Tag: Tsui Hark

Green Snake (Ching se)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

China’s White Snake legend has spawned numerous adaptations including the recent, animated White Snake / Baishe: Yuanqi (Amp Wong, Ji Zhao, 2019) which boasts fast paced action and state of the art CG visuals. Tsui Hark is from another era: the legendary Hong Kong director who almost single-handedly bought Hollywood-style special effects to Hong Kong movie production in such epics as Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain (1983) and the Once Upon A Time In China films (1991 onwards) alongside period romps like Peking Opera Blues (1986). For Green Snake, Tsui turned to Lillian Lee’s novel based on the White Snake legend which she adapted into a screenplay for him. Rather than tell the story from the perspective of the white snake as the original legend does, Lee shifts her narrative to the perspective of the younger, less experienced green snake.

In appearance, the two spirits start off as female humans down to the waist and snakes below, not dissimilar to Harryhausen’s half woman/half snake Medusa in Clash Of The Titans (producer and effects: Ray Harryhausen, 1981) but using full size puppetry/animatronic effects rather than stop frame animation. Because they want to enter the human world and experience romantic, sexual love, the two snakes transform themselves into full body, beautiful women.

Older white snake Bak Sei Juan (Joey Wang) and green snake younger sister Siu Ching (Maggie Cheung) initially leave their spirit world home and descend from the roof of a house in which Indian girls dance. Soon the pair swim their way up river to a more Chinese period village that could have come straight out of the Tsui-produced A Chinese Ghost Story /Sien lui yau wan (Ching Siu Tung, 1987, in which Joey Wang played an attractive ghost) where they both ingratiate themselves with a local scholar Hsui-Xien (Wu Hsing Kuo) with white Bak Sei intent of having his children while green snake Siu Ching goes off to seduce a Buddhist monk Fa Hai (Vincent Zhao) – whose two hundred years worth of studies have allowed him to run through the air and master various other physical and spiritual abilities – intent on banishing the pair from the human world back to the spirit world.

As you might expect from the director who in Zu: Warriors staged a priest keeping a demonic asteroid at bay using several thousand yards of eyebrows, Green Snake boasts extraordinary set pieces. These vary from shots of the two girls cavorting naked in a period hot tub (not that they reveal anything much, but the images positively drip sex) through various gigantic snake tails swishing about through water or in the air, epic airborne battles with the flying monks and a finale in which the monk’s red clothing is transformed into a vast shroud with which he and a magic crane which suddenly appears from nowhere battle the two flying snake women.

Memorable episodes include green Maggie Cheung trying to seduce the monk by gliding through the air around him while he attempts to concentrate poised in mid-air at being sexually pure and not distracted by her presence. The whole thing has a gorgeous Chinese score and the art direction makes you feel as if you’ve got lost inside a full colour version of the willow pattern plate, but an original Chinese version not some Western re-imagining. And while the men are standard comic fodder (the scholar) and equally standard flying monk action hero, the two women / reptiles are voluptuous sirens at one point mirrored by an army of women moving on all fours who besiege the monk.

While it’s recognisably a Tsui Hark film, at the same time he isn’t really repeating himself here: there’s nothing else in his body of work quite like this.

Green Snake plays in LEAFF, The London East Asia Film Festival as a late item in their Dilemma And Desire strand followed by a panel discussion.

Castle Cinema, Saturday, November 16th, 18.00. More information, and book here.

Watch a trailer for the film below:

and a promo which arguably represents it more accurately:

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).