Column Anime Spotlight Five Anime for Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin Not including the Ghibli adaptation of “Tales of Earthsea”… By Leah Thomas | Published on May 21, 2026 Credit: Wit Studio / MAPPA Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Wit Studio / MAPPA Last fall, during my chaotic morning commute through Shibuya’s infamous rush-hour crush, I coped with my temporary status as a sardine by finally diving into Earthsea. Last year I purchased an anthology of the first four novels and drifted frequently into the beautiful worldbuilding, evocative prose, and philosophical ennui. What did it matter if I were pressed against a salaryman’s nape or elbowing the forehead of an innocent high schooler? Ged was dissociating on his island homeland, or Tenar was exploring the labyrinth she was doomed to rule, and later growing old and contemplating a woman’s place in a magical world and how best to take care of a scarred, powerful adopted daughter.  Reading Le Guin is forever humbling. She is among my favorite authors. The Dispossessed altered my thinking when I needed it most, and as a young queer person, the unflinching approach to dismantling assumptions about love and gender in The Left Hand of Darkness was revelatory. I could not believe a powerful novel about androgyny and gender had been written while my mother was still in elementary school. Half a century before “genderqueer” became a byword on Tumblr, Le Guin wrote a staggering novel about the culture clash and subsequent love that colors the relationship between a Terran man and an ambisexual from Gethen. Le Guin was always miles ahead of whatever era she occupied. And perhaps that is another reason that the sole anime adaptation of a Le Guin work, which held a great deal of promise—it was Studio Ghibli production, for Pete’s sake—looked beautiful in trailers but was destined to disappoint. Tales from Earthsea, directed by Goro Miyazaki, failed to do justice to either legacy. Too much was changed from the books to appeal to Earthsea devotees, and the condensed plot made the storytelling too convoluted for many Ghibli fans. While Howl’s Moving Castle proved that Ghibli adaptations could depart from the source material and still be magnificent, Tales from Earthsea missed the boat.  However, fans eager to find the majesty and insight that characterizes Le Guin’s writing reflected in anime shouldn’t feel too discouraged. Though we’re still waiting for an adaptation that does justice to her work, there are a few great series that remind me—be it thematically, emotionally, or narratively—of Le Guin’s writing and worldbuilding. Some of these anime I adore, while others unsettled or even alienated me, but in each example, the parallels are there, and the thoughtfulness is, too. If you’re looking for stories that capture some of the magic and complexity of Le Guin’s imagination, I’d recommend the following anime. For Fans of Earthsea: Vinland Saga Credit: Wit Studio / MAPPA Vinland Saga is not a second-world fantasy series—or even a fantasy series at all. Instead, I’d argue it’s the best historical fiction work ever put to manga, crafted by the ever-impressive Makoto Yukimura (I recently referenced another fantastic Yukimura series, Planetes, in my piece on Hard Science Fiction in anime). A dramatized biography of Icelandic explorer Thorfinn Karlsefni hardly sounds like ideal fodder for a seinen epic, but thanks to Yukimura’s keen worldbuilding and meticulous character arcs, Vinland Saga strikes true and beautiful. Like Le Guin’s Ged, Thorfinn is a troubled soul who errs often in his youth. While he does not wield magic, Thorfinn becomes a violent creature, shaped by the brutal murder of his father. He falls in with the Viking band that did the deed, determined to kill the man who ended his childhood: Askeladd. Things become more complicated when he comes to admire Askeladd and, despite his best intentions, begins to view Askeladd as a surrogate father figure. Just as Ged is haunted by a cursed shadow of his own creation, so is Thorfinn haunted by the ghosts of the lives he takes over the course of his violent youth.  But this is only the start for Thorfinn. Like Earthsea, Vinland Saga is a sprawling tale that took Yukimura more than two decades to complete. The payoff to this epic is extraordinary and likely to fill a certain type of Le Guin-shaped hole in the hearts of those who embark on the journey. For Fans of The Dispossessed: Terra E (Toward the Terra) Credit: Tokyo Kids When I watched Toward the Terra (2007), I remember wondering why no one was talking about it. It struck me as a fantastic anime, classic science fiction done correctly. As usual, I was just out of the loop. Toward the Terra, an award-winning manga written by Keiko Takiyama between 1977 and 1980, saw its first animated adaptation in 1980. Like The Dispossessed, Toward the Terra feels eerily prescient, given all that’s happened since. Set in the 31st millennium, Terra’s Earth is governed by artificial intelligence, supercomputers called Superior Dominance. Superior Dominance has a hand in the lives of every human being, deciding their traits, assigning them parents, and wiping their brains in adolescence in order to program them into being useful adults. A faction of humanity develops psychic abilities and flees Earth to colonize the stars and save their kind, but longs to return to their homeland of Terra. The story takes place across several timelines, but our main protagonists are two young men, Soldier Shin and Soldier Blue. As in The Dispossessed, inhabitants of an ideological world must vie against an authoritarian one, and any would-be utopia turns out to be ambiguous at best. Paralleling Le Guin, Takemiya’s feminism helped her create truly groundbreaking art. She is counted among the Year 24 group, women who redefined the shoujo genre in the 1970s, shifting its production into the hands of female mangaka. In particular, Takemiya was a pioneer of shounen-ai manga: she is credited with illustrating manga’s first gay kiss. Among her most acclaimed works is Kaze to Ki no Uta, an iconic tragedy about boys falling in love at a French boarding school. The relationships in Toward the Terra, to me, feel queer-coded—particularly between Shin and Blue—despite the sometimes-sanitized storytelling prevalent in the decade in which it was first written. This did not feel like queerbaiting. It felt, instead, like a statement being quieted only because it had come from the future. For Fans of The Word for World Is Forest: Land of the Lustrous Credit: Orange I tried very hard to love Land of the Lustrous. It looks fantastic, polished (pun perhaps intended). Its fans grow glowy-eyed and fond when discussing it. Land of the Lustrous features genderless leads and willowy character designs. Somehow, it felt like the sadgirl answer to the joyful queerness of Steven Universe: both series depict shiny intergalactic rocks as people. The Lustrous are a race of gems in humanoid form, trying to survive the invasion of their planet by the Lunarians who wish to harvest them. I just could not get into the show. I think some of this had to do with decisions made in production, which clearly missed the memo on the androgyny front; every one of the Lustrous characters (who are established to be agender and nonbinary) feels femme-presenting to me, given that the whole cast is composed of female voice actors and each one is drawn with a slim torso, long eyelashes, and, well, a booty. The limitations in the character design destroyed whatever personal empowerment I may have felt in watching it, but I appreciate that the story means and has meant a lot to many of its queer fans. And then again, what does a voice have to do with gender? What does an appearance? Where is the line? It feels odd to me that it’s only aliens that are allowed to be nonbinary (and even then, they are very pretty aliens). But maybe it just isn’t the right representation for everyone. Similarly, people who love Le Guin do not necessarily love her 1972 Hugo-winner, The Word for World Is Forest. To be fair, any book sandwiched between The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed in the Hainish Cycle would have had heavy boots to fill. But what is missing, for me, from Word for World is any degree of subtlety. Le Guin wrote the novel as a furious response to the ongoing atrocities in Vietnam. The plight of the Athsheans, peaceful denizens of a tropical world besieged by Terran colonists seeking lumber, is familiar territory. So too is the plight of the Lustrous. I do not mean to dismiss or belittle either story—forced colonization and the kinds of violence it entails is always traumatic, and always a threat to the good things in the world(s). I mean to say that while both Land of the Lustrous and Word for World are essential stories worthy of their acclaim, both follow storylines that are already well-trodden. It is right to feel furious about the deaths of innocents, and profoundly unfortunate that stories such as these are always goddamn relevant. For Fans of The Lathe of Heaven: Paprika Credit: Madhouse / Sony Pictures Confession: I have not yet read The Lathe of Heaven. I assume I will one day, which is what I also assumed about Paprika. I wrote a separate piece about the years I spent adoring Satoshi Kon without ever indulging in his work, so this feels about right. In Lathe, a man named George Orr has dreams that reshape reality. In Paprika, a psychologist named Atsuka Chiba chases a dream terrorist who leaves a trail of nightmares in their wake. While Orr’s dreams alter the past and present of the real world, Chiba’s forays into dreamscapes are more surreal, filled with whimsical, chaotic, and sometimes sinister imagery. But we’ve all heard the old adage that dying in your dreams means dying in real life, and when the barriers between waking and sleeping blur, the threat feels more and more imminent. While Le Guin uses her premise mostly as a vehicle for exploring philosophical themes of morality and the tenets of Taoism, Kon’s film is colored by the world as it was in the early 2000s, when the internet was truly becoming a formative factor in the trajectory of humankind. If hers is a thought experiment, then his is a thriller. Regardless, both stories provide ample food for thought and, well, dread. For Fans of The Left Hand of Darkness: Kaiba Credit: Madhouse I discovered Kaiba by accident, while spinning the wheel with my fellow otaku Bridget as part of the Anime Grab Bag feature. Another Masaaki Yuasa arthouse masterpiece, illustrated in an avant-garde style that recalls Tezuka’s, Kaiba is a feast for the eyes and the brain. When a nameless, heartless young man (literally—there’s a perfectly circular hole in his chest) wakes in a peculiar world without any memories of who he is, he pulls the audience along with him through a trippy universe in which people can transplant their minds into other bodies and memories are stored as organic data on memory chips that look more like toy blocks. The young man, later called Warp, is initially aimless, propelled through the universe by the forces and laws that surround him. In place of his own will, he has the will of those who choose to protect him. As he gradually regains his memory, he becomes entangled in the troubles of a divided society in which the poor struggle to find good bodies to exist in and the rich traffic memories for sport. I hesitate when it comes to making comparisons to The Left Hand of Darkness, because it is such a singular work. But it is also a work preoccupied with questions of what it means to be a person, and whether a body plays a part in that or not, or whether anatomy matters in the least. If Warp is aimless at the outset of Kaiba, so is Genly Ai when he visits Gethen and meets Estraven. Both characters become engaged with their surroundings and become better for it, though they are plagued by uncertainty. It takes the work of understanding others to ultimately understand themselves. So, those are some suggestions, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on other anime that might resonate with readers of Le Guin, whether they remind you of specific works or simply share some stylistic or thematic DNA with her many worlds…[end-mark] The post Five Anime for Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin appeared first on Reactor.