Saalon Muyo

I apparantly have Ursula on the brain today.  Her quiet but passionate response to Ghibli’s adaptation of her Earthsea novels is worth the read, even if you’ve read or seen neither.  An excerpt to prove my point:

The moral sense of the books becomes confused in the film. For example: Arren’s murder of his father in the film is unmotivated, arbitrary: the explanation of it as committed by a dark shadow or alter-ego comes late, and is not convincing. Why is the boy split in two? We have no clue. The idea is taken from A Wizard of Earthsea, but in that book we know how Ged came to have a shadow following him, and we know why, and in the end, we know who that shadow is. The darkness within us can’t be done away with by swinging a magic sword.

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