Le Guin's one-of-a-kind fantasy series for the screen, it was probably Hayao Miyazaki... which makes it a slight bummer that the legendary animator passed this project off to his son Gorō Miyazaki instead.
If anyone was capable of adapting Ursula K. Le Guin's one-of-a-kind fantasy series for the screen, it was probably Hayao Miyazaki... which makes it a slight bummer that the legendary animator passed this project off to his son Gorō Miyazaki instead. Named after the fifth Earthsea book but based on plot elements and character moments from the first, third, and fourth novels, Tales From Earthsea gets a little too tripped up mixing and matching disparate references to tell a completely coherent story. To its credit, it does nail the most important themes of the Earthsea series (namely, that mankind should use its power in concert with the natural order rather than try to oppress it, and that death is what makes life beautiful in the first place) and there are some delightful mash-ups of Le Guin's style with Ghibli's aesthetic.