Tag: fantasy

White Snake (Baishe: Yuanqi)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Conceived as a prequel to China’s White Snake legend which has spawned numerous adaptations including Green Snake / Ching se (Tsui Hark, 1993), this computer animated Chinese epic concerns demon sisters Blanca and Verta (voiced by Zhang Zhe and Tang Xiaoxi) who look to all intents and purposes like beautiful women but are actually demon snakes in disguise – a white snake and a green snake as you might guess from their names. With her power and form enhanced by her sister’s gift of a green hairpin, Blanca leaves the demon world and visits ours for a showdown with a human General trying to prove his worth to the Emperor by dabbling in occult rituals involving snakes. When the showdown doesn’t go as planned, Blanca finds herself alone and suffering a complete loss of memory as to who (and indeed what) she is.

She awakes in a small, human, rural village where the local economy is built on catching snakes for the General. Local boy Sean (Yang Tianxiang) has no interest in catching snakes, spending his time instead sourcing toys for the local children or inventing things. Smitten with the amnesiac Blanca, Sean is astonished when by magic she rescues his dog Dudou from falling off a mountain ledge and by further magic gives the animal a human voice. Sean eagerly scrambles after Blanca as she flies up perilous mountain terrain, trying hard to look beyond her growing a snake’s tail when she does so, preferring to think of her as a woman rather than a demon.

It’s a strange and somehow very Chinese combination of creature feature, mythology and full on romance with the girl torn between the human and demon realms and the boy trying to justify his feelings for her. The physical effects work that Hong Kong would have been used 25 years ago is replaced by CGI which is generally of a higher standard than you would expect. As well as the two sisters, the snakes include a whole army of snake people whose cinematic origins go right back to Ray Harryhausen’s human-torsoed, snake-tailed Medusa in Clash Of The Titans (1981) and his similarly built, dancing girl in The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (1958). The snake people’s leader, much like the two sisters, switches between woman and snake, in her case an ethereal, yellow fire snake.

Equally inventive is the creature that pulls the General’s chariot, which looks like a crane with three heads. Other highlights include a spectacular firebird and malevolent black manifestations of the General’s dark magic. When Sean and Blanca reach the forge where the green hairpin was made, they meet another demon in the form of a woman with two faces, one human and, when she turns round, one fox.

The whole thing is beautifully paced with never a dull moment. Full blooded romantics will be struck by a memorable ending which throws into the mix Chinese concepts of reincarnation. Anyone who enjoyed the action movies coming out of Hong Kong in their halcyon days of the eighties and nineties prior to Hollywood’s co-opting such stunts for The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999) will love this. Hong Kong did some amazing stunts using aerial wire work back then, but that will only get you so far and White Snake puts CGI to full and highly effective use, getting the most out of the medium and achieving things that would be near impossible in live action. So, to all intents and purposes an old school Hong Kong action fantasy redone as computer animation – and it works wonderfully. A joy.

White Snake played in the BFI London Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On Amazon Prime from February (2021).

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Posted on by victorfraga

This brand new fantasy-horror movie – showcased with much fanfare at the Bankside Vaults – struck me as a combination of The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1993) and It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015) by way of Goosebumps (Rob Letterman, 2016). An interesting set of influences, you may think, but the result is narratively and thematically trite – haunted houses, cursed books. Even triter is the character work. It’s all geeks and jocks. How many times have we seen bookish girls and bespectacled boys get tormented by douchebags in a varsity jackets? Too many.

However, the most disappointing thing is the utter dearth of scares. This is cattle prod cinema at its most formulaic; so easy to read that even its most earnest attempts to spoil your underwear barely register. All it succeeds in doing is a spot of heart flutter and a touch of ear damage – decidedly unimpressive.

There’s no denying its technical proficiency, though. It has a deft blend of the practical and the digital, which is no surprise given the Guillermo del Toro’s influence, although this counts for little when the subjects, their dialogue and their circumstances which are impossible to remember.

The problem is that director Andre Ovredal and producer/writer del Toro appear to be far more interested in Stephen Gammel’s macabre illustrations than Schwartz’s writing. There’s period detail and a slim satire of the Nixon era – represented by the bigoted, authoritarian police chief – but any substance is sidelined in favour of ghoulish set pieces, which may be exciting to its loyal fan base but are too random and episodic to anyone else.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 23rd. Special screenings will be held across gloomy locations such as the Bankside Vaults of London. Available on VoD in April!

Edhel

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Although her father was killed in a riding accident, Edhel (Gaia Forte) is training hard for an upcoming show jumping competition. Tensions are frayed at home where her mother (Roberta Mattei) constantly tells her off for wearing her hoodie over her head round the house. School is even worse. She won’t take the hood down and expose her head for anyone – and her classmates hate her for it.

Things change with the arrival of a new boy in the classroom who is far more friendly towards her. Around him she starts to come out of her shell. This is an amazing, really thoughtful film about people who are different. It has a lot to say about not only bullying and the cruelty of children towards their peers but also what goes on inside the head of the person being bullied.

Its narrative walks a very clever tightrope between its heroine having a physical deformity beneath the hood in the form of distinctive, pointy ears and the fairly preposterous idea that she might in fact be an elf. There are connections you can make to support the idea, but the style of shooting never goes beyond suggesting the possibility.

Silvano, a caretaker at the school who is also a sword and sorcery fantasy obsessive given to hanging out at the local comics store, is certainly convinced and becomes concerned for her. He thinks she needs to return to “her people”. His obsession gets him into trouble with his employers. And when Edhel vanishes for part of the final reel, it’s very tempting to agree with Silvano. But perhaps there’s another explanation.

However, the trailer boasts no such subtlety and screams at us, she’s an elf, she’s an elf, she’s an elf! No possible room for doubt, no ambiguity and – to all intents and purposes, not the film I saw. It’s a terrible trailer because it completely misrepresents the feel of the film and what it’s actually about. Although we’ve published it below, you’re better off watching the opening five minutes instead which provides a much clearer idea of the film (the clip is below the trailer – no subtitles, it’s in the original Italian, but you’l get the idea).

If you want to see how to promote a film like this, look no further than Border (Ali Agasse, 2018). That has some pretty clever surprises hidden in the twists and turns of its narrative (although no one in that film is an elf, in case you were wondering), but the clever trailer understands the game the film is playing and gives away nothing it shouldn’t. It’s a shame whoever did the trailer for Border couldn’t do the one for Edhel too. Both are subtle films which need the correct marketing to succeed and are likely to fail in cinemas without it.

Edhel played in the Schlingel International Film Festival. Watch the uninspiring subtitled trailer for the film below – or below that, watch the first five minutes instead for a more accurate idea of the film (in Italian without subtitles, sorry):

Big Fish & Begonia (Dayu Haitang)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Around the age of 16, people in the spirit world must visit the world of the humans, with whom they are warned not to interact, as a rite of passage. Thus it is that teenage spirit girl Chun must pass through the elemental maelstrom linking her world and ours whereupon she is transformed into a red dolphin and made to spend seven days in the seas of the human world. On her sixth day, she hears a teenage boy play a dolphin-shaped flute to his sister; on her seventh she sees blue dolphins struggling in a fishing net. Her return to her world is blocked when she becomes entangled in a net between her and the whirlpool until the boy rescues her only to be himself fatally sucked into that whirlpool. This is more or less how the Chinese animation Big Fish & Begonia sets off.

Safely back in the spirit world, Chun understandably feels she owes him a debt so trades half her life to a soul keeper in exchange for that of the boy: she must nurture the boy’s soul which will be given the form of a fish in her world and release him back into the human world when the fish reaches adulthood, at which point she will die but he will live. She names the fish/boy Kun after a legendary sea creature of immense size.

There’s a lot more to it than that: firstly, an unrequited love story introduces teenage spirit boy Qiu who fancies Chun and looks out for her even though she treats him like no more than her big brother. Then, while the old aged male soul keeper watches over the souls of departed good people incarnated as fish, his equally old female counterpart watches over the souls of departed bad people incarnated as mice. Chun’s late grandma is reborn as a phoenix; her beloved grandpa, a Begonia tree. Also in the mix are a deadly two-headed snake, a mystical stone dragon and an unearthly ferryman who steers his barge along the clouds. And while in the human world the red dolphins swim among the seas, in the spirit world they soar through the skies along with cranes and dragons.

The whole is rendered in beautifully drawn animation as effective at portraying in the heroine’s internal life as it is in bringing incredible landscapes and fantastic creatures to the screen. The pace is mesmerisingly slow in places, breathtakingly action-packed in others. Where else can you see a girl sell half her life to save someone else’s, a man play mah-jong against three other versions of himself or the terrible portent of snow falling in the middle of Summer? For the finale, it throws in cataclysmic floods and waterspouts descending from the skies.

The production, which was intermittently on then off for some 13 years, was ultimately promoted by posts on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter) then financed by China-based crowdfunding. Very much an indie production by two directors with a unique vision, it’s a landmark entry in the annals of fantasy film and animated storytelling which deserves to be widely seen. Its limited UK and Irish release means you’ll need to make a special effort to see it. You should do so though because this magnificent home-grown Chinese offering demonstrates just how tired and formulaic most Hollywood fantasy and/or animated films are. Don’t miss.

Oh, and be warned there’s a key scene buried in the middle of the end credits.

Big Fish & Begonia is out in the UK on Wednesday, April 18th. It is screening in both subtitled (independent cinemas) and dubbed (Showcase Cinemas) versions. We recommend the subtitled version as screened to press. Click here to see where it is being screened. Watch the film trailer below:

Subtitled:

Dubbed: