Read the Earthsea series for the first time this year. I'm heartbroken I had 20 years of life where I could have thanked her for her work but didn't find it in time :( Such is life!
I remember getting home one night and weeping in my kitchen, while my mom was in town visiting. She asked me what was wrong and I told her, Ursula LeGuin is dead and Garrison Keillor is a predatory creep. That she understood my sadness immediately speaks to what great parents I have.
I mean you do see Thénardier crawling around in there - and if having your ‘comic relief’ character screaming ‘GOD IS DEAD’ at the sky isn’t Victor Hugo then I don’t know what is 😅
“They needed a love interest.” Dear god, this makes me mad. They didn’t have to strip her of her character for that. There is genuine attraction between them in The Tombs of Atuan, at least from Tenar’s view. She’s fascinated by his confidence, patience, and compassion. But they don’t pursue an overtly romantic relationship because Ged’s committed to his life as a wandering mage and Tenar, having abandoned everything she’s known, needs a steady foothold to build up her new life. It’s not until decades later, when Tenar’s already been married and widowed and Ged’s struggling to define himself outside of his magic, that they finally get together. It’s a subtle romance, not a flash-in-the-pan love that sparks quickly but fades just as fast, but a slow burning, comfortable relationship that takes a more mature approach to romance. It’s beautiful and refreshing, but requires a certain level of subtlety and patience that Hollywood clearly didn’t care about. I just hope the new Earthsea adaptation that’s supposedly in the works does it right.
"They need a love interest" is also the reason why Del Toro couldn't make his At The Mountain of Madness movie. The producer rejected his proposal for R - rating and told him to have a love interest in the movie, and to make it have a happy ending. It's a Lovecraft story, ffs.
The hilarious thing is, no romance story could be as heartwarming as the story that's actually in the book. After weeks of isolation and mistreatment Ged gives Tenar things she hasn't had since infancy: her name and her identity. For the first time in her life she can think of herself as something other than Arha, a name she wasn't even allowed to own, and make her own choices. Before she did the rituals as she had been told to do, afterwards she rejects the first life Ged offers her because it's not what she wants.
Not to mention, they WAY they change her character is is especially gross. They took a complex, 3 dimensional character and turned her into a stereotypical soft, weak woman (tm) in order to make her a love interest, because in their eyes that’s the only kind of woman the audience will accept as a love interest (don’t think I need to point out that that’s a load of horse shit, but you never know these days)
I spent far too much time resenting how they switched his true name and use-name from Ged to Sparrowhawk. Because Sparrowhawk "sounded" more mystical, even though it is the blatant name of an animal and there's nothing mysterious about it. Then I read Ursula Le Guin's rant on the series, "How the Sci Fi Channel Wrecked My Books," and felt much better.
"I could probably rededicate this series to book to film comparisons and never run out of material" I'm literally revisiting this episode as a years long fan of Dan Olson coming from Dominic Noble's manifestation of the idea of doing EXACTLY that, incredible
Thank you for this. When I first finished reading "A Wizard of Earthsea," I placed the book down on the table, took off my glasses, and after a few moments of quiet awe and reflection, began sobbing. It was an incredible representation of trauma in the form of a familiar narrative. Ursula K. Le Guin was revealed to me to be an author I would read simply from her name on the cover. When I learned there were adaptations of the series, I was excited. A feeling that was instantly crushed by what I read about them online. I never got around to watching, and now I am so glad I didn't.
Best example is Holes - movie was a lot better than book. Even the author says that he was able to make a better product as a movie than the book. Source material was good but the movie was better.
david eberhart Another example: Perks of Being a Wallflower. Cut extraneous plot lines and characters. (Then again, written and directed by author of book, so...) Or! The Fault in Our Stars. Creators worked to make the movie as close to the book as possible, and they're of equal quality.
True. The constraints of the film forced him to focus the theme into specific symbols and elements. Layering that down into the subtext of the film, while bringing it out in otherwise unrelated elements (the cure for shoe odor being peaches and onions, for example) made for a more complete experience.
@@insertcheesypunhere For The Fault in Our Stars, I remember the author talking about doing exactly what's described in this video -- that is, focusing on keeping the _feeling_ the same, rather than the _content._ So if you watch the movie and read the book, you'll actually notice a lot of subtle changes, and a few big ones, but they're all intelligent choices made by skilled artists, and the author had the sense to step back and let the movie people make the movie. As opposed to, say, EL Jamesing it.
I loved The Tombs of Atuan as a kid, and it breaks my heart to imagine anyone reading that book and deciding its only value was as a conveyor for a potential romance. Tenar and her journey deserved so much better. It hurts knowing Ursula K. LeGuin saw what this adaptation did to her.
Even today, when heroines are much better established in children's/YA fantasy, I can't think of anyone who conveys a redemption story as dark, intense, and gripping as the Tombs of Atuan.
This is such a small point to your larger points but one of my favorite bits was just Tenar coming to the conclusion that her gods weren't real only for Ged to come in and tell her, no. They are real, they are just extremely evil and he's been fighting them off since he got here. It's just such a unique take on the idea of a priestess losing her religion and could have been well explored as like an acting thing. But. No, turn her into a doe eyed love interested is so much better.
Oh, god. "They needed a love interest." I HATE when movies doe this. To quote another internet critic, "Imagine if we visited a parallel universe where every movie regardless of genre was required to include one line dancing competition. We'd think they were all raving lunatics!" I hate the notion that every movie needs a romantic subplot. Half the time when a potentially good movie is merely mediocre, it's because there's this stupid and pointless romantic subplot that doesn't go anywhere and adds nothing to the movie and was only there because someone in a studio said, "This needs a love interest."
Yeah, but humans have biological needs regarding sex, not regarding line-dancing. The vast majority of healthy individuals who have got through puberty are either in, or looking forward a relationship allowing them to satisfy their urges. Sure, in many movies, the purpose of the love interest is simply to satisfy a chunk of the audience, but it does reflect reality generally.
That's not an excuse for shoving a romantic subplot into every story. Not every story needs one and when adding one actively hurts the movie, you shouldn't add it.
Oh my god when I saw that clip discussing the dragon's name I thought I was watching a comedy clip about fantasy tropes, not an actual part of the series!
Randomly making Tenar an adult is especially insulting considering how important Tanar's age was to Le Quin. By the time she was ready to write Tenar as a full grown adult she spent years figuring out her character. Tenar being an adult is why the release between the third and fourth books are so far apart.
They're both so far below the "acceptable" bar that it's almost meaningless to decide which is worse imo. Both are absolute garbage on almost every level, especially compared to the source material.
Quick correction about the use of fog in the book... Duny didn't just make apparitions to scare them off, the village used guerilla tactics to drive them back to their ships, which by then had been burned. The resulting battle turned the sand brown with blood. That's a screen worthy event if I've ever read one.
Randall Stephens Same thing happened with the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (not same scale, I know, but still). The series was still being written when the movie was made, and there is actually a shot in the movie that showed up in the graphic novel.
I would say it's closer to the truth to say the book is adapting the movie. Clarke, as much as I love him, never really understood what Kubrick was really getting at.
Tombs of Atuan is one of my all time favourite books and it makes me feel super uneasy to see Tenar turned into a non-character with no agency or personality who only exists as a love interest
After reading the first book (thanks for the recommendation, by the way!), I realized that even if the filmmakers absolutely had to have a love interest, they didn't need to shoehorn Tenar in because Ged already has something kinda close to a love interest in Estarriol. The two grow close enough at the Roke School that they end up exchanging true names, and Estarriol accompanies Ged as he travels into isolated, uncharted territory to find the gebbeth. Just add a kiss or two and boom, you've got your romantic B-plot. And as much as I crave more speculative fiction with queer romances, there's even a way to make this solution work for a bunch of studio hacks exploiting the series for name recognition. If you really want a straight romance, all you have to do is make Estarriol a girl and the Roke School co-ed. It'd be an offensive change that doesn't gibe with the book's gender politics, but you've already thrown out the gender politics and whitewashed most of the cast, so fuck it.
Jackson Oakley I would be completely okay with making Role co-ed. For me as a young reader it wasn't something I really noticed, especially as LeGuin does show female mages in her world. It would have had the added advantage of making the god-awful fifth book redundant too.
i like that ship (ged and vetch) better than the straight one (him and tenar) in the actual books or to go with that trope of 'hating a person at first because you actually have a crush on them' then ged and jasper
I do think making Roke co-ed would be a somewhat solid move for an adaptation focused only on one or two, but it would really miss out on the god-tier save Leguin made in Tehanu of interrogating the inherent misogyny of how Roke genders magic from Tenar's viewpoint
@@lyndonwesthaven6623 In one text LeGuin wrote about book one (it might be the foreword of a later edition) she notes that there is a lot of sexism in the book that she didn't consciously put there, it just kinda came with the tropes of writing a fantasy book, and she noted how she actively chose to make other choices in the later books, or at least actively considered what tropes she was incorporating. So I don't know that she would have minded any adaptations that toned down the sexism of the first book a bit. Once you notice it it becomes quite jarring how different the first book is from the rest in that regard.
Why in the world is Tenar, The Eaten One, High Priestess Nearly-starved-Sparrowhawk-to-death-by-trapping-him-in-a-dark-and-cursed-maze, a doe-eyed, wilting Ingenue? She hated and resented Sparrowhawk for instilling doubt in her, everything she was molded for! The Ghibli adaptation is a damn masterpiece compared to this nonsense, and it was arguably even more of a Earthsea Frankenstein than this!
JaredMithrandir Yeah. That one was by Goro Miyazaki, his son. it was pretty dull and convoluted. And he tried to cram four books into one movie, but it was miles better than this nonsense.
A story where a woman literally belonging to a religion with myriad dubious practices questions her faith and ultimately rejects it, turned into one where neither her faith nor her church are at all morally questionable. Gee, I wonder why they made _that_ choice...
@@TheNumnutRandomnesshe instead whitewashed all the characters, despite the fact that leguin openly writes about how dark the characters' skin colors are (except Tenar obvi). Completely pointlessly shitty of him to do
I've started reading Wizard of Earthsea, partially because of this review (and I've heard it's good from others). In that fog scene, it does seem like he does sort of cause SOME of the raiders to run looney-tunes style over the cliff. "The pursuers fell screaming through fog and sudden sunlight a hundred feet sheer to the shallow pools among the rocks . " (p. 8) Though, yeah not all of them (the rest are scared away), and no goofy tackler. So not nearly as silly as the miniseries. I know it's a nit-pick. I've enjoyed all of folding ideas.
It’s also noted that the majority of the soldiers saw or heard their buddies falling and were like “nope this is whack” and skedaddled. You don’t need to have the *entire* group lemming themselves to prove a point, these filmmakers are just incompetent.
I've never seen one of Dan's pre-2020 videos before so that intro skit hit me like a bullet. I'm sure the actual video is insightful and interesting but for now I gotta keep pressure on this until the ding dang ambulance shows up.
A Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan are probably my favourite fantasy books ever.. I read them in my teens, and read them again in the past few years, and I can honestly say that they very much hold up. Their length is actually more of a plus than anything, each book manages to explore it's themes and end on a fitting climax without dragging, which is an issue I have with modern 1000+ page fantasy stories.
Hey there, it's just a detail, but the reason why Les misérables gets so long and takes so much time to describe so much places, so much parallel minor stories is not an economic one. Hugo wrote like this because he wanted this book to be a representation of what caused misery in his time, and how man exploits man, and every character in his book matches with this idea. Making money was'nt this important to Hugo, his books sold very well, he had a politician salary and it wasn't a problem for him to afford Hauteville House. But anyway, it's an insignificant detail in a very interesting and well-made episode. Also perdon my english :|
Yeah, to say that the Waterloo or Sewer chapters are there to fill out page count totally ignores how they illustrate the themes of the work. They wouldn't work in a musical, but they make the book amazing.
On her essay about Disney's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Lindsay Ellis made a similar statement in concern of Victor Hugo's economical motivations, and as much as I appreciate both Dan and Lindsay's work, I'm dissapointed at their misguided opinion of Victor Hugo; he was a revolutioner, he was exiled of France because of the political themes of Les Miserables.
It's easy to slip up in the exceptions to the rule. Anyone looking at the size of, say, The Count of Monte Cristo is going to assume it was to get money out of it. But it serves a specific narrative purpose, in taking the sheer time to make our protagonist's starting point SO idyllic, his fall SO prolonged and unjust, and his stay in prison so crushing that we need no imagination to be in his emotional state. When he spends dozens of pages after this misery elaborately and extravagantly awarding anyone who has done him the least kindess it sets up a remarkable tension because you KNOW it's a revenge story, and you're waiting for the revenge - and so when you are days and days of reading in, when he says he has repaid all his friends and will no repay his enemies, it's chilling. This wouldn't work in a lightning-paced book. Even when a book is written for economic reasons, the best authors use them to their advantage. Charles Dickens was one of hundreds of authors who wrote in chapters and were paid by the page, but he is remembered better than all the rest because he used the chapter format to tell small, self-contained stories in each one within the major arcs, and because the small lives of the characters over such time gave them a compelling slice-of-life feeling. His finances were a constraint, but he used them to his advantage.
@@luismarioguerrerosanchez4747 However, she does mention a change between Hunchback and Lea Miserables which I think was undeniable. He clearly didn't care that much for individuals when it came to Notre Dame de Paris, and this thinking shifted by the time of Le mis, not to mention, he did in fact, wrote a watered down version of Notre Dame for money, so she's not far off.
Does it need to be one or the other? Art is often both thematically and financially driven. Wordy prose can serve a thematic purpose and still have been encouraged by contemporary financial incentives or cultural norms in writing.
Just to bash that movie on the head a bit more for fun, Ged giving his name to the doorkeeper of the school shows the filmmakers didnt grasp the importance of names, both from a narrative metaphorical sense as well as the literalist in-universe power of names. Part of the in-universe reason names are important is that knowing someone or something's name gives you power of it, it's the entire basis of the world's magic. Ged can summon a fog cloud because he was taught the 'name' of fog. Knowing someone's true name gives you immense power over them (hell, the filmmakers were clearly vaguely aware of the concept with that bit about "the dragon's true name, the one to bind it and ask it any questions") and Ged just... gives it to the doorkeep, this person who he's just met, the magic word to completely fuck up Ged if he ever chooses. And the whole thing implies this is the case for *every* student at the school, which is fucking insane.
My laptop fell while watching this this video and the page immediately moved to a hungarian internet radio. I owe a beer to anyone who can explain me how could this actually occur.
Regarding Les Miserables, I feel like it’s important to note that has a different goal from any kind of dramatized medium. The way I put it, some books have back story. Les Miserables has back story for its back story, because it has the luxury to stretch its legs. It can be immersive in a way that few other things can be. Also, I’ve always felt that the musical did a poor job of conveying the tone of the book. Simply covering the most exciting bits misses out on the calm in-between times which were the whole point of the book. In fact, my takeaway for the story is that those you might think miserable and those you might think happy can change if you take a closer look. Fantine’s plight wasn’t all misery, it was bittersweet because she was doing all she did for her daughter, and the musical throws that away. Valjean on the run found peace and joy in raising an adopted daughter. The musical just has a time jump. The exciting bits inform the calm between bits, and vice versa.
Another thing I find interesting about adaptation is the way that both properties can be based on the same ideas while having completely different meanings. My favourite example of this is Annihilation. The book is about isolation and control while the film is about trauma and change, yet on the surface they're still both stories about a group of female scientists entering a space where things shouldn't be as they are.
I feel like Ender's Game suffers from adaptation sickness, so much of the movie takes part in Ender's head was well as how he thinks and feels, and what I personally felt draws you into the character which was non existent in the movie. It was a well shot and well acted movie, it just lacked what made the book enthralling.
adhdPatrick Also they made Bonzo shorter than Ender, robbing the fight of any real tension. (Yes, Bonzo was a bit more muscled, but he's supposed to be a foot taller and have several years on Ender.)
There's also the technical constraint that the book takes Ender from the ages of 6 to 12 (or 13) and shows the psychological effect of growing up under the emotional abuse of the IF. That sort of time span would have been impossible without frequent recasting or some kind of Boyhood length shoot, but to get around this they condense the story to a ridiculously short time frame and cut out integral parts of Battle School.
@@maxjolley339 Personally I liked that casting choice, he radiated barely contained savagery and I could buy him as a genuine menace even though physically he was a lil goblin. He's who I'd cast as Sevro if Red Rising ever got a live-action adaptation.
@@SacredDaturana Looking back, my issue is less with Bonzo's casting in general and more with how his casting did not play well with Ender's. Both are good actors, but put that Ender in a room with that Bonzo and there's just not the right kind of looming fear for what Bonzo might do to him.
@@maxjolley339 I think I get what you're saying... the book's descriptions made it visually obvious how much more different and vulnerable Ender is; he's younger, smaller. It reenforces the isolation and disconnect that Ender feels.
I honestly thought this was going to be about the Ghibli adaptation (which to date is the only movie of theirs that I've seen that I really didn't like, at all). That said, I'm glad I got to learn about another adaptation! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this one Dan; I learned about something new from it.
I'm putting Tales of Earthsea on my List of books to read, but you want to know the shiz here? They do this a lot with women characters. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is a great example, where they essentially cut all her parts and made it about the guy who shows up halfway through the movie, and removes all her choices and fire and RUGH--like, She alone was the only person not scared enough of the poison fungus forest to figure out what was going on, and luckily, in most cuts out today, they keep all that important stuff in--but only after Miyazaki essentially sent a threat to the American studio re-releasing it the second time. It's also one reason I don't think Sabriel will ever make it to the big screen. Too many women doing things that involve foreign words like "agency" and "saving the kingdom" and all that sort of stuff, producers don't think anyone will identify with female protagonists but females, meanwhile there's never an issue selling a movie with a male protagonist. One of the biggest discussions I've had that got out of hand in college was actually "Would Harriet Potter have sold as well as Harry Potter?" I don't think so. And I think if Sabriel had a male protagonist, it would have already been made into a movie, like Percy Jackson, I am Number 4(Not a great movie), etc.
Honestly. Despite the liberal far left grip on Hollywood, or perhaps because of it depending on your point of view. They don't even think female protagonists would appeal to females. But I can understand because at this point I feel like the Black Cauldron Series is probably safest that it only got a Disney adaptation(which some consider failed) and hasn't been seriously touched by Hollywood. They would probably have some real problem with Eilonwy. Specially if they got past the first book in their attempts. it's a series I love and the idea of a proper movie or movies made out of it sounds lovely in theory but having that put into practice frightens me because of what they'd likely do when adapting it.
Fwiw a good thing with Sabriel, I think, is that it seems like Garth Nix is keeping the story pretty close to his chest as far as film rights go. It sounds like he's at the point where he's only willing to give it to someone who cares about doing her justice, and who'll fight to keep her/Lirael/the Clayr/etc. at the center. Like Touchstone is great, but could you even imagine an adaptation where they tried to make him the main character? It would make no sense! (although now that you mention it I'm wondering if maybe that's part of why it hasn't been picked up - Touchstone comes in so late that they can't hamfistedly give him the protagonist reins)
@@thevampirefrog06 I feel like what they'd do is make Touchstone her childhood friend, who tags along when she crosses the wall, and pulls a sword from a stone or something to qualify him as King and defeat Kerrigor with it, while she winds up just providing moral support at the end.
@@Quandry1 Liberal far-left grip on Hollywood? My guy, what constitutes as "far-left" to you? It's literally a capitalist industry full of hierarchies and exploitation of workers. Some movies may pander towards some mild, already generally accepted socially progressive themes now and then for publicity or inclusivity's sake but even in the biggest marvel movie so far the most lgbt representation we got was one guy saying "my boyfriend" in a therapy scene. Where's the gender abolitionism arguments? Or hell, can you name me a Hollywood blockbuster movie that respects a trans character and incorporates their identity as a meaningful and central plot element? (That ScarJo comedy doesn't count, for obvious reasons) If you think what we get in Hollywood movies right now is "far-left", you have no idea what actual leftist academics and writers are up to these days. Economically and politically Hollywood promotes a lot more right-wing and centrist/neoliberal ideas than it ever does leftist ones.
@@LeifLovebug Liberal far left means women and minorities. The more women and minorities there are, the more liberal far leftier it is. (I'm being sarcastic please don't hate me)
Thanks to this video I finally decided to read the wizard of Earthsea that had been, for too long, on my shelfs, among the numerous books I buy faster than I read. I read it in 3 days on my way to work and my lunch break, it is as great as everyone say. And I can't wait to read the tombs of Atuan. So thanks!
Can't thank you enough for turning me onto these books! I'm usually not a fiction reader but I read both The Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan this past week and now I'm hooked!
I never caught this video when it was new, but stumbled onto it after starting a re-read of Wizard of Earthsea. I never comment on youtube videos but the intensity at 20:50 of "Tenar, also known as *ARHA*" ... I share your outrage, Dan, and I think anyone who loves her character felt the same anger.
Wtf. I'm reading Earthsea for the first time atm (up to book 4) and almost everything about this adaptation sounds appalling. I loved Tombs of Atuan so much - a child simultaneously being a tribute to and embodiment of these mysterious gods of darkness was such a fascinating, freaky concept. And it's done so well! (vague spoilers coming) Tenar has so much power, yet still feels powerless or pressured a lot of the time. She exercises her power in horrific ways, often to prove herself to the older but (theoretically) junior priestesses. Yet she also experiences self-doubt and eventually doubt in the order of the nameless ones itself. She makes bad choices and takes risks, and they're all satisfyingly understandable within the ideology of the culture and religion that has raised her.
I read The Tombs of Atuan when I was about 9, so ca. 1979. It was an utterly terrifying and astounding and beautiful journey, and as I was a very lonely young girl, very immediate to me. Those tombs have a place in my head. It isn’t overwhelming or major. They are just there at the back, if I remember to look there.
On the subject of filmability I'll always love this letter to the UK critic Mark Kermode: "The Da Vinci Code is unfilmable. As Tom Hanks and Ron Howard proved"
I read somewhere that Catcher in the Rye is the top best-selling book that has never been adapted into a movie. It’s interesting that a book with no expensive set pieces or really any need for special effects is unadaptable into film. I don’t think it would even work as a graphic novel. It’s not a visual text at all, yet is still a wonderfully engaging read. I’ve heard of directors flirting with the idea of making a Catcher in the Rye movie but so far no one has taken the plunge.
I'm glad I stumbled on this video. A friend of mine recommended Earthsea to me a couple of years ago but when I tried it I couldn't get into it at all. Your breakdown of the themes has convinced me I should give it another shot.
Oh, this is from five years ago. T.T RIP Ursula K LeGuin Wizard of Earthsea was one of the first actual books I ever read. One of my all time favourites. I never knew there were more books in the series until I was much older.
Even The Lord of the Rings, one of the best film adaptations out there, wasn't immune to "invent/play up a love story that was absent/inconsequential in the source material" syndrome. What really baffles me about this kind of thing is how *completely unnecessary* it always is. The invented love story is always tepid and uninteresting -- does anyone really *need* this? Is there really anyone out there who would like the movie *less* if it was gone?
Injecting romance into existing plots wouldn't be so bad if the romance subplots weren't all so _boring_. Action/adventure stories can totally juggle romance plots and make them interesting. To move away from movies, the webcomic Girl Genius has a love triangle as a significant element in its ongoing narrative. All while also juggling high action, comedy, and the political intrigue surrounding a continent's worth of bickering royals, mad science lords, and shadowy conspirators. That love triangle - between the heirs of three major geopolitical power legacies - is deeply complex, with potent interpersonal chemistry. It waxes and wanes in response to shifts in politics, various crisies, and each participants' hang-ups, flaws, mistakes, and divided loyalties. It's such a powerful romance between the titular Girl Genius and her two would-be suitors (among other minor romantic entanglements), when it gets into full swing I can almost forget the batshit insane pulp action and harrowing conspiracies going on at the same time. Moreover, this love triangle both complements and works at cross-purposes to the various characters' other personal goals. Characters in-universe must _plan around_ the romantic interplay between these three budding titans of mad science and geopolitics. It's just so interesting in its entirety. And it makes me more frustrated by how little Hollywood films try when it comes to their own romantic subplots. (Though, admittedly, it's unfair comparing 90 minute movies to a multi-volume webcomic that's been running for several years).
In that particular instance it seems to be less a case of "We need a romance" and more a case of "We've got Liv frickin' Tyler in this role - we need to do more with her than the original source material calls for". But yeah...
To give the trope (possibly unwarranted) credit: I think that one of the basic challenges of adapting a book is to take the written narrative in which just about anything can be laid out explicitly for the reader, and convey it to a movie audience, for whom that level of narration would be tiresome. To convey the story to the movie audience they draw on a collection of cultural cues and story cliches, things that don't need to be explained because the audience already understands them at a very fundamental level. Hence, complex motivations are cast out and replaced with "because he's in love". It can be misused, of course, and even when used properly it might come across as a bit cheap or exploitative... But the value of it is that it's one of the available ways to convey a character's motivations quickly and effectively without having to spend too much time establishing them.
I only managed to see the Ghibli movie which seems to be universally panned (I like it but probably mainly cause teru no uta could make me like almost any movie). But even that seems to have done a better job at adapting the source material. At least Tenar is still a villain in that one (which as far as I can tell isn't completely true to the books but at least better than doey eyed cardboard) and they got some amazing looking dragons. Earthsea is still on my "need to read this" pile of books. Still busy with the left hand of darkness and the prose edda, next up will be the dispossessed, then dune and then I will hopefully reach earthsea unless I veer off to the black company first. So many great books to read and not enough time to do it. (I say while commenting on a half hour video essay instead of reading >
This is my dad's favourite book, without seeing the adaptation he recommended it to me as an intro to the books. Needless to say I didn't go read the book and was hugely confused as to why my dad liked this book.
I know I'm commenting on a video that is 3 years old by this point... but damn, I just have to express how glad I am to see someone take the time to address the wonderfulness that is Earthsea and acknowledge how badly it has gotten screwed over with the adaptations. Seriously, fuck this miniseries and fuck the Ghibli movie too while we're at it.
This just made me wish I was a screenwriter/director to make a decent adaptation. I've only read the first two books but those were fantastic and deserving of an acceptable visual adaptation
This video has convinced me to seek out and try the Earthsea Cycle. Thanks! Would like to see more book stuff so we can know what to check out and what to avoid.
A book that I find to be truly "unadaptable" is I know What You Did Last Summer. Yes, it was made into a movie, but aside from the title, they have nothing in common. I read the book first and, while I won't spoil it, it uses a conceit that I'm surprised more books don't use: two separate characters are actually the same person. This person is not disguising themselves, it's just that the book presents Character X and Character Y, and only after the reveal do you realize that nobody in the book has met both characters X and Y. It's a very simple but very effective twist, that would be impossible to accomplish in a visual medium.
"This Book is Full of Spiders" seems like a strange include in the background, since it wasn't adapted into a movie (yet) while the first book in the series, "John Dies in the End" actually was. And I think it was fairly well-done, despite being *ahem* unadaptable.
Of course the whole scene about Ged defending the village happened when he was a young child in the book. Not a 20 something playing a seventeen year old.
i remember speed reading wizard of earthsea when i was like 13 and all i remember is that a lot of the dolphins in the sea were actually wizards who'd forgotten their name and who they were.
I'm rewatching all of your videos right now and idk if I commented on this one earlier on Blip but either way, it's a great video and I'm glad I happened to run into this again because I've sort of been writing a huge essay on Les Mis adaptations... Speaking of Les Mis, though, after getting more involved in the fandom I've started to see the digressions differently... and this is another thing that's interesting about things like audience expectations and formats and so on. You can see Les Mis as a novel with tons of digression that give context to the plot and reinforce the themes and symbolism OR you can see it as a historical-sociopolitical essay on early-to-mid 19th century France with an illustrative plot. So if you only wanted to read it for the plot (like most people do, including me, at least originally) you're almost definitely going to feel frustrated. Also it doesn't help that at this point the reader is not a 19th century French person so a lot of the links that French people at the time would have understood are super obscured to us so it's like actual work to figure out some of the stuff. Or at least you need a heavily annotated edition to read it from. (Also I honestly think that it might make sense for a modern reader to think of Les Mis as a book series rather than one massive novel. Because it can pretty easily be split into five parts. I'm just saying this because I think people find it easier to read five 500 page books than one 2500 page book?) The musical IS a good adaptation and it's possibly the best in terms of the plot&message to running time ratio and the songs are awesome and I'm glad it exists. But it does kind of drop the ball on some elements. To me the best possible screen adaptation format would be a miniseries. Not that shorter and more heavily trimmed adaptations are bad necessarily but I think there's value in more complete adaptations too, especially since the book itself is so inaccessible to many people. (Sadly I doubt the up-coming BBC miniseries is going to be a great example.)
I think "A Clockwork Orange" is a better movie than book. It follows the book very closely at times, but goes in amazing directions and has somehow more subtleties. The book goes darker in the beginning, but the ending is a complete betrayal
Watching this for the first time. I haven't read Earthsea but I have read Left Hand of Darkness, and you made me so angry during this video that I stopped it halfway through, paused to write a comment to tell you about it, then closed my computer and went to read Earthsea, which my roommate gave me for Christmas but I hadn't read yet. Anyway, thanks for getting me to read Earthsea
this is such a small thing (and about 5 to 7 years late), but i really enjoyed the inclusion of The Midwife's Apprentice when you gave an example of a young adult book. That was one of the books that I still cherish from my childhood.
!! So that's where it came from! I know that the Inheritance Cycle borrows (that's a...generous term, honestly) from a lot of different stories, but I didn't know that Earthsea might've been one of them. The whole true name, the importance of names, the fact everything has a true name that grants the holder power that appears throughout the series...could that have been from Earthsea? Fitting, since the book got a similar movie treatment that pisses me off greatly.
I'm not terribly familiar with The Inheritance Cycle, so I can't say specifically, but it's possible. Earthsea is pretty influential. That said, the idea of True Names as a mechanism for magic is an idea as old as antiquity. Glen Cooke and David Eddings, also highly influential authors, both use this mechanism as well.
Hm. It could just be a coincidence, but it does sound a lot like the mechanism in Earthsea. The way it's presented, how the names are treated, and so and so forth sound like the summary you gave.
I remember reading A Wizard of Earthsea. It was in 6th grade and it was my first fantasy novel. I read the hobbit shortly after and LOTR’s shortly after that. Ursula’s writing was the spark that ignited my love for fantasy. I never read another Earthsea book though.
The series adapted decently well to the medium until the executive producers who think "themes are for eight-grade book reports" cast away GRRM and used their bad fanfiction full of self-indulgence as a source instead.
Doing a rewatch and hit the "oh yeah, le Guin is still alive" part. Guess it's time to lament openly.
me rn :(
I just read the left hand of darkness last week and am also doing a sad
Read the Earthsea series for the first time this year. I'm heartbroken I had 20 years of life where I could have thanked her for her work but didn't find it in time :(
Such is life!
I remember getting home one night and weeping in my kitchen, while my mom was in town visiting. She asked me what was wrong and I told her, Ursula LeGuin is dead and Garrison Keillor is a predatory creep. That she understood my sadness immediately speaks to what great parents I have.
so... how did it go?
idk in les mis the musical/movie u can really feel the absence of focus on paris sewage system
I mean you do see Thénardier crawling around in there - and if having your ‘comic relief’ character screaming ‘GOD IS DEAD’ at the sky isn’t Victor Hugo then I don’t know what is 😅
“They needed a love interest.” Dear god, this makes me mad. They didn’t have to strip her of her character for that. There is genuine attraction between them in The Tombs of Atuan, at least from Tenar’s view. She’s fascinated by his confidence, patience, and compassion. But they don’t pursue an overtly romantic relationship because Ged’s committed to his life as a wandering mage and Tenar, having abandoned everything she’s known, needs a steady foothold to build up her new life.
It’s not until decades later, when Tenar’s already been married and widowed and Ged’s struggling to define himself outside of his magic, that they finally get together. It’s a subtle romance, not a flash-in-the-pan love that sparks quickly but fades just as fast, but a slow burning, comfortable relationship that takes a more mature approach to romance. It’s beautiful and refreshing, but requires a certain level of subtlety and patience that Hollywood clearly didn’t care about.
I just hope the new Earthsea adaptation that’s supposedly in the works does it right.
"They need a love interest" is also the reason why Del Toro couldn't make his At The Mountain of Madness movie. The producer rejected his proposal for R - rating and told him to have a love interest in the movie, and to make it have a happy ending. It's a Lovecraft story, ffs.
The hilarious thing is, no romance story could be as heartwarming as the story that's actually in the book. After weeks of isolation and mistreatment Ged gives Tenar things she hasn't had since infancy: her name and her identity. For the first time in her life she can think of herself as something other than Arha, a name she wasn't even allowed to own, and make her own choices. Before she did the rituals as she had been told to do, afterwards she rejects the first life Ged offers her because it's not what she wants.
also she's young and ged's not a creep
Not to mention, they WAY they change her character is is especially gross. They took a complex, 3 dimensional character and turned her into a stereotypical soft, weak woman (tm) in order to make her a love interest, because in their eyes that’s the only kind of woman the audience will accept as a love interest (don’t think I need to point out that that’s a load of horse shit, but you never know these days)
I spent far too much time resenting how they switched his true name and use-name from Ged to Sparrowhawk. Because Sparrowhawk "sounded" more mystical, even though it is the blatant name of an animal and there's nothing mysterious about it. Then I read Ursula Le Guin's rant on the series, "How the Sci Fi Channel Wrecked My Books," and felt much better.
IIRC this was in the first ten minutes of the show, and I literally *screamed* when it happened. I knew we were in for bad times after that.
"I could probably rededicate this series to book to film comparisons and never run out of material" I'm literally revisiting this episode as a years long fan of Dan Olson coming from Dominic Noble's manifestation of the idea of doing EXACTLY that, incredible
Thank you for this. When I first finished reading "A Wizard of Earthsea," I placed the book down on the table, took off my glasses, and after a few moments of quiet awe and reflection, began sobbing. It was an incredible representation of trauma in the form of a familiar narrative. Ursula K. Le Guin was revealed to me to be an author I would read simply from her name on the cover. When I learned there were adaptations of the series, I was excited. A feeling that was instantly crushed by what I read about them online. I never got around to watching, and now I am so glad I didn't.
Best example is Holes - movie was a lot better than book. Even the author says that he was able to make a better product as a movie than the book. Source material was good but the movie was better.
Agreed.
I've heard that the movie the perfect storm was better than the book also.
david eberhart Another example: Perks of Being a Wallflower. Cut extraneous plot lines and characters. (Then again, written and directed by author of book, so...)
Or! The Fault in Our Stars. Creators worked to make the movie as close to the book as possible, and they're of equal quality.
True. The constraints of the film forced him to focus the theme into specific symbols and elements. Layering that down into the subtext of the film, while bringing it out in otherwise unrelated elements (the cure for shoe odor being peaches and onions, for example) made for a more complete experience.
@@insertcheesypunhere For The Fault in Our Stars, I remember the author talking about doing exactly what's described in this video -- that is, focusing on keeping the _feeling_ the same, rather than the _content._ So if you watch the movie and read the book, you'll actually notice a lot of subtle changes, and a few big ones, but they're all intelligent choices made by skilled artists, and the author had the sense to step back and let the movie people make the movie. As opposed to, say, EL Jamesing it.
"LeGuin ist still alive" - watching this late in 2018 this makes me sad :(
I loved The Tombs of Atuan as a kid, and it breaks my heart to imagine anyone reading that book and deciding its only value was as a conveyor for a potential romance. Tenar and her journey deserved so much better. It hurts knowing Ursula K. LeGuin saw what this adaptation did to her.
Even today, when heroines are much better established in children's/YA fantasy, I can't think of anyone who conveys a redemption story as dark, intense, and gripping as the Tombs of Atuan.
This is such a small point to your larger points but one of my favorite bits was just Tenar coming to the conclusion that her gods weren't real only for Ged to come in and tell her, no. They are real, they are just extremely evil and he's been fighting them off since he got here. It's just such a unique take on the idea of a priestess losing her religion and could have been well explored as like an acting thing. But. No, turn her into a doe eyed love interested is so much better.
Oh, god. "They needed a love interest."
I HATE when movies doe this. To quote another internet critic, "Imagine if we visited a parallel universe where every movie regardless of genre was required to include one line dancing competition. We'd think they were all raving lunatics!"
I hate the notion that every movie needs a romantic subplot. Half the time when a potentially good movie is merely mediocre, it's because there's this stupid and pointless romantic subplot that doesn't go anywhere and adds nothing to the movie and was only there because someone in a studio said, "This needs a love interest."
Yeah, but humans have biological needs regarding sex, not regarding line-dancing. The vast majority of healthy individuals who have got through puberty are either in, or looking forward a relationship allowing them to satisfy their urges.
Sure, in many movies, the purpose of the love interest is simply to satisfy a chunk of the audience, but it does reflect reality generally.
That's not an excuse for shoving a romantic subplot into every story. Not every story needs one and when adding one actively hurts the movie, you shouldn't add it.
You're distorting my point.
Then don't argue a point not related to the subject.
rubino 83
Reading comprehension isn't your strongest talent, huh ?
Oh my god when I saw that clip discussing the dragon's name I thought I was watching a comedy clip about fantasy tropes, not an actual part of the series!
I went back to rewatch this episode, thanks to Lost in Adaptation reminding me of the mess they made of Le Guin's work.
Same.
Same.
Randomly making Tenar an adult is especially insulting considering how important Tanar's age was to Le Quin. By the time she was ready to write Tenar as a full grown adult she spent years figuring out her character. Tenar being an adult is why the release between the third and fourth books are so far apart.
And really, her age should have been another clue that making her a romantic interest character was a bad idea.
Dan Olson: This is about as bad as an adaptation can get
M. Night Shyamalan: Hold my beer I'm doing Airbender
No. Airbender is better than this.
They're both so far below the "acceptable" bar that it's almost meaningless to decide which is worse imo. Both are absolute garbage on almost every level, especially compared to the source material.
Quick correction about the use of fog in the book... Duny didn't just make apparitions to scare them off, the village used guerilla tactics to drive them back to their ships, which by then had been burned. The resulting battle turned the sand brown with blood. That's a screen worthy event if I've ever read one.
2001 is less of an adaptation and more of a collaboration. Kubrik actually finished his film before Clarke finished his book.
Randall Stephens Same thing happened with the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (not same scale, I know, but still). The series was still being written when the movie was made, and there is actually a shot in the movie that showed up in the graphic novel.
I would say it's closer to the truth to say the book is adapting the movie. Clarke, as much as I love him, never really understood what Kubrick was really getting at.
Tombs of Atuan is one of my all time favourite books and it makes me feel super uneasy to see Tenar turned into a non-character with no agency or personality who only exists as a love interest
After reading the first book (thanks for the recommendation, by the way!), I realized that even if the filmmakers absolutely had to have a love interest, they didn't need to shoehorn Tenar in because Ged already has something kinda close to a love interest in Estarriol. The two grow close enough at the Roke School that they end up exchanging true names, and Estarriol accompanies Ged as he travels into isolated, uncharted territory to find the gebbeth. Just add a kiss or two and boom, you've got your romantic B-plot.
And as much as I crave more speculative fiction with queer romances, there's even a way to make this solution work for a bunch of studio hacks exploiting the series for name recognition. If you really want a straight romance, all you have to do is make Estarriol a girl and the Roke School co-ed. It'd be an offensive change that doesn't gibe with the book's gender politics, but you've already thrown out the gender politics and whitewashed most of the cast, so fuck it.
Jackson Oakley I would be completely okay with making Role co-ed. For me as a young reader it wasn't something I really noticed, especially as LeGuin does show female mages in her world.
It would have had the added advantage of making the god-awful fifth book redundant too.
i like that ship (ged and vetch) better than the straight one (him and tenar) in the actual books or to go with that trope of 'hating a person at first because you actually have a crush on them' then ged and jasper
I do think making Roke co-ed would be a somewhat solid move for an adaptation focused only on one or two, but it would really miss out on the god-tier save Leguin made in Tehanu of interrogating the inherent misogyny of how Roke genders magic from Tenar's viewpoint
@@lyndonwesthaven6623 In one text LeGuin wrote about book one (it might be the foreword of a later edition) she notes that there is a lot of sexism in the book that she didn't consciously put there, it just kinda came with the tropes of writing a fantasy book, and she noted how she actively chose to make other choices in the later books, or at least actively considered what tropes she was incorporating. So I don't know that she would have minded any adaptations that toned down the sexism of the first book a bit. Once you notice it it becomes quite jarring how different the first book is from the rest in that regard.
Not only did this review convince me to read the Earthsea books, but the opening also introduced me to Spirit Spine, who are delightful.
Why in the world is Tenar, The Eaten One, High Priestess Nearly-starved-Sparrowhawk-to-death-by-trapping-him-in-a-dark-and-cursed-maze, a doe-eyed, wilting Ingenue? She hated and resented Sparrowhawk for instilling doubt in her, everything she was molded for!
The Ghibli adaptation is a damn masterpiece compared to this nonsense, and it was arguably even more of a Earthsea Frankenstein than this!
Ghibli adaptation??? You mean as in Miyazaki's Anime Studio?
JaredMithrandir Yeah. That one was by Goro Miyazaki, his son. it was pretty dull and convoluted. And he tried to cram four books into one movie, but it was miles better than this nonsense.
A story where a woman literally belonging to a religion with myriad dubious practices questions her faith and ultimately rejects it, turned into one where neither her faith nor her church are at all morally questionable. Gee, I wonder why they made _that_ choice...
@@TheNumnutRandomnesshe instead whitewashed all the characters, despite the fact that leguin openly writes about how dark the characters' skin colors are (except Tenar obvi). Completely pointlessly shitty of him to do
I've started reading Wizard of Earthsea, partially because of this review (and I've heard it's good from others). In that fog scene, it does seem like he does sort of cause SOME of the raiders to run looney-tunes style over the cliff. "The pursuers fell screaming through fog and sudden sunlight a hundred feet sheer to the shallow pools among the rocks . " (p. 8)
Though, yeah not all of them (the rest are scared away), and no goofy tackler. So not nearly as silly as the miniseries. I know it's a nit-pick. I've enjoyed all of folding ideas.
It’s also noted that the majority of the soldiers saw or heard their buddies falling and were like “nope this is whack” and skedaddled. You don’t need to have the *entire* group lemming themselves to prove a point, these filmmakers are just incompetent.
I've never seen one of Dan's pre-2020 videos before so that intro skit hit me like a bullet. I'm sure the actual video is insightful and interesting but for now I gotta keep pressure on this until the ding dang ambulance shows up.
A Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan are probably my favourite fantasy books ever.. I read them in my teens, and read them again in the past few years, and I can honestly say that they very much hold up. Their length is actually more of a plus than anything, each book manages to explore it's themes and end on a fitting climax without dragging, which is an issue I have with modern 1000+ page fantasy stories.
The line about Le Guin being still alive is sad now :(
"I realize it sounds tautological but its not that reductive" - ha! You just earned my subscription sir.
Hey there, it's just a detail, but the reason why Les misérables gets so long and takes so much time to describe so much places, so much parallel minor stories is not an economic one. Hugo wrote like this because he wanted this book to be a representation of what caused misery in his time, and how man exploits man, and every character in his book matches with this idea. Making money was'nt this important to Hugo, his books sold very well, he had a politician salary and it wasn't a problem for him to afford Hauteville House.
But anyway, it's an insignificant detail in a very interesting and well-made episode.
Also perdon my english :|
Yeah, to say that the Waterloo or Sewer chapters are there to fill out page count totally ignores how they illustrate the themes of the work. They wouldn't work in a musical, but they make the book amazing.
On her essay about Disney's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Lindsay Ellis made a similar statement in concern of Victor Hugo's economical motivations, and as much as I appreciate both Dan and Lindsay's work, I'm dissapointed at their misguided opinion of Victor Hugo; he was a revolutioner, he was exiled of France because of the political themes of Les Miserables.
It's easy to slip up in the exceptions to the rule. Anyone looking at the size of, say, The Count of Monte Cristo is going to assume it was to get money out of it. But it serves a specific narrative purpose, in taking the sheer time to make our protagonist's starting point SO idyllic, his fall SO prolonged and unjust, and his stay in prison so crushing that we need no imagination to be in his emotional state. When he spends dozens of pages after this misery elaborately and extravagantly awarding anyone who has done him the least kindess it sets up a remarkable tension because you KNOW it's a revenge story, and you're waiting for the revenge - and so when you are days and days of reading in, when he says he has repaid all his friends and will no repay his enemies, it's chilling. This wouldn't work in a lightning-paced book.
Even when a book is written for economic reasons, the best authors use them to their advantage. Charles Dickens was one of hundreds of authors who wrote in chapters and were paid by the page, but he is remembered better than all the rest because he used the chapter format to tell small, self-contained stories in each one within the major arcs, and because the small lives of the characters over such time gave them a compelling slice-of-life feeling. His finances were a constraint, but he used them to his advantage.
@@luismarioguerrerosanchez4747 However, she does mention a change between Hunchback and Lea Miserables which I think was undeniable. He clearly didn't care that much for individuals when it came to Notre Dame de Paris, and this thinking shifted by the time of Le mis, not to mention, he did in fact, wrote a watered down version of Notre Dame for money, so she's not far off.
Does it need to be one or the other? Art is often both thematically and financially driven. Wordy prose can serve a thematic purpose and still have been encouraged by contemporary financial incentives or cultural norms in writing.
Just to bash that movie on the head a bit more for fun, Ged giving his name to the doorkeeper of the school shows the filmmakers didnt grasp the importance of names, both from a narrative metaphorical sense as well as the literalist in-universe power of names. Part of the in-universe reason names are important is that knowing someone or something's name gives you power of it, it's the entire basis of the world's magic. Ged can summon a fog cloud because he was taught the 'name' of fog. Knowing someone's true name gives you immense power over them (hell, the filmmakers were clearly vaguely aware of the concept with that bit about "the dragon's true name, the one to bind it and ask it any questions")
and Ged just... gives it to the doorkeep, this person who he's just met, the magic word to completely fuck up Ged if he ever chooses. And the whole thing implies this is the case for *every* student at the school, which is fucking insane.
Man, these old videos using the puppets are much tougher to watch. I'm glad you have the confidence to appear on camera now.
My laptop fell while watching this this video and the page immediately moved to a hungarian internet radio. I owe a beer to anyone who can explain me how could this actually occur.
"I think I'm dying."
"Please don't. Who will edit?"
😂 asking the important questions
Regarding Les Miserables, I feel like it’s important to note that has a different goal from any kind of dramatized medium. The way I put it, some books have back story. Les Miserables has back story for its back story, because it has the luxury to stretch its legs. It can be immersive in a way that few other things can be.
Also, I’ve always felt that the musical did a poor job of conveying the tone of the book. Simply covering the most exciting bits misses out on the calm in-between times which were the whole point of the book. In fact, my takeaway for the story is that those you might think miserable and those you might think happy can change if you take a closer look. Fantine’s plight wasn’t all misery, it was bittersweet because she was doing all she did for her daughter, and the musical throws that away. Valjean on the run found peace and joy in raising an adopted daughter. The musical just has a time jump. The exciting bits inform the calm between bits, and vice versa.
"READ FROM THE BOOK!"
You know, Earthsea really should have worked as a minseries. As a movie, it's basically unadaptable, but as a SHOW, it can be done.
aww that lil hedgehog wrapped in a blanket was so cute :3
Damn. Gonna read the books now.
Sometimes it feels like filmmakers just hate the source material. I feel that with the Earthsea miniseries. These guys just hated those books.
Another thing I find interesting about adaptation is the way that both properties can be based on the same ideas while having completely different meanings. My favourite example of this is Annihilation. The book is about isolation and control while the film is about trauma and change, yet on the surface they're still both stories about a group of female scientists entering a space where things shouldn't be as they are.
I thought this was going to be about the Ghibli movie, silly me.
Same :(
i wanna see folding compare the ghibli treatment to this one tbh
Why? The Ghibli movie was terrible. First one I've walked out on.
2
wtf
I feel like Ender's Game suffers from adaptation sickness, so much of the movie takes part in Ender's head was well as how he thinks and feels, and what I personally felt draws you into the character which was non existent in the movie. It was a well shot and well acted movie, it just lacked what made the book enthralling.
adhdPatrick Also they made Bonzo shorter than Ender, robbing the fight of any real tension. (Yes, Bonzo was a bit more muscled, but he's supposed to be a foot taller and have several years on Ender.)
There's also the technical constraint that the book takes Ender from the ages of 6 to 12 (or 13) and shows the psychological effect of growing up under the emotional abuse of the IF. That sort of time span would have been impossible without frequent recasting or some kind of Boyhood length shoot, but to get around this they condense the story to a ridiculously short time frame and cut out integral parts of Battle School.
@@maxjolley339 Personally I liked that casting choice, he radiated barely contained savagery and I could buy him as a genuine menace even though physically he was a lil goblin. He's who I'd cast as Sevro if Red Rising ever got a live-action adaptation.
@@SacredDaturana Looking back, my issue is less with Bonzo's casting in general and more with how his casting did not play well with Ender's. Both are good actors, but put that Ender in a room with that Bonzo and there's just not the right kind of looming fear for what Bonzo might do to him.
@@maxjolley339 I think I get what you're saying... the book's descriptions made it visually obvious how much more different and vulnerable Ender is; he's younger, smaller. It reenforces the isolation and disconnect that Ender feels.
I honestly thought this was going to be about the Ghibli adaptation (which to date is the only movie of theirs that I've seen that I really didn't like, at all). That said, I'm glad I got to learn about another adaptation! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this one Dan; I learned about something new from it.
This makes me want to read the books now.
I started reading the Earthsea series after watching this video and just learned that Ursula K. Le Guin has now passed away. :(
Folding Ideas just spoiled the end of Infinity War: "I don't feel so good"
“The Tombs of Atuan” is one of my favorite books of all time, and I couldn’t bear to watch this movie when it came out.
"A woman-shaped manniquen named Tenar" oh my gosh that's good
I'm putting Tales of Earthsea on my List of books to read, but you want to know the shiz here? They do this a lot with women characters. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is a great example, where they essentially cut all her parts and made it about the guy who shows up halfway through the movie, and removes all her choices and fire and RUGH--like, She alone was the only person not scared enough of the poison fungus forest to figure out what was going on, and luckily, in most cuts out today, they keep all that important stuff in--but only after Miyazaki essentially sent a threat to the American studio re-releasing it the second time.
It's also one reason I don't think Sabriel will ever make it to the big screen. Too many women doing things that involve foreign words like "agency" and "saving the kingdom" and all that sort of stuff, producers don't think anyone will identify with female protagonists but females, meanwhile there's never an issue selling a movie with a male protagonist. One of the biggest discussions I've had that got out of hand in college was actually "Would Harriet Potter have sold as well as Harry Potter?" I don't think so. And I think if Sabriel had a male protagonist, it would have already been made into a movie, like Percy Jackson, I am Number 4(Not a great movie), etc.
Honestly. Despite the liberal far left grip on Hollywood, or perhaps because of it depending on your point of view. They don't even think female protagonists would appeal to females.
But I can understand because at this point I feel like the Black Cauldron Series is probably safest that it only got a Disney adaptation(which some consider failed) and hasn't been seriously touched by Hollywood. They would probably have some real problem with Eilonwy. Specially if they got past the first book in their attempts. it's a series I love and the idea of a proper movie or movies made out of it sounds lovely in theory but having that put into practice frightens me because of what they'd likely do when adapting it.
Fwiw a good thing with Sabriel, I think, is that it seems like Garth Nix is keeping the story pretty close to his chest as far as film rights go. It sounds like he's at the point where he's only willing to give it to someone who cares about doing her justice, and who'll fight to keep her/Lirael/the Clayr/etc. at the center.
Like Touchstone is great, but could you even imagine an adaptation where they tried to make him the main character? It would make no sense! (although now that you mention it I'm wondering if maybe that's part of why it hasn't been picked up - Touchstone comes in so late that they can't hamfistedly give him the protagonist reins)
@@thevampirefrog06 I feel like what they'd do is make Touchstone her childhood friend, who tags along when she crosses the wall, and pulls a sword from a stone or something to qualify him as King and defeat Kerrigor with it, while she winds up just providing moral support at the end.
@@Quandry1 Liberal far-left grip on Hollywood? My guy, what constitutes as "far-left" to you? It's literally a capitalist industry full of hierarchies and exploitation of workers. Some movies may pander towards some mild, already generally accepted socially progressive themes now and then for publicity or inclusivity's sake but even in the biggest marvel movie so far the most lgbt representation we got was one guy saying "my boyfriend" in a therapy scene. Where's the gender abolitionism arguments? Or hell, can you name me a Hollywood blockbuster movie that respects a trans character and incorporates their identity as a meaningful and central plot element? (That ScarJo comedy doesn't count, for obvious reasons) If you think what we get in Hollywood movies right now is "far-left", you have no idea what actual leftist academics and writers are up to these days. Economically and politically Hollywood promotes a lot more right-wing and centrist/neoliberal ideas than it ever does leftist ones.
@@LeifLovebug Liberal far left means women and minorities. The more women and minorities there are, the more liberal far leftier it is.
(I'm being sarcastic please don't hate me)
I remember seeing the Dune adaptation by the Sci Fi channel and thinking ‘Wow! These guys will always make good movies!’
Ah youth
"It's also about a woman-shaped mannequin named Tenar."
That is probably the most brutal thing Dan could have said, and I am _here_ for it.
Thanks to this video I finally decided to read the wizard of Earthsea that had been, for too long, on my shelfs, among the numerous books I buy faster than I read. I read it in 3 days on my way to work and my lunch break, it is as great as everyone say. And I can't wait to read the tombs of Atuan. So thanks!
Can't thank you enough for turning me onto these books! I'm usually not a fiction reader but I read both The Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan this past week and now I'm hooked!
I never caught this video when it was new, but stumbled onto it after starting a re-read of Wizard of Earthsea. I never comment on youtube videos but the intensity at 20:50 of "Tenar, also known as *ARHA*" ... I share your outrage, Dan, and I think anyone who loves her character felt the same anger.
I just wanted to say that I love all your videos, but in particular the one on Gamergate was superb. Thank you.
Wtf. I'm reading Earthsea for the first time atm (up to book 4) and almost everything about this adaptation sounds appalling.
I loved Tombs of Atuan so much - a child simultaneously being a tribute to and embodiment of these mysterious gods of darkness was such a fascinating, freaky concept. And it's done so well! (vague spoilers coming) Tenar has so much power, yet still feels powerless or pressured a lot of the time. She exercises her power in horrific ways, often to prove herself to the older but (theoretically) junior priestesses. Yet she also experiences self-doubt and eventually doubt in the order of the nameless ones itself. She makes bad choices and takes risks, and they're all satisfyingly understandable within the ideology of the culture and religion that has raised her.
This explains why I have not heard of this adaptation.
This episode inspired me to read A Wizard of Earthsea, so just know your suffering has caused some joy in the world
I really appreciate the use of the term "monkeysphere" in this video.
I read the Earthsea series after watching the Ghibli animated film! It was amazing!
I read The Tombs of Atuan when I was about 9, so ca. 1979. It was an utterly terrifying and astounding and beautiful journey, and as I was a very lonely young girl, very immediate to me. Those tombs have a place in my head. It isn’t overwhelming or major. They are just there at the back, if I remember to look there.
This comment is really late coming but this is one of my fav episodes of yours. Also Annabelle is so cute!
On the subject of filmability I'll always love this letter to the UK critic Mark Kermode: "The Da Vinci Code is unfilmable. As Tom Hanks and Ron Howard proved"
By the end of the video I had managed to convince myself that the Lain wall scroll was vibrating out of suppressed rage.
RIP Ursula Le Guinn
Oh man, I read these as a kid and had forgotten about them. Looking forward to reading again with a more critical eye, thank you!
I read somewhere that Catcher in the Rye is the top best-selling book that has never been adapted into a movie. It’s interesting that a book with no expensive set pieces or really any need for special effects is unadaptable into film. I don’t think it would even work as a graphic novel. It’s not a visual text at all, yet is still a wonderfully engaging read. I’ve heard of directors flirting with the idea of making a Catcher in the Rye movie but so far no one has taken the plunge.
I'm glad I stumbled on this video. A friend of mine recommended Earthsea to me a couple of years ago but when I tried it I couldn't get into it at all. Your breakdown of the themes has convinced me I should give it another shot.
Oh, this is from five years ago. T.T RIP Ursula K LeGuin
Wizard of Earthsea was one of the first actual books I ever read. One of my all time favourites. I never knew there were more books in the series until I was much older.
i love that you have two of my favourite books in the background!
Even The Lord of the Rings, one of the best film adaptations out there, wasn't immune to "invent/play up a love story that was absent/inconsequential in the source material" syndrome. What really baffles me about this kind of thing is how *completely unnecessary* it always is. The invented love story is always tepid and uninteresting -- does anyone really *need* this? Is there really anyone out there who would like the movie *less* if it was gone?
Probably not. These kinds of things tend to be executive decisions, not creative ones done by the director or whoever.
Injecting romance into existing plots wouldn't be so bad if the romance subplots weren't all so _boring_. Action/adventure stories can totally juggle romance plots and make them interesting.
To move away from movies, the webcomic Girl Genius has a love triangle as a significant element in its ongoing narrative. All while also juggling high action, comedy, and the political intrigue surrounding a continent's worth of bickering royals, mad science lords, and shadowy conspirators. That love triangle - between the heirs of three major geopolitical power legacies - is deeply complex, with potent interpersonal chemistry. It waxes and wanes in response to shifts in politics, various crisies, and each participants' hang-ups, flaws, mistakes, and divided loyalties.
It's such a powerful romance between the titular Girl Genius and her two would-be suitors (among other minor romantic entanglements), when it gets into full swing I can almost forget the batshit insane pulp action and harrowing conspiracies going on at the same time. Moreover, this love triangle both complements and works at cross-purposes to the various characters' other personal goals. Characters in-universe must _plan around_ the romantic interplay between these three budding titans of mad science and geopolitics.
It's just so interesting in its entirety. And it makes me more frustrated by how little Hollywood films try when it comes to their own romantic subplots. (Though, admittedly, it's unfair comparing 90 minute movies to a multi-volume webcomic that's been running for several years).
In that particular instance it seems to be less a case of "We need a romance" and more a case of "We've got Liv frickin' Tyler in this role - we need to do more with her than the original source material calls for". But yeah...
Tolkien told his story in such a way, that I understand while people think Aragorn/Arwen was inconsequential, yet it still annoys me.
To give the trope (possibly unwarranted) credit:
I think that one of the basic challenges of adapting a book is to take the written narrative in which just about anything can be laid out explicitly for the reader, and convey it to a movie audience, for whom that level of narration would be tiresome. To convey the story to the movie audience they draw on a collection of cultural cues and story cliches, things that don't need to be explained because the audience already understands them at a very fundamental level.
Hence, complex motivations are cast out and replaced with "because he's in love". It can be misused, of course, and even when used properly it might come across as a bit cheap or exploitative... But the value of it is that it's one of the available ways to convey a character's motivations quickly and effectively without having to spend too much time establishing them.
1. Well, this made me decide to read Earthsea. I love a solid world in stories.
2. hey, Lain poster in the background! :D
I never noticed how awesome a shot that is at 9:15. Wow, that was well done.
Romano Coombs definitely
I only managed to see the Ghibli movie which seems to be universally panned (I like it but probably mainly cause teru no uta could make me like almost any movie). But even that seems to have done a better job at adapting the source material. At least Tenar is still a villain in that one (which as far as I can tell isn't completely true to the books but at least better than doey eyed cardboard) and they got some amazing looking dragons.
Earthsea is still on my "need to read this" pile of books. Still busy with the left hand of darkness and the prose edda, next up will be the dispossessed, then dune and then I will hopefully reach earthsea unless I veer off to the black company first.
So many great books to read and not enough time to do it. (I say while commenting on a half hour video essay instead of reading >
Why is this under 1M views??? Let's get it recommended again!
This is my dad's favourite book, without seeing the adaptation he recommended it to me as an intro to the books. Needless to say I didn't go read the book and was hugely confused as to why my dad liked this book.
He's gotta be dumb to recommend an adaptation without seeing it. Literally every adaptation of it has sucked
Years after I first saw this, I can say I finally understand the boat building. Nothing else.
I know I'm commenting on a video that is 3 years old by this point... but damn, I just have to express how glad I am to see someone take the time to address the wonderfulness that is Earthsea and acknowledge how badly it has gotten screwed over with the adaptations. Seriously, fuck this miniseries and fuck the Ghibli movie too while we're at it.
This just made me wish I was a screenwriter/director to make a decent adaptation. I've only read the first two books but those were fantastic and deserving of an acceptable visual adaptation
This video has convinced me to seek out and try the Earthsea Cycle. Thanks! Would like to see more book stuff so we can know what to check out and what to avoid.
A book that I find to be truly "unadaptable" is I know What You Did Last Summer. Yes, it was made into a movie, but aside from the title, they have nothing in common. I read the book first and, while I won't spoil it, it uses a conceit that I'm surprised more books don't use: two separate characters are actually the same person. This person is not disguising themselves, it's just that the book presents Character X and Character Y, and only after the reveal do you realize that nobody in the book has met both characters X and Y. It's a very simple but very effective twist, that would be impossible to accomplish in a visual medium.
"This Book is Full of Spiders" seems like a strange include in the background, since it wasn't adapted into a movie (yet) while the first book in the series, "John Dies in the End" actually was. And I think it was fairly well-done, despite being *ahem* unadaptable.
Of course the whole scene about Ged defending the village happened when he was a young child in the book. Not a 20 something playing a seventeen year old.
This is the second book series I read and is my favourite. I have to read it again soon.
i remember speed reading wizard of earthsea when i was like 13 and all i remember is that a lot of the dolphins in the sea were actually wizards who'd forgotten their name and who they were.
I'm rewatching all of your videos right now and idk if I commented on this one earlier on Blip but either way, it's a great video and I'm glad I happened to run into this again because I've sort of been writing a huge essay on Les Mis adaptations...
Speaking of Les Mis, though, after getting more involved in the fandom I've started to see the digressions differently... and this is another thing that's interesting about things like audience expectations and formats and so on. You can see Les Mis as a novel with tons of digression that give context to the plot and reinforce the themes and symbolism OR you can see it as a historical-sociopolitical essay on early-to-mid 19th century France with an illustrative plot.
So if you only wanted to read it for the plot (like most people do, including me, at least originally) you're almost definitely going to feel frustrated. Also it doesn't help that at this point the reader is not a 19th century French person so a lot of the links that French people at the time would have understood are super obscured to us so it's like actual work to figure out some of the stuff. Or at least you need a heavily annotated edition to read it from.
(Also I honestly think that it might make sense for a modern reader to think of Les Mis as a book series rather than one massive novel. Because it can pretty easily be split into five parts. I'm just saying this because I think people find it easier to read five 500 page books than one 2500 page book?)
The musical IS a good adaptation and it's possibly the best in terms of the plot&message to running time ratio and the songs are awesome and I'm glad it exists. But it does kind of drop the ball on some elements. To me the best possible screen adaptation format would be a miniseries. Not that shorter and more heavily trimmed adaptations are bad necessarily but I think there's value in more complete adaptations too, especially since the book itself is so inaccessible to many people. (Sadly I doubt the up-coming BBC miniseries is going to be a great example.)
I just started the books and remembered this video.
I really should have read them years ago.
The intro is fabulous 😂 I have seen only very few of the early ones of these.
I think "A Clockwork Orange" is a better movie than book. It follows the book very closely at times, but goes in amazing directions and has somehow more subtleties. The book goes darker in the beginning, but the ending is a complete betrayal
Watching this for the first time. I haven't read Earthsea but I have read Left Hand of Darkness, and you made me so angry during this video that I stopped it halfway through, paused to write a comment to tell you about it, then closed my computer and went to read Earthsea, which my roommate gave me for Christmas but I hadn't read yet. Anyway, thanks for getting me to read Earthsea
this is such a small thing (and about 5 to 7 years late), but i really enjoyed the inclusion of The Midwife's Apprentice when you gave an example of a young adult book. That was one of the books that I still cherish from my childhood.
!! So that's where it came from! I know that the Inheritance Cycle borrows (that's a...generous term, honestly) from a lot of different stories, but I didn't know that Earthsea might've been one of them. The whole true name, the importance of names, the fact everything has a true name that grants the holder power that appears throughout the series...could that have been from Earthsea?
Fitting, since the book got a similar movie treatment that pisses me off greatly.
I'm not terribly familiar with The Inheritance Cycle, so I can't say specifically, but it's possible. Earthsea is pretty influential. That said, the idea of True Names as a mechanism for magic is an idea as old as antiquity. Glen Cooke and David Eddings, also highly influential authors, both use this mechanism as well.
Hm. It could just be a coincidence, but it does sound a lot like the mechanism in Earthsea. The way it's presented, how the names are treated, and so and so forth sound like the summary you gave.
Inheritance is nothing special, it's basically Star Wars BUT NOT IN SPACE!!!!!!
But IceDragon, it has something that Star Wars doesn't.
Dragons.
I remember reading A Wizard of Earthsea. It was in 6th grade and it was my first fantasy novel. I read the hobbit shortly after and LOTR’s shortly after that. Ursula’s writing was the spark that ignited my love for fantasy. I never read another Earthsea book though.
Oh you have to, seriously. I'd recommend at least finishing Earthsea books, but the (sci-fi) Hainish cycle is equally amazing!
i love the David Wong books in the background!
19:55 I don't know anything about the Earthsea books or movie, but with that sentence, I immediately knew what happened to the Tenar character.
Fans of Pillip Jose Farmer had even more reason to fret over the Sci-Fi channels "Riverworld" adaptation.
This movie makes Studio Ghibli's adaptation look like Spirited Away
READ FROM THE BOOK remains a very funny moment to me here
Holy fuck, I've been wondering at the title of these since sixth grade (a long time ago). Thank you Dan. Thank you very much!
it turns out that when GRRM was like "my series is unadaptable" he was right
okay I know my comment has nothing to do with anything just when I heard the word "unadaptable" this series was the first thing I thought of
The series adapted decently well to the medium until the executive producers who think "themes are for eight-grade book reports" cast away GRRM and used their bad fanfiction full of self-indulgence as a source instead.
Never seen the series, but thanks for the book reference. :-)
Why am I watching a cigarette box review a movie?