Copia

Somehow, the Miyazaki (of Studio Ghibli) movie Tales from Earthsea slipped through the cracks and I wasn’t aware of this Miyazaki film until just last week when Netflix suggested it to me. My friend, Nnedi is usually the one who keeps me up on his latest movies. This one was actually one of the best of the more recent films by his studio. Certainly not as good as my all time favorites: Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and Princess Mononoke, but definitely up there and more memorable.

It is much darker than his others, so I wouldn’t recommend it for children under 11. However, the atmosphere, the artwork (of course), and the creativity of the story is classic Miyazaki. The story takes place in a fantastic, medieval setting and is about the journey of the son of a King, who in a fit of unexplained rage kills his father and steals his magic sword

. At the time, the great balance in the world is shifting and the whole movie has a very powerful forbidding sense of dark evil subversively strangling the characters in the movie. The movie is definitely much more atmosphere than story but in this regard it is one of his better movies. I watched it in the original audio track (Japanese) with subtitled, so I don’t know about the quality of the dub but it probably is of excellent quality like the others given that it is Disney Studios production. If you are like me and have small children, older children (11 and upwards), and love a good animated feature with something in it for fantasy lovers (which I am), I would suggest grabbing this movie.