Terashima Tamiya scoring “Tales From Earthsea”
This has me a little bit excited, I must say: a Studio Ghibli interpretation of the third and fourth books of Ursula K. LeGuin‘s Earthsea tales about Ged the wizard. It’s called Gedo Senki.
It’s directed by Goro Miyazaki, who is Hayao‘s son, and it’s his first film as a director. I’m a smidge bummed that they didn’t opt to make the first book into a story, since some real enjoyment is to be had in that one from following Ged’s metamorphosis from a peasant into a bad-ass wizard. The second book is sort of an aside, it doesn’t feature Ged’s main quest, although he appears in it. But as I recall, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill fantasy stuff. It’s high quality. It’s one of the few fantasy series I ever really found exciting. I have no patience for fantasy books, so go figure.
I am pretty intrigued by the fact that Terashima Tamiya did the score to this film. I became a big fan of Terashima Tamiya after hearing her work with the Falcom Sound Team‘s Ys series. She also did an immensely pleasurable symphonic arrangement and reworking of the original Ys scores for an album called Symphony Ys ’95. It’s sen-sational and I made sure to rip it to my laptop before I moved to Scandinavia.
It’s funny that I didn’t think to check out what kind of work she and some other notable composers are doing these days. For instance, I know Yoko Kanno used to do Super Famicom soundtracks back in the day, and now she’s a pretty hot commodity for mainstream Japanese music-scoring. But it really makes sense they’d get such serious (and presumably well-paying) gigs. Actually, it would be a crime if they didn’t! A crime against the quality and well-being of cultural media as much as it would be an improper assessment of their skills…
The third and fourth Earthsea books are pretty difficult subjects to capture for a director’s first movie. Now, of course there are tons of exceptional people working on this project who are very seasoned, but for such a cool story you really want all the pieces to be in the right place.
Be a fine connoisseur, damn it! Watch this movie when it comes out on DVD!
Fretbored CRM 