I thought that I had already seen every Ghibli movie...until I came across a list on tumblr that included this one. I had honestly never heard of it. And I can kind of see why.
First, the good things about this movie:
The music is amazing. Atmospheric and vaguely celtic, it really adds depth and emotion to all the scenes.
The two main characters, Arren and Therru, are dynamic and interesting. Their struggles are definitely more mature and overtly dark than those in other Ghibli films. Arren struggles with depression, dissociation, random outbursts of violent anger, fear of the future, and regret for the past. Therru clearly has PTSD from abuse at the hands of her parents. Their problems are not solved by the end of their adventure, but they are both able to move forward because of their relationship to each other.
Kumo/Cobb is very unsettling. I love his character design because he just looks so...wrong. His proportions are all off, and his body just gets more and more deformed and horrifying as time goes on.
It's pretty standard adventure fantasy fare. Call to adventure, denial of the call, belly of the whale... all that good John Campbell hero's journey stuff. It's entertaining and often unexpected.
And now, the bad things.
The dragons are so ugly. It's like someone cut them out of a trashy fantasy paperback cover from the 80s and glued them onto a gorgeous Ghibli backdrop. They don't match the style and it's jarring.(it's possible that they are meant to look like they don't belong, but Ghibli's visual storytelling has always been beautiful and this isn't)
The secondary characters are pretty generic. I have a soft spot for Tenar because she's just so cozy and she calls the slavers pigs, but everybody else is kind of...meh. Sparrowhawk doesn't have much of a personality. He's really only good for exposition and saving Arren from dying via stupidity. Even Kumo is kind of a generic villain. He wants eternal life because he's scared of dying. And that's it. We don't even get a real explanation of why or how that is supposed to work.
That gets me to another problem. The plot...There are so many holes and loose ends. I won't point them out here because of spoilers, but even the climax lacks real explanation or closure. i honestly wish that the villain had monologued a bit, just so I would know what his plan actually was.
The thing that all ghibli films have in common is that they tell the struggles and lessons of growing up by packaging them with magic and adventure. We watch them because they're beautiful and we love them because we identify with them. That's the main problem with this movie, the reason why it doesn't really feel like Ghibli: it doesn't feel that magical and it's hard to identify with the characters. And unlike Ponyo, which was visually stunning but not that deep, Tales from Earthsea doesn't have sheer animated beauty to fall back on.
