You have to feel a little sorry for Goro Miyazaki. Entering the family business must be an intimidating prospect when your dad is master-animator Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of the famous Studio Ghibli and Oscar winning director of films like Princess Mononoke and, most famously, Spirited Away. Not only that, but Goro’s first project is an adaptation of one of his father’s favourite works, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic Earthsea series – Miyazaki has said that he keeps the books by his bed, and had once hoped to direct the project himself. Goro’s choice of first directorial project seems almost calculatedly masochistic.

Sure enough, Tales from Earthsea has failed to please the Le Guin faithful (or Le Guin herself), and there are rumours that it’s caused ruptures between father and son too. Certainly the majority of reviews have been, at best, barely favourable. Without doubt, there are some obvious flaws – the plot, though basically drawn from the third novel, The Farthest Shore, incorporates a mishmash of elements from other books and stories. Some strands go nowhere, characters are introduced only to disappear moments later, things that seem important aren’t and it rounds off, for anyone ignorant of the source material, with a deux ex machina of staggering proportions. But, while the narrative is definitely confusing and long-winded, it’s not entirely unsatisfying – things get better as they go along and most of the big questions are wrapped up to a greater or lesser degree.

Apart from that, the amount of criticism leveled at Goro’s first film seems largely unjust. Of course, many are holding it up against its source material and against his father’s work. On the latter point, it’s fair to say that this is no Spirited Away – but to compare any film against a genre classic, by a director with decades of experience, is unfair. Taken in the context of earlier Miyazaki films like Nausicaä and Laputa, Tales from Earthsea fares far better. It has the same sedateness, the same dark colour palette, the youthful protagonists, and like Nausicaä in particular it’s preoccupied with creating an epic and believe world as much as with telling a story.

In fact, Tales from Earthsea does look and feel, in many ways, like some forgotten project that Ghibli have uncovered from their archives. There’s nothing at all modern-seeming about it – the hand drawn and hand painted animation is beautiful, particularly once you get used to the style, but very static, with little in the way of action until near the end. Much of the character design is, by modern standards, a touch primitive. And, in all fairness to Le Guin, the Earthsea stories are very much a product of their time.

Whether you choose to see this is as a criticism, though, will very much depend on taste. Personally I enjoyed Tales from Earthsea, and sincerely hope that Goro Miyazaki gets to make another film, perhaps under a little less pressure – he has a style that, though occasionally reminiscent of his father’s work, is nonetheless distinctive in the world of anime. Given a little patience in its slow opening third, and judged primarily for what it is rather than what it isn’t, Earthsea is an absorbing, unique and often enchanting piece of high fantasy.