Earthsea and other adaptations

W

Warmaster

Great Teacher
I thought I'd bring this up as the original topic vanished (the discussion about it however, was offtopic anyway :p)

Basically, people were saying Tales from Earthsea was extremely bad etc. Partially due to the adaption issues. My reply, which seemed to end the topic (implying something? :p) was thus:

Warmaster said:
vashdaman said:
Well I will comment. Warmaster how can say Tales of Earthsea is better than porco rosso and pom poko, are you mad! Normally I would say well you have different tastes from me and it's all good, but not when you say something like that.

Not only was Tales of earthsea hands down Ghibli's worst film, it was just a bad film in general, which also happened to disgrace the great literature it was based on. I mean even the way they made the characters white in the film when they dark skinned in the book(which the author made a consious point of doing) shows the lack of respect the maker had for the source material. In the end they really managed to muddle up a great story with this film.

Goro clearly has a long way to go and right now I would not trust him with a barge poll.
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Fair enough comments for the most part and a perfectly valid opinion - I'm certainly not trying to put my opinions on anyone! (I mean, I think Evangelion is absolutely awful, but that is a different argument all together) However as to lack of respect to source material, Miyazaki Senior is equally, if not more guilty of changing plots and concepts around from original sources - Only the first 1/3 of Howls really resembles the book, Future Boy Conan only shares the barest plot with The Incredible Tide, Kiki was not particularly liked by the original author as being utterly different, etc. I'm sure if this forum was around in the 80s, some of the similar complaints about poor translation of the subject matter would have been directed at Hayao too.

...

All my opinions again I must add, but my original points still stands that I think Goro has a bit of an undeserved witch hunt going on here. I'm not saying Earthsea is brilliant, it is quite 'wooden' presentation, but it has its moments which I think are quite special.
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I know the knowledge of Miyzaki's 'adaptation' isn't passed around much, But I do wonder if his films were somewhat less popular that more people would bring up the fact that he is as bad as many hollywood directors in changing well known works to suit his style.

More to the point, to get the discussion going, what are your views on changing narratives to fit anime? After all there are many, many discussions about this in Hollywood, but I have yet to see any decent ones referring to Anime.

Discuss :)
 
I think there's a difference between taking the essence of an original work, and forming a great movie from it, and purely taking the name and trappings of an original and completely ****ing up. I think Hayao does the former most of the time, and Goro did the latter with his film.
 
Absolutely. Changing aspects of the source is fine if it is still being honored and done justice in one way or another. That's the point Goro did not stay true to the spirit of earthsea nor did he do the name justice with his take, it was just a poor interpretaion, something you can't quite accuse hayao of.
 
vashdaman said:
Absolutely. Changing aspects of the source is fine if it is still being honored and done justice in one way or another. That's the point Goro did not stay true to the spirit of earthsea nor did he do the name justice with his take, it was just a poor interpretaion, something you can't quite accuse hayao of.
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Well I've read the first two earthsea books (I'm not sure why I never finished them though, they were quite good) and while I felt the story of the film was rather blunt and straight forward, I still think it was a reasonable adaptation. It is certainly much, much better than that horrible American Tv series to me.

I'm reasonably lucky I suppose that I have never read any of the books Myazaki Sr has adapted from before the film was released. The closest I came was Howls, where I had read a couple other Dianne Jones books, but not Howls. I know people go on about the 'spirit' of adaptations - Kiki for one I know bares extremely little relation to the books it is based on in plot, and only marginally in characters (same with Future Boy Conan) but I do wonder what fans of the originals thought back in the 70s and 80s about those adaptations (Perhaps on a Dianne Wynne Jones forum you may be able to find views of book fans about Howls?)

And of course adaptation is an art in itself. I have come to moderately dislike the LOTR films - I am a big Tolkien fan, and though I felt Fellowship was a reasonable adaptation, I felt TT and ROTK were very poor in parts. Some of it was acting (some really bad acting IMO) some of it was special effects (some of the CGI looked terrible even for 2002) and some is the script (Gimli the clown etc) but most say they are brilliant. *shrug* - I'm still not saying Earthsea is a great film, it is slightly wooden, and slightly plodding, but I think Goro tried to do his best, and I think he made a reasonable go for his first time. (Looking for a parallel, Horus Prince of the Sun, Takahata's first Anime I feel much the same way about, he had all the ambition in the world, but the result was far from perfect - and Miyzaki had a big hand in it!)

I wonder what people will say about the Borrowers film - for one I can say I have actually read that book! We shall see...
 
Karigurashi is a lot more faithful in many ways than the films that have been discussed in the thread so far. The Borrowers were a part of my childhood, and I loved the film. Ghibli's best since Sen to Chihiro at the very least.
 
There's a chapter in Schoolgirl Milky Crisis entitled which is about a conversation with an un-named old Director containing the following regarding requests from the marketing suits at the studio to produce another international best seller:

"If I don't cooperate, they'll lean on my family instead! They think if someone with my surname is in charge, it'll be the same Brand!"
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I like to think this is Miyazaki talking about Goro. The article, by the by, was entitled "Son of..."
 
Funny, when I read that chapter my thoughts were the same but I also though of Kenta Fukasaku, who took the helm at directing Battle Royale 2.

Clements always gives just enough details for fans to Know what he's talking about.
 
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