes the thugs a third and final time before striking off Cob’s hand with a blow of his father’s sword – an action which in a conventional epic would signal the transference of patriarchal power from one generation to the next.  But the briefest reappraisal of these incidents demonstrates their undercutting of the tradition of patriarchal romance they invoke.  Having been rescued, Therru contemptuously dismisses Arren as a boy with a dangerous disregard for what she holds most precious: life and all its complex processes.  Tenar responds to Arren’s effort to shield her by thrusting herself in front of him: it is not for him, she implies, to decide whose life is worth saving and whose worth casting away.  And the climactic confrontation between Arren and Cob rapidly transforms itself into a confrontation between Therru and Cob, as Therru, like Tenar, interposes herself between the warring males.  While allowing Arren to go through the motions of heroism, Goro never permits his audience to relax with the notion of Arren as hero; and his chief means of ensuring that they never do so is to cast over him the shadow of his father’s death.

This shadow takes the form of a grotesque ‘mask’ of aggression that distorts the boy’s face at key moments in the narrative; an expression of gleeful malevolence as disturbing as it is unexpected.  This mask first appears when he attacks the thugs who attacked Therru, and its appearance reminds us that he is capable of atrocities quite as appalling as anything done by the slavers.  After all, he has killed the king.  The menace of Arren’s facial expression is driven home when the chief of the thugs threatens to cut the girl’s throat if the prince approaches: Arren tells him to go ahead, and his contempt for the girl’s life as well as his own terrifies the gang into beating a retreat, aware that they have lost their only bargaining chip against him – the assumption that he is more humane than they are.  Later, the expression returns to the boy’s face in the sequence where he assaults a second father-figure, Sparrowhawk (Haitaka), with a sword he has borrowed from a third, Cob.  Here it is clearly linked with the problematic patriarchal heritage he has grown up in, where a son’s independence must show itself through violence, and where the logical target of that violence is the father who stands in the way of his child’s development.  It’s hardly surprising, then, that the mask is absent when Arren engages in his final act of violence: the attack on Cob in defence of Sparrowhawk and Tenar.  After all, this time it was Therru who urged him to fight.  But it’s also hardly surprising if his violence should prove ineffectual.  By this stage in the narrative, assaults on father-figures have been shown to have nothing heroic about them, as each one in succession awakens echoes of that first, shocking act of parricide.  The last step in Arren’s redemption must not replicate the crime that put him in need of redemption in the first place.  Violence is Cob’s tool, and cannot logically be used to destroy what the wizard stands for.     

The young prince could be said, then, to represent a memory of the traditional hero; the remains of a simple form of narrative that concerns itself with what Le Guin calls ‘the so-called war between good and evil’, and that has been rendered obsolete by the sophisticated appropriation of its terms by unscrupulous politicians.  His status as a memory is confirmed by the style of the character drawing in Tales from Earthsea.  Le Guin felt that ‘the animation of this quickly made film… does not have the delicate accuracy of Totoro or the powerful and splendid richness of detail of Spirited Away’.[11]  But Goro’s rejection of ‘delicate accuracy’ and ‘richness of detail’ is no accident.  It stems from a stylistic decision he took in consultation with the animators: a decision to emulate the techniques of Japanese animation from before Hayao Miyazaki founded Studio Ghibli, as Goro explains in detail in his blog.[12]  The film’s characters have the stocky simplicity – most notably in the rendering of the legs and feet – of Goro’s favourite animé, The Little Norse Prince of 1968, directed by his father’s friend and collaborator Isao Takahata.[13]  It is as if the new director is announcing a return to first principles not unlike that advocated by the Victorian pre-Raphaelites, or the Modernists of the early twentieth century.[14]  To find a style of his own he must wind the clock back to Takahata’s first full-length feature, which was also the first animated movie to be made in Japan, and the first of many projects on which Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki worked together.  In The Little Norse Prince, as in Tales from Earthsea, humanity is threatened by a powerful demon-magician, whose spells disrupt the order of the seasons just as Cob’s interrupt the ploughing and sowing of the fields of Goro’s Earthsea.[15]  Scenes from the old film are echoed in the new: notably Arren’s encounter with ravenous wolf-like beasts, which recalls the Norse Prince’s running battles with the demon’s ‘grey wolves’ and has no equivalent in Le Guin’s series.  The affectionate relationship between humans and animals elsewhere in Goro’s film recalls the central role played by animal companions in Takahata’s; Goro’s investment of Cob with the power of flight might remind his viewers of the disconcerting aerial mobility of Takahata’s demon; and the dream-sequences in Goro’s film echo the expressionistic visionary scenes with which Takahata punctuates his narrative.  Arren himself is an older version of Horus/Hols, the young hero of The Little Norse Prince, with the same shock of black hair and perpetual frown.

Above all, the importance of Arren’s sword in Tales from Earthsea derives from Takahata’s narrative, not Le Guin’s.  Prince Horus/Hols pulls an old damaged sword from the shoulder of a giant, and spends most of the movie trying to find a way to re-forge it; and he only succeeds when the whole community of Northmen collaborates in its forging.  In Goro’s film, the wizard Sparrowhawk reminds Arren that his name means ‘Sword’, and the boy always carries his father’s sword with him (as indeed he does in The Farthest Shore).[16]  But the weapon was not handed to Goro’s Arren in a symbolic gesture of legitimate succession.  Instead we watch him snatch it from the dying king after he has stabbed him, and for most of the film he is unable to draw it from its scabbard.  At a moment of crisis in Cob’s castle, Therru urges him to unsheathe it in order to save Sparrowhawk and Tenar, who are about to be executed by Cob.  Arren responds with the hackneyed view that he is ‘not worthy’ to wield his father’s weapon, a sentiment Therru dismisses as the irrelevance it is, while she weeps over the scabbard in frustration at the prince’s self-imposed impotence.  Then abruptly she announces that she knows the boy’s ‘true name’: the name all inhabitants of Earthsea must keep secret from any but their most trusted friend, since knowledge of it puts them at the mercy of the knower.[17]  By speaking it, she releases him from his obsession with the stolen blade.  His real identity is not Arren, meaning sword, but Lebannen, a word that refers only to himself.  So it is fitting, once again, that the moment when he succeeds in drawing the weapon during the final confrontation with Cob should prove less than decisive in the struggle against the wizard; much less decisive than the fact that Therru is with him in that confrontation.  Arren and Therru combine to overcome the wizard, and as in The Little Norse Prince, by this stage the sword has come to symbolize not the handing down of paternal power but the coming together of people who were once divided.  It was Therru’s tear falling on the scabbard, we might imagine, that loosened it in its sheath and made it functional; and it is Therru’s passion for life that finishes the demolition of Cob which the sword began.

But the choice of a pre-Ghibli style for this movie may have another rationale besides a wish to pay homage to The Little Norse Prince.  The project of bringing Le Guin’s Earthsea books to the screen had been cherished by Goro’s father, Hayao, since before the studio’s foundation; in fact, since before he directed his second feature, Nausicaa (1984), whose success enabled him to launch the Ghibli studios.[18]  One can see what appealed to Hayao about the books.  The notion of the young wizard who spends his time, in the first book, struggling against his own shadowy alter-ego instead of an external enemy, could only delight a director who has consistently worked against the notion that evil can be ‘comfortably externalized in a villain’.  As early as Nausicaa, Hayao refused to demonize the giant bugs of the poisoned forest that threatens the survival of mankind; instead he traced the source of the forest’s threat to toxins unleashed by humans themselves.  And after Laputa: The Castle in the Sky (1986) there ceased to be any outright villains at all in Hayao’s films.  Again: the ‘balance’ that must be observed by wizards in the Earthsea books would appeal to a director whose ecological convictions form only part of a larger philosophy of maintaining social and psychological equilibrium among the inhabitants of a fragile environment (think of the urgent struggle, in Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke (1997), to find a modus vivendi between humans and the forest they fear but also need).  Again: the opportunities for representing flight offered by the Earthsea books would no doubt have enthused a director who is celebrated for the aerial sequences in his films.  From the hawks into which Sparrowhawk transforms himself in the first volume to the dragon that carries Sparrowhawk and Arren to Roke in the third, flying stands for a kind of freedom in the works of Le Guin, as it does in Hayao’s movies.  Even the fierce attack on the values of capitalism in The Farthest Shore perfectly matches Hayao’s political convictions, as does Le Guin’s respect for the worth of ordinary domestic and agricultural labour and her consistent opposition to violence.  The self-consciously old-fashioned style of Goro’s film pays indirect homage to the film Hayao might have made in the early 1980s, if he could have got the rights to what was then the Earthsea trilogy.

But Goro’s film could never have been anything like that unmade film of the 1980s; because by the time he took his seat in the director’s chair a lot more had happened to the Earthsea series than a change of perspective in Goro himself.  Three more Earthsea books had appeared in print, two of which (Tehanu  (1990) and The Other Wind (2002)) took up the story of Sparrowhawk and Arren where it left off at the end of The Farthest Shore (1973), while radically rewriting Earthsea.  In Tehanu Le Guin unleashed the full force of her anger on the patriarchy that she herself had permitted to take control of her imagined archipelago.  The first three books gave male wizards an absolute monopoly over ‘serious’ magic, relegating only petty forms of conjuring to the despised female witches.[19]  And women played only a peripheral role in the plots of the first and third novels; while even the heroine of the second, Tenar, only plays Ariadne to Sparrowhawk’s Theseus (or so some readers have assumed).  Furthermore, in addition to confronting Le Guin’s own imaginative injustices, Tehanu introduced the concept that human beings and dragons were once the same species, and that the great divorce between them occurred at a time when men and women chose to devote themselves to possessions – lands, knowledge, things that could be passed from one generation to another – while dragons grew wedded to wildness and freedom.[20]  The divorce between humans and dragons resembles the divorce between men’s and women’s social roles in a patriarchal culture: and Tehanu and the books that follow hold out hope that this divorce, like that between humans and dragons, may undergo some sort of metamorphosis – though nothing so glib as an undoing.  In the years, then, when Goro was changing as a reader of the first three Earthsea books, Le Guin was changing as a writer; so that nothing about the project of filming Earthsea could remain altogether faithful to his father’s vision.

In 2006, even a film based on the third book of the series, The Farthest Shore, could hardly remain untouched by the backward-reaching shadow of the books that follow it.  Women could no longer remain peripheral, and Le Guin’s discoveries about dragons could scarcely be ignored.  The violence Goro does to the plots of the Earthsea sequence no more than matches the violence done by the sequence to itself.  How, for instance, could Sparrowhawk remain the saviour of Earthsea, as he was in that third novel, in a world where the traditional notion of male heroism has been so totally supplanted by the quieter heroism of women as it is in Tehanu?  Goro’s response to this problem is to bring a character from Tehanu – Tehanu herself, whose use-name is Therru – back in time to the events of The Farthest Shore, and to make her the same age as Arren in the earlier novel.  This enables Therru to confront and undermine Arren’s individualistic, violence-fuelled notion of his own heroism at each stage of the narrative, refusing ever to let him succumb to the narcissistic self-infatuation that drives Cob.

But this is only one of many unsettling changes Goro makes to the chronology and geography of Earthsea.  Another is his transference of Tenar’s farm from Gont, the most frequently revisited of the islands of Earthsea in the novels, to Wathort, which Le Guin’s readers visit only in The Farthest Shore and whose inhabitants traffic in human flesh.  The effect of this is to destabilize Earthsea – to pluck it from the rock on which it was founded.  Gont is the place in which Le Guin’s sequence has its deepest roots, as she shows in her short story ‘The Bones of the Earth’, where an elderly wizard plunges into the ground to soothe the quaking roots of Gont Mountain.[21]  Le Guin set Tehanu on Gont because Gont was where the Earthsea stories began, and it was there that the mighty work of re-imagining that world must also start.  By shifting Tenar’s farm to Wathort, Goro sets it at the epicentre of Cob’s bid to unbalance Earthsea; and in the process he unsettles Le Guin’s universe, which is one of the things that unsettles lovers of her books as they watch the film.

The third change Goro has made is to conflate the first and third books of Le Guin’s sequence so that the shadow that pursues Sparrowhawk in the first novel becomes the shadow of Prince Arren, Sparrowhawk’s companion in the third.  Goro’s shadow springs directly from Arren’s state of mind after he has murdered his father.  It first manifests itself as a sense of dread that seizes the prince on the night when he first meets Sparrowhawk.  The dread intensifies in Hort Town, when the boy sees a fountain take on the appearance of the dead king; and reaches its climax in a nightmare he suffers at the farm of Tenar, where Sparrowhawk turns into Arren’s father, then into a monstrous tar-covered replica of Arren himself.  On waking the boy decides to leave the farm, convinced that if he stays he will be visited once again by the rage that made him a parricide; and shortly afterwards he meets the doppelganger from his nightmare and flees from it in terror, certain of its malevolence.  The doppelganger’s eyes are hidden, much like those of Therru, who often conceals her eyes behind a protective fringe of hair; and Arren’s terror of it makes us anticipate something terrible if ever they should be revealed.  But when the shadow does push aside its fringe – at the point when it stoops over the boy’s body, after he has fled into a swamp and half drowned himself in an effort to escape – it reveals the large, vulnerable child’s eyes that are ubiquitous in early anime.  And when it speaks to Therru at the gate of Cob’s castle, the air of malevolence that formerly surrounded it dispels at once.  With gentle courtesy it explains its nature to her, identifying itself not with the rage that drove Arren to murder, but with the princely qualities he flung aside when he fled his father’s court.  Arren himself, in fact, is the shadow – as the dark clothes he wears throughout the film should tell us – while the brightly-clothed doppelganger from his dreams represents the bright possibilities he rejected.  And his double is alive in a way that Arren is not.  After speaking to Therru at the castle gate it embraces her like a lover and whispers Arren’s true name in her ear, before melting away as her face turns crimson with blushes.  At this stage in the film, it can approach Therru with a confidence and openness the prince can only dream of; but it also gives her the ammunition she needs (Arren’s true name) to free him from his self-made prison and recall him to full participation in the business of living.

The role of the doppelganger in the movie, then, is quite different from that of the shadow in A Wizard of Earthsea.  In the book, the creature is a non-being summoned by the adolescent Sparrowhawk from the land of the dead, in an arrogant and self-destructive gesture, as a demonstration of his skill in working magic.  It has a ‘blind unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes’, and it stands both for an ‘ancient darkness’ that seeks to engulf the wizard, and for the young man’s own worst aspect: his self-segregation from the community of Earthsea, his immaturity as a social animal.[22]  Sparrowhawk can only defeat it when he accepts help from someone else – his best friend Vetch; after which he can embrace the shadow like another friend, hugging it to him in dreadful intimacy and whispering its true name (his own) in its ear as he does so.  Goro’s shadow is not Le Guin’s, but it is just as carefully conceived.  His Arren has rejected the role that made him part of society, his role as a prince; and by rejecting that role he has rejected life of any kind, as he showed when he stabbed his father.  It is fitting, then, that his shadow should be a lively, colourful one, capable of bringing colour to Therru’s face.  And it is fitting, too, that Arren’s return to life should involve Therru as a mediator between his living self (the doppelganger) and its fearful, violent, self-segregating twin – the boy whose adventures we have followed throughout the film.

This change is in any case imposed on Goro by the backward-reaching shadow of Tehanu, which questions the terms on which Sparrowhawk pursues and defeats his shadow-self in A Wizard of Earthsea.  One of the steps Sparrowhawk takes towards his victory in the earlier novel is when he becomes sensitized to the beauty of a young farm-girl, Yarrow, whom he meets just before his climactic confrontation with ‘ancient darkness’.[23]  The implication is that he at last recognizes himself to be  part of a community – no isolated island, but an element in the interconnected archipelago of humanity – and so can permit himself to be emotionally drawn to a fellow human being for the first time in his life.  But in A Wizard of Earthsea this understanding can never bear fruit in a fully-fledged partnership, because Sparrowhawk is a wizard, and wizards, like priests, are celibate.  Only in Tehanu, after Sparrowhawk has lost his wizardly status, is he permitted to take a sexual partner – Tenar; and in the process the lost balance between the genders in Earthsea begins to be restored.  Therru in Goro’s film is in one sense another Yarrow, and Arren a Sparrowhawk who has the potential to form a permanent bond with the girl he loves, as Sparrowhawk could not.

But Therru is more than Yarrow.  At the beginning of the movie, the old wizard Root reminds the King of Enlad that humans and dragons were once a single species; a fact that does not figure in the first three books of the Earthsea sequence.  And Goro’s Therru is closely linked with dragons.  Soon after the prince has rescued her from the slavers he falls asleep and dreams that a dragon is approaching from the sky.   We learn later that this is an aspect of Therru herself, who is a throwback to an earlier phase in the world’s history, a being as much dragon as girl.  Her dragon nature betrays itself in her temperament.  Goro’s dragons crackle with fire as if on the verge of disintegrating under its force, flecks of flame spilling from their mouths while their bodies undulate in the serpentine motions familiar from the river-dragon sequences in Spirited Away.  Therru too is fiery: her angry response, first to Arren’s rescue of her and later to his intrusion on her privacy at Tenar’s farm (‘Why are you here?’ she snaps, ‘to hurt me?’) is an apt emotional counterpart to the physical form she is capable of assuming.  And she makes, too, a perfect foil to the often sullen Arren, whose intervals of passivity (he passes out several times in the movie, and grows tired when he walks long distances or works on the farm) identify him as her opposite, as limp and frail as she is energetic.  Arren is in fact Therru’s shadow, so that the reunion of shadow and substance that occurs at the end, when he rides to safety from Cob’s collapsing castle cradled on the forearms of her dragon-self, represents the righting of an imbalance that has been obvious from the moment the youngsters met.

Once Therru has been recognized as Arren’s inverted double, it soon becomes apparent that the film’s narrative is structured around a series of doubles or opposites.  Tenar is Sparrowhawk’s opposite, her blond hair and blue eyes identifying her as of a different ethnic group from the rest of the dark-haired, dark-skinned inhabitants of Earthsea – as she is in the books.  Her stability, cultivating the farm, contrasts with Sparrowhawk’s flightiness, associated throughout the film with the hawk from which he gets his use-name, and which appears in his company whenever he enters the narrative.  This flightiness manifests itself most amusingly when the Archmage gallops off in the middle of ploughing a field to fetch Arren’s sword from Hort Town; a mission Tenar rightly sees as having little point to it.  The Archmage, meanwhile, is the inverted double of Arren’s father.  His paternal relationship to the prince is driven home repeatedly, as he blends with the murdered king in Arren’s dreams, instructs the boy in a fatherly way about the ‘Balance’ on which Earthsea depends, rides to rescue him when he is in danger, and becomes the target of the boy’s aggression in Cob’s castle.  But he differs from Arren’s father in his sense of responsibility for his young protégé; a sense that tells him that he ought to stay close to the boy, even though (as his flightiness dictates) he is always leaving him.  On one occasion when he leaves Arren by himself in Hort Town, where he is captured by slavers, Sparrowhawk first rescues the boy, then apologizes for having put him in a position where he needed rescuing.  In contrast to this, Goro is careful to place Arren at an insurmountable distance from his father at the beginning of the film.  We see the King of Enlad marching through his palace surrounded by nobles and advisers, his attention fixed on affairs of state, while two women vainly seek to catch his attention.  When at last one of his advisers is persuaded to listen, the women tell him that the prince is missing.  At this point, Goro gives us a fleeting glimpse of a strong character who never appears in the books: Prince Arren’s mother.  The queen tells the women that the king is too busy to be troubled with the matter of his son’s disappearance, and that Arren is in any case of age to look after himself.  The royal family at the film’s opening, then, has no warmth at all, no mutual interest, no coherence; and it is this incoherence that presumably, by some dreadful logic, drives Arren to murder.    

Arren’s mother, like his father, has a double in the film.  The queen’s inverted double is Tenar, who gives up her bed to the sick boy after his rescue from the slavers, invites him to join her in her farm-work, and compliments him on his unexpected aptitude as a labourer.  Like the mother, she acknowledges Arren’s manhood (how good it is to have men about the place, she says, to help in the fields); but she does so by including him in her affairs, not by barring him from adult company.  And at moments of crisis – as when Cob’s henchmen burst in through the gates – she shows a protectiveness which Arren’s mother haughtily rejects.

In fact, the dysfunctional royal family as a whole has an inverted double in the awkward family group that begins to form at Tenar’s homestead.  This is a family of four, unrelated by blood or marriage, whose focus is the supper table.  After the arrival of Sparrowhawk and Arren at the farm, this table is a place of enforced and unwelcome proximity, where the youngsters Arren and Therru radiate mutual hostility while the substitute ‘parents’ Tenar and Sparrowhawk exchange uneasy glances.  But by the end of the movie the same table has become a place of celebration, concerned as much with laughter as with nourishment.  At one point in between these two contrasting supper scenes, Sparrowhawk tells Arren that human beings must learn with difficulty to do what wind and leaf and whale do naturally; and the whole film could be said to concern itself with the task of achieving a ‘natural’ domestic harmony at mealtimes.  The heroic scale of that task can be measured by recalling the state of the royal family at the start.

The fusion of two adults (Tenar and Sparrowhawk) and two teenagers (Therru and Arren) into a harmonious family unit also combines two more sets of doubles.  Therru, who is part dragon, quickly forms a bond with Sparrowhawk, whose name allies him to another creature of the air – a bird – and whose addiction to wandering identifies him as a lover of the freedom enjoyed by dragons.  Therru calls him ‘Hawk’ (‘Taka’) when she meets him; and later she sings a song about a hawk, in which she wishes for a companion who will understand and perhaps mitigate her loneliness.  Sparrowhawk would seem well suited to this role, if he could be persuaded to stick around long enough to assume it.  Arren, meanwhile, bonds with the farmer Tenar.  When Sparrowhawk takes off for the town, the boy stays behind to help with the ploughing, and it is at this point that Tenar recognizes him as a potential co-worker.  So the new family created at the end of the film joins together two freedom-lovers and two lovers of the land, symbolically healing the rift between humans and dragons, the beings of earth and air, which was explained by the old wizard Root in conversation with the King of Enlad.

There is another, easily overlooked double in the movie.  When he first enters Hort Town, Arren sees a slave-wagon going by, and when he glances in through the barred rear window he sees a youngster of indeterminate sex who looks just like him, forlornly awaiting his/her entry into a life of forced labour.  Later in the movie, when Cob’s henchman Hare (Usagi) has seized Arren and thrown him into an identical wagon, we glimpse the prince through the barred window at the rear of the wagon in a precise reiteration of the earlier scene.  The identical appearance of slave and captive prince suggests another function for the simplified character drawing selected by Goro.  The people in the film often bear a close resemblance to one another; and because of their physical resemblance it’s impossible to see Arren’s situation as unique.  At one point, indeed, Sparrowhawk insists in divesting the prince of the principal token of his uniqueness.  He buys him a cloak to cover up his princely clothes, and those clothes are later stolen from him by Hare and replaced with the sombre garments of a slave.  In an interview, Goro explained the thinking behind this homogenising of Arren and his people. ‘I didn’t want to make a fantasy with a main character who is just a prince,’ he pointed out.  ‘Arren is a prince but then he has a problem and that problem can be related to many young people in Japan…  In today’s Japan, the young people are being choked.  They don’t see hope in the future, life isn’t that beautiful anymore.  They feel… oppressed and that oppression comes from their own parents’.[24]  Arren and the anonymous slave are related; and both share with Therru a sense that their generation has been stifled and betrayed by the one before.  In Therru’s case and the slave’s, that betrayal is real enough: the first has been abused by her parents, the second deprived of liberty.  But Arren’s situation is closer to that of the young people of Goro’s Japan, in that he cannot define the exact nature of the oppression that has been visited on him.  The removal of this weight of oppression at the end of the film is symbolized once again through clothing: the new-made family sits by the fire sewing a new set of garments for the prince, garments suitable for farm-work or a journey.  Here at last Arren’s physical resemblance to his people accords with his situation and his state of mind, as he immerses himself in the healthy work of an ordinary subject, which can be carried out only with the support and respect of peers.              

Among all the proliferating doubles in this movie, the evil wizard Cob is the most profligate in the range of roles he duplicates or inverts.  His ability to do so is enhanced by his indeterminate gender; in the English version of the film he is voiced by a man, in the Japanese by a woman, and his Japanese name Kumo (which can mean ‘spider’, like the English word ‘cob’) is used both for men and women.  At one point or another Cob acts as a double for almost everyone in the narrative, insinuating himself into all the different social positions that might have been used to help integrate Arren into the communal life of Earthsea.  If the changing constitution of the supper table in the film suggests that life is about learning to work and play together in fruitful co-operation, Cob’s contradictory desire is to make himself the centre of all affections, the sole beneficiary of all labour.  His white, mask-like face identifies him as an actor, with the classical actor’s gift of taking on male or female roles at will.  At various points he substitutes himself for Arren’s shadow (he snatches the boy from the shadow’s grasp when he carries him to his castle); for Arren’s mother, tending the boy in his own bedchamber as Tenar did in hers; for his lover, stooping over the prince’s prone body to offer him pleasure in the form of a cup that stains his lips purple; and for his father, as he stands by Arren with proprietary arrogance, looking down on Sparrowhawk as if to note the Archmage’s reaction to his successful seduction of his adoptive son.  Cob can fly like a dragon or a hawk – like Therru or Sparrowhawk; yet he is also associated with a single fixed location, as Tenar is – his castle.  What he represents, then, is a pastiche of the Balance or Equilibrium, the reconciliation of many complementary qualities and functions that characterizes what is ‘well and rightly done’ in Sparrrowhawk’s philosophy.  He is everyone’s shadow, as the dragon-Therru recognizes at the end of the film when she dismisses him to the darkness he came from.  ‘Shadow’ she calls him, even as she snuffs him out in a blaze of light.[25]

Shadows have no substance of their own, and Cob’s existence is sustained by draining substance from every other inhabitant of Earthsea; a process so self-centred that it upsets all balance.   Goro, who is an architect as well as a landscape gardener, conceives this loss of balance in spatial terms, and depicts it in the many broken buildings that lie scattered through his movie.  We first meet Sparrowhawk as he moors his boat in a dilapidated harbour; and when he sets out on foot to seek the source of Earthsea’s sickness, he passes further ruins: the hulks of giant ships left high and dry on land; the empty shells of farms; the decayed and decadent city of Hort Town, whose inhabitants dwell in the shattered remains of what looks like an ancient Greek civilization.  At the entrance to Hort Town, a gigantic disintegrating gateway frames a market-place where slaves are bartered, as though liberty has been lost along with architectural coherence.  Later, Therru’s near rape takes place in a courtyard full of classical columns, where the masked henchmen of Cob – slave-traders in his service – seek to combine pleasure with the sickening business they live by, as they chase the girl between surviving fragments of a long-lost feat of structural engineering, hoping to violate her before they sell her.  All these ruins find their source and culmination in Cob’s castle, which is itself reduced to ruin in a series of spectacular collapses at the end of the film.  A spiral staircase falls away as Arren runs up a tower in pursuit of the fleeing wizard.  The summit of the tower is then demolished in an earthquake unleashed by Cob’s magic, concentric shock-waves tearing the stones apart so that Arren has to scrabble for purchase at the tower’s edge.  If Goro contrived to upset Le Guin’s admirers by destabilizing her Earthsea books, one wonders if he set out to destabilize himself in this climactic sequence, which is crammed with images of balance precariously maintained, perverse embodiments of an architect’s worst nightmare.

At one point Therru leaps from a flight of stairs to the top of a narrow wall.  She is steadied by Arren, but not before she has almost unbalanced the prince and knocked them both into the courtyard far below.  During the first fight between Arren and Cob, Sparrowhawk stands nearby, hands tied, at the edge of another precipitous drop – the mode of execution chosen for him by his shadowy alter-ego.  The second fight with Cob is more vertiginous still, as the top of the tower falls to pieces under the fighters’ feet.  And after Cob’s death, Arren deliberately abandons all balance and leaps from the tilting tower in the ultimate gesture of trust.  His conviction that Therru in her dragon-form will catch him before he hits the ground marks the final step of his restoration to inward balance: his acceptance that his equilibrium as a man can only be maintained by acknowledging his dependence on others.  Central to all this drama of balance and imbalance is the castle: a building designed to protect its occupant, to keep his enemies at bay and to intimidate his subjects.  Therru and Arren must find their way through this castle to rescue Sparrowhawk and Tenar – entering it (in Therru’s case) by an unguarded gate, proceeding through it by unorthodox routes, evading its points of weakness or collapse and finally abandoning it as they fly away together to a life beyond its gloomy confines.  Dismantling old frameworks – narratives or buildings – is not necessarily destructive, Goro implies; it may even be necessary.  But it is deeply disconcerting, and he is not afraid to show this in the most graphic terms imaginable.

If ruins stand for the loss of balance in Cob’s new order, the ultimate effect of that loss of balance is symbolized in the film by a succession of sunsets.  Goro has chosen a rich palette of colour with which to paint the landscapes of his movie, in contrast to the subtler tones favoured by Hayao in most of his films; and the raison d’etre for this palette is the sunsets which punctuate its narrative, harbingers of the total darkness into which Cob seeks to plunge Earthsea.  Sparrowhawk first meets Arren at close of day, and gives him shelter from the darkness by his fire.  Evening falls again after their arrival at Hort Town, where Arren falls asleep alone, watching the sunset on the harbour steps; this is where the slavers catch him.  It’s evening time, again, when he decides to leave Tenar’s farm and strike out on his own; the shadow finds him at sundown and chases him into the marsh, where he nearly drowns.  Sunset represents the moment of balance between night and day; and each of Goro’s sunsets – most notably the one Arren watches from Hort Town – occur in a setting where another binary is present: that of land and sea, which gives Le Guin’s and Goro’s worlds their names, and which gives the sunsets their magnificence.  Once sunsets begin to dominate this landscape at the expense of sunrises, Earthsea as a whole will lose its balance and be reduced to the foul black tarry substance that is always linked with Cob.

The same setting of land and sea provides the backdrop for the two most striking dawns in the film, both of which are viewed from Cob’s castle.  The first is the vision of sunrise granted to the two teenagers when Therru presents Arren with the gift of her true name, as she struggles to arouse him from his lethargy in time to rescue Sparrowhawk and Tenar.  As soon as she names herself as ‘Tehanu’, the walls of the castle fall away and the youngsters find themselves standing on a pinnacle beside the open sea, with the sun rising behind them.  As the sun rises, a dragon rises too: the dragon-self invoked by Therru’s true name, which flies up over the young couple, after which the walls of the castle suddenly close in again and they return to the urgent task in hand.  The scene echoes the dazzlingly-drawn moment earlier in the film when Sparrowhawk rescues Arren from the slavers’ wagon.  He does so in a blaze of light much like a dawn, and all forms of bondage melt away before his brightness.  And a similar scene is recalled by Tenar at her farm, when she tells Arren of the moment when Sparrowhawk rescued her from the tombs of Atuan (the movie makes it a one-sided rescue, although in Le Guin’s book the rescue is mutual – Sparrowhawk needs Tenar as much as she needs him).[26]  As Tenar recalls this incident, the screen dissolves into a whiteness that leads us to expect a re-enactment of the past; instead we are shown Sparrowhawk riding into town in his quest to find Arren’s lost sword.  The re-enactment of the rescue takes place much later, and involves the liberation of both Sparrowhawk and Tenar from Cob’s castle and the installation of a new generation at the centre of the story of Earthsea.

Sparrowhawk is lured to Cob’s castle by the capture of Tenar, who remarks as she is shoved into the castle’s lowest dungeon that the place reminds her of Atuan; ‘so many memories’, she adds, invoking the sense of a lost but constantly resurfacing past with which the film is imbued.  Sparrowhawk duly comes for her, in another breathtaking juxtaposition of light and darkness: the sequence in which he rides through the night towards Cob’s castle with his staff blazing is one of the most memorable in the movie.  But his intended re-enactment of Tenar’s rescue never takes place.  Instead, the Archmage comes face to face with a murderous Arren, seduced by Cob into trying to kill his friend as he killed his father; and this encounter ends with Sparrowhawk imprisoned alongside the woman he meant to save.  All hope lies now with the younger generation: and their fulfilment of that hope takes place in the context of an actual sunrise, as prefigured by the vision they had when they exchanged true names.  Cob comments on the rising of the sun as he watches Therru rising from the dead after he has strangled her.  And when she gets to her feet amidst the wreckage of the castle tower, demolished by Cob in a bid to annihilate the youngsters who defy him; and when she changes into her dragon-self, again as the vision predicted; we might register, consciously or otherwise, that in destroying his own castle Cob has effectively completed the picture painted by the vision.  He himself has brought about the melting of the walls of his own tyranny.  His desperate attempts to hold back the course of time, to delay his own aging by adopting an immaculate mask – in contrast to the time-ravaged faces of Sparrowhawk and Therru, both of whom have been scarred by their histories – together with his efforts to enlist the next generation in defence of his position, when he caused Arren to fight Sparrowhawk; all his struggles have merely created the conditions for their termination.  His plot to seize sole power ends with him begging for assistance from the person in all Earthsea he most despises – the girl he left out of all his schemes.  And his collapse leaves the next generation free to fly clear of the oppressive ruins of his aborted future.

Much of this imagery of solipsism supplanted by co-operation, of a selfish element in the older generation overthrown by a mutually supportive younger one, of a dysfunctional, distant family replaced by a new, affectionate familial community, has clearly been carefully thought through by Goro in his courageous struggle to achieve a style of his own in the face of his father’s astonishing artistic achievements.  It’s clear, too, that his vision of the perfect community owes much to Isao Takahata, whose hymns to agricultural solidarity – Only Yesterday (1991), Pom Poko (1994), the desperate efforts to find nourishment that dominate the waking lives of the child-heroes in The Grave of the Fireflies (1988) – had their origins in the humble strife-torn village defended by Hols/Horus in The Little Lost Prince.  Despite its initial hostility to him, Hols ends by forging the village into a community, much as Therru ends by transforming Tenar’s farm into a family homestead; and Goro’s repeated acknowledgement of Takahata’s influence invites his interested viewers to follow up the thematic and visual links between their works as I have done earlier in this essay.

It’s trickier, though, to determine how far Goro might have intended the more disturbing transformations he has effected to his father’s cinematic legacy.  Although the drawing of the characters recalls the pre-Ghibli tradition of anime, many of the characters’ faces are strongly reminiscent of specific types in Miyazaki movies, as if Goro is keen to embed the history of his father’s work in his production.  At Hort Town, Arren meets a small warty man whose face is closely modelled on that of the amoral mercenary-monk in Princess Mononoke.  But whereas in that film the monk had the glamorous villain’s role of tracking down the Spirit of the Forest, in this film he is reduced to a drug-pusher, whose attempt to persuade Arren to sample his wares is foiled by Sparrowhawk – and who at once turns vicious in a way the monk never did.  Hare/Usagi, the leader of Cob’s henchmen, has a face that recalls a long line of comic villains in Hayao’s movies, from the despicable Count in The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) to the skyborne pirate family in Laputa and the bungling sky-pirates in Porco Rosso (1992).  In this film, however, the comic villain is a would-be rapist and a slave trader, terrorizing his men and the island’s population, while acting with grovelling subservience in the presence of his master.  As if to emphasize his degeneracy, he wears a helmet whose goggle-visor recalls the 1920s headgear worn by all the pilots in Porco Rosso; his cowardice looks all the more pronounced when compared to the dashing aerial antics of his predecessors.   His subordinates who drive the slave-wagon in which Arren is transported look like members of the pirate families in Hayao’s work; but their consent to the slave trade represents a level of villainy to which the pirates never descend.  The old women who visit Tenar at her farm to ask for medicine for a sick child bear some physical similarity to the strong old women who crop up everywhere in Hayao’s work, from the mother of the pirates in Laputa to the indomitable Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).  But in this film they have become sneaks and hypocrites, betraying Tenar to Hare in hope of financial gain, despite the fact that she has been supplying them with medicine free of charge.  In every case, the charming if sometimes unprincipled characters in Hayao’s oeuvre who are summoned up by the faces of Goro’s minor players find themselves diminished and darkened in Tales from Earthsea, condemned to play wholly despicable roles where in earlier Ghibli films they were always redeemable.  Obviously Goro’s world will require far more drastic remedial surgery than Hayao’s, if it is ever to regain the balance it has forfeited.

The most direct allusion to a specific Hayao character, or rather creature, comes at the end, when Cob loses his staff and with it the magical control of his body that sustained his youthful appearance.  Cob is at once devitalized, dragging himself up the steps of the castle with the painful laboriousness of old age, white-haired and round-shouldered.  One is reminded of the many moments of physical debility that afflicted young Arren throughout the film – his exhaustion and his fainting fits – and one imagines that these had their source in Cob’s pernicious influence over Earthsea.  But when Cob reaches the top of the tower a more drastic change comes over him.  His legs shrink and his arms extend until they are grotesquely long and boneless.  Proportioned like this, Cob resembles one of the flying robots in Laputa, charged with protecting the ancient skyborne castle of the movie’s title, which is both a deadly weapon and a heavenly garden.  These robots themselves began as weapons, capable of demolishing even the monstrous gunship that attempts to take charge of the Castle in the Sky; but some of them have achieved redemption, converting themselves to gardeners who tend the rich vegetation that has taken over the ruins of the aerial fortress.  The robotic Cob, by contrast, is concerned only with self-preservation.  His lack of eyes at this stage in the movie (a grotesque detail taken from The Farthest Shore) means that he is unable to see anything but what’s inside him – and that is emptiness, as we learn from the occasional close-up.  Where the robots existed to interact with others – even if in acts of aggression – Cob is incapable of doing so; and this makes him infantile in his final moments, cackling over the seeming death of Therru, begging whiningly for life from her when she revives.

Cob, then, becomes childish as the children in the movie grow up.  And the pain involved in the process of growing is powerfully evoked in the painful sight of well-loved characters from our filmgoing past – the lovable rogues and tender robots of the earlier Ghibli movies – diminished, darkened, humiliated and finally displaced at the moment when the new generation comes into its own.  In his final moments, Cob’s grotesque eyelessness recalls the moments in the film when we could not see the eyes of the youngsters: Arren and Therru, whose eyes are veiled by their hair when they feel angry or alienated, and Arren’s doppelganger, whose invisible eyes confirm Arren’s unwillingness to confront it rather than any inherent hostility in the doppelganger itself.  Each of these youngsters, however, can unveil their eyes when they choose to communicate.  Cob cannot; and this fixes him in a permanent state of adolescent egotism, a state which he seeks to impose on Arren too, and on the rest of Earthsea, from which the magic is draining away as it strives to rid itself of the responsibility and hurt that comes with adulthood.     

In his fusion of age and youth, then, as in other things, Cob is a distortion of the community of four that forms in the film’s last sequence.  Arren’s and Therru’s new family represents a fruitful combination of young and old, as against the wizard’s poisonous compound of immaturity and senility.  In the last few shots, the teenagers work shoulder to shoulder with Tenar and Sparrowhawk on the farm, sowing the new-ploughed land with seed, laughing together at supper, sitting in the evenings contentedly at work on the clothes and equipment Arren will need on his journey back to Enlad.  And when Arren goes to face the consequences of the murder he committed, he does not go alone.  Sparrowhawk goes with him as his advocate and guide; and they wear the clothes and equipment fashioned by their farming community in those evenings of contentment.  In Hayao’s films as well as Goro’s, families are things you work on.  Think of Chihiro in Spirited Away (2001), scrubbing at the floors of a witch’s Bathhouse so as to win back her parents; or Satsuki and Mei in My Neighbour Totoro (1988), labouring to make an old house ready to receive their sick mother, or setting out on the long journey to the hospital carrying the good food they think will cure her.  Goro has not broken Hayao’s world, any more than he has betrayed the imaginative vision of Ursula K. Le Guin.  He has chosen the difficult route of telling his tale from Earthsea rather differently from the way either of them would have told it.  But for those who are willing to look closely at what he has done both to Earthsea and to Ghibli, the prospect of further difficult films from Goro is a welcome one.

NOTES

1. Tales from Earthsea is known in Japanese as Gedo Senki.  The only version I could watch before writing this essay in October 2007 was the dubbed one released in the UK in 2007; names are therefore given as in the dubbed version, with Japanese equivalents in brackets.  I am grateful to Yushin Toda both for nourishing my enthusiasm for Japanese culture over the last couple of decades and for answering my questions as the essay reached its final draft.

2. On Goro Miyazaki’s relationship with his father see Animé News Network, ‘Taipei International Book Exhibition: Meet and Greet with Goro Miyazaki’, by Chih-Chieh Chang.

3. See Ursula K. Le Guin’s official website, ‘Gedo Senki: A First Response to “Gedo Senki”, the Earthsea film made by Goro Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli.  Written for my fans in Japan who are writing me about the movie, and for fans elsewhere who may be curious about it’   (www.ursulakleguin.com/GedoSenkiResponse.html, accessed 21. 9. 07).

4. On the success of Tales from Earthsea at the box office see the Wikipedia entry Tales from Earthsea, ‘Reaction and box office’ (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_Earthsea%28anime%29, accessed 21. 9. 07).  On the divisions over the film among Japanese audiences, see Ursula K. Le Guin’s official website, ‘Gedo Senki: Responses from Correspondents’ (www.ursulakleguin.com/GedoSenkiCorrespondents.html, accessed 21. 9. 07).   

5. See Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore, in The Earthsea Quartet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 475; The Other Wind (London: Orion, 2002), p. 94 ff.

6. See Le Guin, The Farthest Shore, in The Earthsea Quartet, p. 324.

7. Le Guin, ‘A First Response to “Gedo Senki”’.

8. Interestingly, too, Goro speaks of his film as a response to a universal malaise among young people in Japan (I discuss this later in the essay).  See Peter van der Lugt, ‘Gedo Senki at Venice International Film Festival’, an interview with Goro Miyazaki on the website ‘GhibliWorld.com’ (www.ghibliworld.com/gedosenkiatviff2006.html, accessed 21. 9. 07).

9. Indeed, the defeat of Cob is a good deal more violent in The Farthest Shore than it is in Tales from Earthsea.  He is first ‘crushed and burned’ by the dying dragon Orm Embar, then crawls in this shattered state into the land of the dead, where he is attacked again and again by Arren with his sword (‘The blade made a great wound, severing Cob’s spine… a rage of loathing swelled up in Arren, a berserk fury, and swinging up the sword he struck again with it, a full terrible downward blow’).  Arren’s attack is as ineffectual in the book as it is in the film.  For Goro’s feelings on aggression, see his blog entry for 17^th January 2006 (Goro Miyazaki’s Blog Translation, translated by Paul Barnier, The Hayao Miyazaki Web): ‘even for the purpose of defeating evil, I don’t want to make magic an instrument of violence’.

10. On Goro’s initial response to the Earthsea books, compared with his response on re-reading them, see his blog entries for 14^th-22^nd December 2005.

11. Le Guin, ‘A First Response to “Gedo Senki”’.

12. For a detailed discussion of this decision, see Goro’s blog entries for 27 February 2006-7 March 2006.

13. Goro tells us that The Little Norse Prince is his favourite animated movie in his interview with Peter van der Lugt, ‘Gedo Senki at Venice International Film Festival’.  The film is also known as Horus Prince of the Sun.  Goro discusses it often in his account of the ‘simple’ visual style of Tales from Earthsea: see his blog entries for 27 February-7 March 2006.

14. The analogy he makes is with the European neo-classicists of the eighteenth century; see his blog entry for 28 February 2006.

15. The version of Little Norse Prince discussed here was released on DVD by Optimum Asia in 2005.

16. For Le Guin’s description of the sword see The Farthest Shore, in The Earthsea Quartet, pp. 328-9.

17. Le Guin discusses names in general in A Wizard of Earthsea, in The Earthsea Quartet, pp. 50-2; and names and friendship on pp. 70-1.  See also her early short story, ‘The Rule of Names’, in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, 2 vols. (London etc.: Granada, 1978), vol. 1, pp.82-93, and her late novella ‘Dragonfly’ in Tales from Earthsea (New York: Ace Books, 2002), pp. 209-79.

18. On Hayao Miyazaki’s long-term fascination with Earthsea, see for instance Kaleem Aftab, ‘A feud that animated Japanese film’, The Independent, August 10, 2007, at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20070810/ai_n19478963/pg_1, accessed 23. 9. 07.

19. See Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, in The Earthsea Quartet, p. 16: ‘There is a saying on Gont, Weak as woman’s magic, and there is another saying, Wicked as woman’s magic’.

20. See Le Guin, Tehanu, The Earthsea Quartet, pp. 488-93.

21. Le Guin, ‘The Bones of the Earth’, Tales from Earthsea, pp. 151-171.

22. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, in The Earthsea Quartet, p. 164.

23. See Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, in The Earthsea Quartet, pp. 143-152.

24. Peter van der Lugt, ‘Gedo Senki at Venice International Film Festival’.

25. In fact, the film makes it unclear whether the dragon-Tehanu burns Cob with its breath or whether he undergoes some sort of spontaneous combustion.  Once again, the violence of Cob’s death is not the point.

26. See Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan, in The Earthsea Quartet, pp. 272-3.