So huge are the themes and so expansive the scale of the childishly animated Japanese feature “Tales From Earthsea” that the effect is somewhat as if “Ben-Hur” were re-enacted with finger puppets.
The film, from Goro Miyazaki, scion of the garlanded director Hayao (“Spirited Away”), is nominally an adventure about a runaway prince who is taught about magic by a roaming wizard. Yet its deliberate pace and heavy themes about rejecting immortality make it unsuitable for all but the most intellectually voracious children.
At the outset, an imbalance of nature poisons the land and corrupts minds. Young Prince Arren inexplicably kills his father the king and flees with the old man’s Excalibur-like sword into the wild, where he is aided by a Ben Kenobi-ish sorcerer named Sparrowhawk (Timothy Dalton) and rescues a sullen girl from slavery. In a farmhouse, Arren learns to labor like a field hand as the wizard eases him into maturity. Arren turns out to be prey to a dark side that may prove useful to the wizard’s archenemy, Cob (Willem Dafoe).
Dafoe’s creepy hushed readings and scorched baritone maximize the bone-chilling terror of this villain, who sports a bizarrely feminine look — he has a lithe glam-rock aspect in white clown face paint with vertical dashes below the eyes. But he’s the only interesting-looking character in the piece.
Based on a series of books by Ursula K. Le Guin, this utterly earnest, philosophy-drenched story recombines its borrowed elements in imaginative ways to create a frequently gripping effect that builds to a rich climax. Thanks in part to a generous, Irish-tinged score, even scenes in which characters merely stand quietly in rustling fields seem fraught with somber majesty. The Miyazaki legacy is in good hands.