Film Trust Blog

Instead of waiting for the final installment of J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard’s tale - ‘A Deathly Hallows’, to find out how it will all end for Harry this summer, a unique opportunity already exists at a UK PREMIERE screening at this years Festival, courtesy of Studio Ghibli (HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE, SPIRITED AWAY), to see where it almost certainly began.

Nearly thirty years before Harry first boarded that train to Hogwarts from platform 9, another boy was starting Wizard School, in what was to become one of the landmarks of fantasy literature - Ursula Le Guinn’s Wizard of Earthsea Cycle (’A Wizard of Earthsea’, ‘The Tombs of Atuan’, ‘The Farthest Shore’, and ‘Tehan’).

Comparable in the depth and breadth of her imagination to Tolkien, Borges, Calvino and close friend the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, Le Guinn conjured up an archepeligo where “Once man and dragon were one. Man chose Land and Sea. Dragon chose Wind and Fire.” Dragons still speak the old language of ancient magic that man has forgotten, but watch out, they are ‘capable of lying and are not always to be trusted’.

Here on the `Isle of Roke’ the school’s most precocious pupil Sparrowhawk, learns the magic in knowing the true names of things, including his own - Ged. During a boast with a conceited blonde snobby pupil (Potter’s arch-rival Malfoy, anyone?), Ged, tempted by vanity overreaches beyond his as yet unperfected powers and attempts the forbidden Spell of Summoning. This adolescent act of arrogance and immaturity earns him a greater, even more powerful enemy - the evil shadow-beast. Once released, this dark malevolent ghoulish spirit, attacks Ged, scarring his face and killing the school’s greatest Wizard - the Archmage.

So far, so familiar, but Ged is drawn with greater complexity than Harry - he is elusive and darker. While Harry involves himself in the investigation of a sinister plot at school, Ged is the creator of his own woes. Earthsea magic is no mere conjuring trick, it involves, as with all power, great responsibility. Ged has a tragic flaw, he is  ‘loud and proud and full of temper’. As Guardian critic Nicholas Lezard so rightly said, “”Rowling can type, but Le Guinn can write (The Guardian, Saturday July 27, 2002).

TALES FROM EARTHSEA, a new feature anime film from Studio Ghibli Gedo Senki, takes up Ged’s story from the third and darkest book of the series ‘The Farthest Shore’. Ged, now an Archmage, and Arren, Prince of Enlad, must defeat an evil sorcerer whose efforts to cheat death are destroying the delicate balance that governs the realm of Earthsea and creating the terrible darkness falling over the world of man. Marking the directorial debut of Goro Miyazaki, son of legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki, this emotional anime received an enthusiastic response when it was screened at the Venice Film Festival.

Sarah Pottle