Week 3/4: Le Guin's feeling about the adaptation of Earthsea.

So I didn't realise there was questions to base this on until it was half written, so I finished it.

The first novel in Ursula K. Le Guin's series Earthsea was published in 1968. In the early 1980s, Le Guin was approached by animator and director Hayao Miyazaki with an offer to create a film adaptation of the series. However at the time Le Guin was unsure because she did not know any of Miyazaki's work or in fact anime as a genre. After seeing Miyazaki's film - My Neighbour Totoro - she decided that if anyone should adapt the Earthsea series it should be him. However when the adaption - Tales from Earthsea - was made it was directed by Miyasaki's son Goro rather than Hayao Miyasaki himself. This disappointed Le Guin.
While Le Guin was positive about the aesthetics of the film claiming "much of it was beautiful," she took great issue with its re-imagining of the moral sense of the books and greater focus on physical violence. "...evil has been comfortably externalized in a villain," Le Guin writes, "the wizard Kumo/Cob, who can simply be killed, thus solving all problems. In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic questions."

There were 2 adaptations of another of her works - The Lathe of Heaven which was published in 1971. The first adaption was created in 1980 by thirteen/WNET New York, with contribution from Le Guin herself. The second was made in 2002 by the A&E Network.
In 2008, Le Guin said that she considers the 1980 adaptation as "the only good adaptation to film" of her work to date.