Week Four; Fantasy

Lost in Translation
As Megan stated in her earlier post, Le Guin was frequently disappointed with the film adaptations of the Earthsea series. This was mostly in part to her feeling as though the films where untrue to her vision. In 2004, the TV mini-series (that we had the "pleasure" of watching in class) was made, and was disappointing to both Le Guin and longtime fans of the franchise. For the purposes of you the reader, this is the film adaptation I will be referring to for the remainder of this post. While the story was changed for the film, this does tend to happen in adaptations of books all the time; mostly because movies and books rely on different storytelling devices. The main problems with the 2004 adaptation is that it was cast poorly (with the possible exception of Danny MF Glover, who seemed to be mailing it in anyway), the role of Ged being given to a Hollywood prettyboy who portrayed none of the depth that Le Guin gave Ged in the novel. Additionally, the dialogue was weak and the special effects were ridiculous (using the same CGI sequences repetetively just seems like a cheap, bad idea). It seems to me that what makes works of the fantasy genre so enticing are the fictional worlds in which they take place. Reading a book, which is descriptive up to a point, allows the reader to envision the fictional world in the thier own way, sibconsciously adding parts of themselves to it. By adapting it, the imagination of the reader becomes moot, as all parts of the world, great or small, are created based on the film-maker's vision or interpretation of the writer's vision. While the film version followed a loose version of the original novel, perhaps it would've been better recieved if it were good in itself, rather than "a good adaptation." However, as this isn't the case here, it's no wonder Le Guin wanted nothing to do with it.

Race in Earthsea
Considering the novel "A Wizard of Earthsea" was published by a white author in 1968, the same year as Martin Luther King's assassination, in a country where a civil rights movement was in full-swing, perhaps it is at least marginally surprising that the protagonist of the story is a black man. Admittedly, I feel like the color of the main character is inconsequential, the story stands up on it's own regardless. Le Guin has been quoted as saying "I have received letters that broke my heart, from adolescents of color in this country and in England, telling me that when they realized that Ged and the other Archipelagans in the Earthsea books are not white people, they felt included in the world of literary and movie fantasy for the first time" (Speech to the Book Expo America children's literature breakfast, June, 4, 2004). As far as I'm concerned, this is excellent. I've found myself reading books from all over the world, written by authors of varying race and ethnic backgrounds, and I have never personally felt that I need the protagonist to be white (as I am) in order to relate to them and feel included. However, I can appreciate how this would've been for young black fantasy readers during embarrassingly recent periods of tremulous race-relations. There was some controversy surrounding Le Guin's comments on the 2004 film adaptation. During her comments regarding the "butchering" of her work, she mentioned the casting of white actors to play characters who were not white in the novel. Several people (all white as far as my research shows) commented that race is irrelevant to the story. This may be true, as the novel takes place in an imaginary land, where the colors might be the same as they are in our real world, but the applicable cultures and backgrounds of said colors are not the same as we have in the real world. Personally, I feel that if it is important to Le Guin that certain characters have certain skin color, then it is important to the work; she is, after all, it's creator.

What I find particularly interesting is that the only case of controversy I could find surrounding the issue of race in Earthsea arose from the 2004 adaptation, not from the time of publishing in 1968 when you would expect people to be more narrow minded and judgmental about such things.