Sunday, April 09, 2006

A New Miyazaki This Summer?

by Nick
(Been slacking off lately. Try to make up for it this week.)

Studio Ghibli is busy at the moment with what now can almost certainly be confirmed to be a big-screen adaptation of one of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels (I'm guessing the third book, The Farthest Shore, incidentally my favorite of the series, but could turn out to be mix of all of them). I wasn't sure when I first heard about the announcement, but this seems to settle things.

Here's a video clip from some documentary tv-documentary of some sort on Studio Ghibli, focusing mainly on the producer Toshio Suzuki, with the senior Miyazaki now concentrating on designing and building stuff like enormous clocks. Unless your japanese is way better than mine, the main good thing to be had here are some glimpses into the film, mostly in the first three and last minute of the clip. Looks like classic Miyazaki, perhaps the sign of a tradition of animation being passed on to a new generation (this film being directed by Hayao's son Goro)? That would be the best news of all.

If you check out the lower text of the poster it says "2006 7" Does this mean the film will be released already this summer in Japan? That case this would have landed way high on my upcoming list.

(Shit, here's some more footage, better and longer this time, showing the making of the trailer for Gedo Senki as the film is called. All in japanese, again, of course. You can read more about it over at Ghibli World.)

1 Comments:

Blogger Nick said...

I read that too, which would make it an adaptation of the first book.

But there are couple of things that speak against this, though.

1) Wizard of Earthsea is also commonly used as the title for the entire series.

2) All of the clips, pics and posters are scenes that to my memory best fit in with the third book.

The fact that there are scenes in the film that are not part of the first book make it likely that they are either

a) Really adapting the third book, it's just that the IMDb isn't being that specific on the details.

b) Focusing on the story of the third book, with parts from the other novels cut in here and there throughout.

c) As with Howl's Moving Castle taking the entire story of Ged chronologically (comprising all four books in this case) but cutting out a lot of other story and characters in the novels.

d) Playing a bit fast and loose with the series, and making something of a mish-mash.


To me b) sounds the most likely.

4/10/2006 01:08:00 AM  

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