The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: City Hunter (1993), directed by Wong Jing

 The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'City Hunter (Sing Si Lip Yan)' by Jackie Chan

       Are there films from China and Hong Kong that are based on novels that I could have done? Of course, some of the most famous and successful stories of all time came from China, and they’ve been adapted to film dozens of time. Are there films from China and Hong Kong that don’t star Jackie Chan? Yes, in fact we’ve even covered some in the past Marathons. But god damn it sometimes you just want to watch Jackie Chan do wacky and incredibly dangerous stunts, which for me is every October in between 30 other movies. Also I believe this is the movie where Jackie Chan cosplays as Chun-Li from Street Fighter, and I can’t truly die until I see that. That’s not hyperbole by the way, I was actually cursed by a witch last summer who was really into martial arts movies.

       Released in 1993, City Hunter was written and directed by Wong Jing and produced by Chua Lam through Golden Harvest, Paragon Films and Golden Way Films, based on the popular manga series by Tsukasa Hojo. Jackie Chan stars as Ryu Saeba, the private detective known as City Hunter, although he seems to prefer pretty ladies and eating over solving cases. Today Ryu has been hired by newspaper magnate Mr. Imamura to find his daughter Kiyoko, who in a fit of teenage rebellion has run away from home. Simple enough, until the case moves onto the luxury liner Fuji Maru, which aside from having its maiden voyage is also being targeted by an international gang of thieves. Now Ryu not only has to recover Kiyoko, but he also has to stop a boat hijacking while trying to salvage his relationship with his assistant Kaori. All on an empty stomach! What’s a poor City Hunter to do?

       Going into this movie, my first question was ‘how are they going to make Jackie Chan suave’? I mean you look at how Hojo drew City Hunter and it gives the impression that Ryu is the smooth, Han Solo type of badass, and while I’ll always contend that Jackie Chan is cool it was always based more so on what he could do rather than how he acted. Well it turns out the answer is ‘they didn’t’. Out of all of Jackie’s films that I’ve covered on this blog, City Hunter is far and away the goofiest, with some kind of gag or joke just about every minute. If you remember Roger Rabbit and the ways Zemeckis interpreted cartoon visual gags into live action, it’s very much the same for City Hunter, whose antics feel straight out of the anime trope handbook. Perhaps even more than Roger Rabbit, which at least had the benefit of a toon environment. City Hunter has folk transforming in video game characters and getting hit with comically oversized hammers with no attempt at reconciling it with reality.

       Which I guess could be considered City Hunter’s biggest flaw, depending on your connection to the source material. Having never really read City Hunter or watched any of its numerous OVAs I have no idea if this film could be considered a loving tribute or outright parody of Hojo’s work. I can tell you that it doesn’t take itself or its story seriously; Even at the very beginning of the film where Ryu is discussing the brutal murder of his former partner the scene is done in a very slapstick manner, so there’s very little in the way of emotional weight or depth. Yet the film is written in such a way that it kind of expects you to understand the references? Is this Tim Burton’s Batman or more like The Guyver?  I dunno, the whole thing ends up feeling like a fever dream by the end, hyperactive and often horrifyingly incoherent.

       One thing that is consistent however is the action, because Chan knows his audiences. Nothing especially elaborate/bone breaking, but the level of stunt and fight choreography is still leagues above others in the field, which is only compounded by the cartoonish elements. The Street Fighter tribute is a definite highlight, but I also really loved the climax of the film with the dancing gunplay and the final fight, which is a great showcase of Chan’s agility and dexterity. The man is a living highlight reel.

       City Hunter gets the recommendation. While the overwhelming goofiness could be a turn off to some, don't really need a running gag of a dude trying to bang his cousin, it maintains the level of action quality that Golden Harvest built its legacy on, so if not acceptable it’s at least tolerable. Pair it up with Wheels on Meals for more wacky kungfu antics.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Wandering Earth (2019), directed by Frant Gwo

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "The Wanderer", by Dion

      When it comes to Western audiences and Chinese cinema, we’ve often been stuck with two things: Martial arts films and period piece dramas, or some combination of the two. Not for lack of trying, I’m pretty sure the Chinese have a thing about being viewed as a semi-feudal society steeped in mystical stereotypes, but unfortunately it often feels that genre fiction with a Chinese perspective doesn’t get a fair shake on the other side of the pond. Chinese horror, Chinese science fiction, Chinese film noir with supernatural elements, you know the hardcore shit. Whether that’s due to racist attitudes by the West, some sort of low-key cultural warfare thing, or I’m just that unobservant, I don’t know . So when I do happen to find one, and I have a good enough excuse (like, say an annual 31 movie marathon), I tend to jump on it. So it was with Animal World a while back, and so it is today.

      Released in 2019 though the China Film Group Corporation, The Wandering Earth was directed by Frant Gwo and written by Gwo, Gong Ge’er, Yan Dongxu, Ye Junce, Yang Zhixue, Wu Yi and Ye Ruchang, all of which was based on a story by celebrated science fiction writer Liu Cixin. The world is absolutely fucked, and for once it’s not humanity’s fault. Nope, it turns out that the sun is degenerating, and in about 100 years it’s going to take out Earth and the entire solar system with it. In order to save mankind the governments of the world decide to team up and reenact their favorite Spongebob meme by tricking out the planet with a couple hundred rocket engines and pushing it somewhere else, namely in Alpha Centauri, as human beings eke out a existence in enormous underground cities for the 2,500 years it takes to get there. How exactly humanity is supposed to fix the ecosystem once there when all non-human life is now extinct, but I guess we didn’t need all those animals and plants anyway.

      For the past seventeen years things have been going relatively smoothly, but then one day everything decides to go wrong. Not only do  the rockets end up malfunctioning, which plunges the underground cities into chaos, but a gravitational spike on Jupiter screws up Earth’s trajectory, pulling it onto a collision course which will most definitely not turn out well for anyone involved. The human race is looking down the barrel of a gun, and it’s only hope seems to lie in a ragtag group of rescue workers, scientists and normal citizens, including teenage inventor Liu Qi. If he manages to get over his daddy issues that is.

      The Wandering Earth is what you might call a ‘money shot’ kind of movie, by which I mean one of the main goals of the film is to show off the special effects budget. About 90% of this movie is covered in CGI and dipped in slow-mo, and while that might give one flashbacks to SharkBoy and Lava Girl, the imaging work done here is very impressive in terms of scope and the complexity of the design. It still doesn’t look quite ‘real’, but it’s about as close as you can get in this day and age. Combined with the set design and practical effects, which bring to mind something out of Prometheus or Pacific Rim (a spacesuit with a minigun attached to it does seem more suited to take out xenomorphs than it does for rescue missions), The Wandering Earth might be one of the better looking science fiction films I’ve seen in a long time. Of course most of the science fiction films I watch tend to be a few decades old, but it’s still very impressive.

      Story-wise The Wandering Earth hits a bit different from what you might be used to in other films as well. The closest thing to an antagonist is a HAL ripoff who kind of slows some of our characters down, and there’s no romance whatsoever. No this film is built on family, friends, community working together to overcome obstacles, in this case the obstacle of preventing the entire planet from being destroyed. Which, admittedly, is the kind of thing you’d want to devote most of your attention to, but it seems that many disaster movies can’t get by without it. Titanic, Armageddon, what have you. For those aromantic people out there, this might be a nice change of pace.

      The flipside to this then is that rather than focusing on one or two people we are instead flooded with characters, and I think that unfortunately the film suffers because of that. While they make sure to give everyone a name and a chance to do something plot-wise, personally I ended up forgetting most of them who were besides the more blatant tropey ones. This ends up affecting our protagonist Liu Qi as well, as he starts off as something of a shithead and it never felt to me like he ever moved beyond that. The resolution of the arc between him and his father Peiqiang also rang hollow, partially because of that and partially because the two characters literally have no interaction with each other prior to that exact moment. Honestly in spite of it lifting stuff from 2001: A Space Odyssey I prefer the Peiqiang parts of the film to the Liu Qi. Not only is Peiqiang a more entertaining character Liu Qi, but because he gets more solo time as a character you get more of a chance to connect with his character. It might be derivative, but you could have expanded his part to the whole film and I wouldn’t have minded. It would’ve given Makarov more screen time anyway.

      Also, while I would call The Wandering Earth a competently written movie, certainly not a common feat with films that have a half a dozen writers in the credits. Excluding the absurd premise of turning the entire planet into a generation ship, because sci-fi needs an idea from which to grow, but some of the things the characters do just come off as downright stupid. I understand the need for Liu Qi’s obstinance in regards to building drama, but it seems contrived given the enormity of the stakes involved. Complaining about getting roped into a rescue mission and wanting to go home would make more sense if the planet weren’t set to collide with a gas giant in a half hour. Later on there’s a scene where the rescue team arrives at an engine in need of relighting, only to find it destroyed by magma. The team is discouraged, which leads to arguing, when suddenly one of the team pulls out her gun and shoots the mechanism designed to relight the engine, on the basis of wanting ‘no more dying’. Besides the fact that if you wanted to get attention you could just shoot your gun in the air, this train of thought is so fucking stupid that even another character calls her out on it. They make it clear that these mechanisms aren’t exactly plentiful, so by destroying it not only do you ensure that the sacrifice of those who got it that far was in vain, but you are actively endangering the entire human race in the quite likely possibility that the other engines malfunction in the future. It’s pissing me off a little just thinking about it, especially because the writers pull a deus ex machina immediately afterwards and render the entire scene pointless. Bad, bad writing on their part.

      Reflecting upon everything that goes down, The Wandering Earth is not only a ‘money shot’ film, it’s one of those movies that would have been better as a miniseries. While Frant Gwo manages to keep things moving at a reasonable pace, there are definitely times where the plot is straining under the weight of everything it’s trying to set up, and the constant use of slow-mo and action setpieces strain the seriousness of the events taking place in the movie. Spread it out over a couple of episodes and you give everyone room to breathe, do some world building, some character development, and you’d still have enough excitement to carry the audience through the story.

      Overall I’m going to give The Wandering Earth the recommendation. In a world that’s constantly reminding us of how shitty it is, it’s nice to get something every now and that reminds us how strong we can be when we work together. Not strong enough to keep the sun from exploding perhaps, but I think we’re a lot more capable than we realize. We’ve just gotta try. Maybe you’ll want to try this movie too.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Drunken Master (1978), directed by Yuen Woo-Ping

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "8 Drunken Gods", by Chow Fu-liang

       Bruce Lee may have been the pioneer of what we know of as the martial arts genre of film, but I don’t think anyone can deny that Jackie Chan was its greatest innovator. With a style honed by the rigorous acting training he underwent as a child for the Peking Opera , a natural gift for comedy and a willingness (if not desire) to put his body through hell for the sake of the movie, Chan not only firmly established himself as one of the top dogs of Hong Kong/Chinese action cinema, he also found great success in the West as well with such films as Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon. I first discovered him as a child through the animated series Jackie Chan Adventures, one of my favorite shows back in those days, and even if didn’t match up 1 to 1 with Chan’s actual life, it did put his name in my head, and later pushed me towards his films. Bruce Lee was undoubtedly a legend, but that legend was confined to a couple films and a role in short-lived superhero show. Jackie Chan, on the other hand, WAS martial arts to me for a long time, and when I think of martial arts movies, his name is the one that immediately comes to mind. Not Bruce Lee, not Jet Li or Tony Jaa, but Jackie ‘remember that time I dressed up as Chun-Li from Street Fighter?’ Chan. So if the newly established guidelines state that we get in at least one martial arts film a year, it only makes sense that he would eventually make an appearance. A proper inauguration, if you will.

       His 37th or so film of that decade, his fourth film of 1978, and his second with director Yuen Woo-Ping (the first, Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, having come out earlier that year), Drunken Master stars Jackie Chan as a young Wong Fei Hung (or Freddie Wong, depending on your dub), a real life Chinese folk hero, martial artist and acupuncturist. The son of a well-respected martial arts master, Hung is something of a lazy punk, relying on his natural talents in kung-fu to get out of the messes he finds himself in. When he finally pushes things too far his father arranges for him to be taken in by Master So-Hi for one year, in the hope that he will find discipline through training. Despite appearing like a feeble old drunk, So-Hi reveals that he is more than a match for the over-confident and rebellious Hung, possessing an incredibly bizarre and powerful kung-fu that astounds anyone who comes up against it. Hung, deathly allergic to strain or work of any kind bristles at the idea of the harsh training So-Hi, but it’s training he’ll need, as an assassin with deadly kung-fu roams the land. Can Wong Fei Hung become the Drunken Master, or will he die on his knees? You’ll have to watch to find out.

       If you’ve never seen a Jackie Chan movie before now I can’t think of a gateway film as good as Drunken Master. You’ve got the long takes of quick, intricate and acrobatic fight choreography, the use of props in said choreography, the comedic aspects, everything that defined Jackie Chan as an action star wrapped up in one movie. Not only that, but this is a Hong Kong action movie, which means they’re not selling you a sports car with nothing under the hood. You came for fights, and Drunken Master packs them in as much as they can. With weapons and without, in multiple styles, all the while Jackie Chan (in his physical prime) flips and move through space like gravity forgot his name. It’s amazing to see, almost as if Jackie and the crew are doing their very best to make sure every minute in this 2+ hour movie doesn’t go to waste. If only some of the other filmmakers in this Marathon had taken notes.

       As for cons, well as as a story there’s not to say, there’s not much of a plot or character development beyond ‘guy trains in martial arts to beat people up’. There’s also the fact that use of martial arts in this film emphasizes acrobatics and theatrics, which means it can lack the visceral energy that made The Big Boss and Enter the Dragon such great films. In terms of comedy Drunken Master has a tendency towards the childish and cartoonish at times, including fart and poop jokes, which might turn more serious minded people away. Then there’s the English dub, which has some issues beyond the trope of kung-fu movies having bad dubs. Aside from shoe-horning English names here and there, Wong Fei Hung and his dad becoming Freddie and Robert Wong for example, I just found Jackie’s voice actor rather annoying to listen to at some points. Of course Hung’s character does a lot of whining, but there’s something about the tone of it that struck my ear the wrong way. Definitely a movie you’d want to go subs not dubs for, or you could get up off your ass and learn Mandarin. I mean, unless you’re a coward or something.

       A lot of films get labeled as popcorn movies, occasionally in a derogatory, ‘turn your brain off’ manner, but Drunken Master is an example of this at its best. So much work, so much blood, sweat and tears shed all so that we can see Jackie Chain act like an idiot and beat the shit out of people with chairs and Hong Kong audiences drank it in like fine wine, Drunken Master making over twice what Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow managed to rake in. I loved it too, which is why it’s getting the unabashed full recommendation. It might not seem like Halloween fare, the only horrors here are the horrors of alcoholism, but if you need a fun break from the spooks then this should be your first stop. Drinks are on me. 

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: Animal World (2018), directed by Han Yan

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Mirai wa Bokura no Te no Naka", by Kaiji and the Redbound Cherries

       To be honest, I don’t take in much anime these days. It used to be, when I was a much younger nerd, that my days seemed to revolve around what came out of Japan. Games, Comics, their seemingly endless amount of naked lady pictures, and of course their most devious of all creations, anime. Yessir, the bulk of my formative years were shaped in part by that uniquely Japanese style of animation; the adventures of Son Goku and Yusuke Urameshi were far more visceral to me than Batman’s struggles with the Joker, and while I couldn’t tell you the rules of American football I could describe the system of equivalent exchange or discuss the symbolism of FLCL. Keep in mind that these were the days when anime was still largely niche, instead of mostly niche like it is now. If you wanted to see a show you had to either fervently hope it got dubbed and sent to the states, which if you’ve seen what happened to One Piece you know was a gamble, or you had to hope a traveling band of translators decided to make it a project and put it up on the internet, which posed its own set of problems. If you wanted to talk about anime, you either were lucky and your friends were into it as well or you were stuck with the kid who used Japanese honorifics in public conversation despite being whiter than the driven snow. And if you wanted to try the internet, well, it was still in the internet in those days, so you were better off hanging out with the guy in the Naruto headband.

As I said however, at a certain point I seemed to largely drift away from the thing that had once commanded my time. Part of it was just the process of growing up I suppose, budgeting time, moving on to other things, part of it was a lack of interest in the material coming, but however it is to be framed the fact was that at a certain point anime had become an afterthought. I watched maybe a few episodes of something and then would abandon it for months at a time, and the things I did keep up with were mostly for reasons of nostalgia. I just couldn’t find it in me to care anymore, of course that could describe me on any given day.

Then, from out of the blue, I discovered a show by the name of Kaiji. Based on the long-running manga series by Nobuyuki Fukumoto, Kaiji is nominally a story about gambling and literally an exploration of the human psyche on a epic scale. In true anime fashion there are no average stakes in Kaiji; when you win you are floating up in heaven and when you lose you are pulled into the depths of hell, devoting minutes upon minutes of time giving in-depth explanation of strategy and tactics, and just when you think things can’t get any more insane somehow the bar is raised. I can’t think of many shows anime or otherwise that has managed to get me so completely invested in what was going on, and right from the outset as well. To know Kaiji is to know despair as it turns out, which is what I love about it, and when I found out that there was apparently a live action adaptation of the Kaiji manga released this year made in China, I just had to check it out for myself. Sorry Battle Royale, maybe next year.

       Zheng Kai-si is a man at the end of his rope. Most of his time is spent loafing around playing games and daydreaming (or rather hallucinating) at his job as a clown mascot at an arcade, and most of his money is spent on his mother, who has been in a coma for years now. He can’t afford to keep his mother out of the hallway, he can’t afford to give his girlfriend Liu Qing the life he thinks she deserves, he can barely afford to live. In a fit of desperation he decides to mortgage his family’s apartment to his buddy Li Jun’s real estate company, only to find out that Li Jun hasn’t worked at that company in months. The truth is that Li has a bit of a gambling problem and that when the organization that lent him money came a callin’ he decided to scam Kai-si and saddle him with the debt (plus interest), which has ballooned so greatly that working 4 jobs for 30 years straight would just about pay it, as long as he didn’t have to pay for any hospital bills. However, when Kai-si meets the head of this shady organization, Anderson (played by Michael Douglas), he is offered a magnificent deal: There is a cruise ship by the name of Destiny that’s set to leave harbor soon, where a game is going to be held. If Kai-si join the game and win, he could win enough money to pay off his debt and more besides all in one night. If he loses, well… best not to think about it. Besides, as long as Kai-si wins, it doesn’t really matter what happens when you lose, does it? How bad could it be?

       Animal World is based on the opening arc of part 1 of the Kaiji series, known also as Tobaku Mokushiroku Kaiji, which would become the first 9 episodes of the anime series. To its credit it actually manages to hit the bullet points of the source material rather consistently, as well as more Fukumoto related bits like the cutaways to show the breakdown of strategies. It gives you a pretty good sense of what people liked about the original material, which isn’t always common when it comes to adaptations, and shows that Han Yan knows which side to butter his bread, so to speak.

       Of course this being an adaptation there are indeed changes from the source material, and in the case of Animal World those changes are numerous. Liu Qing is an invention of the film for example, as is the coma-ridden mom, Kaiji/Kai-si’s arcade job, or really anything concrete about his backstory. Michael Douglas’ character Anderson seems to be a combination of the characters Andou and Tonegawa from the original, while the character named Andou here seems to be relegated to a creepy looking side character. The shady organization also seems to reach a far larger scope than the Japan-centric Teiai Group of the manga, apparently managing to get its hooks into people from across the world. Even things that you wouldn’t think warranted changing ended up getting changed, like the name of the ship they end up on, Espoir in the original and Destiny in the film (and no, Espoir is not French for Destiny).

       Then there are the fantasy sequences, which are explained in the film as PTSD-inspired hallucinations. Fantastical imagery is actually in line with the original Kaiji, as FKMT uses it often to visualize character’s mental states. A character in the depths of despair might be shown being dragged down into a swamp for instance, or somebody on the upswing might be climbing the broad side of a mountain. To our director Han Yan, this has convinced him that he has carte blanche to just throw in whatever he wants whenever he wants. So you have the kind of classic Kaiji moments, and then you have characters literally becoming monsters every few minutes. I can understand the argument for throwing Liu Qing or coma mom into the story as adding an emotional core to the film (although the original story did fine without them), but who is the minutes long dream sequence with Kai-si fighting monsters on a train while dressed as a clown with more slow motion than a Zack Snyder wet dream for, exactly? Because as a Kaiji fan, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for me or people like me.

       Which brings us to the major problem with Animal World in my opinion, which is pointless excess. Nothing is allowed to just be normal in this film it seems, it all has to be grim-dark and badass, in the 14-year old boy sense of the term. So Andou isn’t allowed to just be a man in a black suit and sunglasses, he has to be this tattooed weirdo with no eyebrows. The Destiny can’t just be a cruise ship, it has to look like it was built from the remnants of an oil rig. Oh, and it wouldn’t be Kaiji is we didn’t inject a meaningless 15 minute long chase scene right in the middle like this were the fucking Life of Brian. Even the damn cards used in the games aren’t allowed to just be cards, they’ve got to be covered in gold leaf and overly elaborate design like you pulled it out of Harry Potter’s asshole. What’s the point? The way that Kaiji was done was fine as it was, proven by the fact that it’s a renowned series that has several adaptations. It pushed the boundaries of believability, but FKMT always kept things down-to-earth enough that the problems and the drama were on point. Here in Animal World, where you can’t even show the concept of time with an image of a watch packed with grinding gears, where it feels like someone slapped a Guillermo del Toro filter on a screenshot from 300, everything feels so ludicrously over-the-top that it just feels tiresome to watch at a certain point. Just smoke a joint or something and calm the fuck down Han Yan, turning a comic book about gambling into some kind of Michael Bay bullshit isn’t going to solve anyone’s problems. I’ve already got enough problems as it is anyway.
   
I’m also not overly impressed with the quality of the acting here. Generally speaking it’s fine, but at points I wonder if Han Yan decided to make Kai-si ‘crazy’ because Li Yifeng only has about three expressions. In a series that is mired in drama, in scenes where we are supposed to be seeing the heights of emotion, Li doesn’t seem able to hit the high notes, so to speak. The actress who plays Liu Qing might be even worse, having only one expression compared to Kai-si’s handful, but since her importance to the plot is minimal I suppose it doesn’t matter that much. I don’t know if Michael Douglas is bringing much to the table either besides star power, but then again I believe this is first time I’ve ever actually seen him in a movie, so I can’t really judge his performance off of his previous work. He may have played a better vaguely menacing villain in another film, I don’t know.

I will admit though, that for a film that smothers the audience in CGI and slo-mo, it doesn’t look too bad. The monsters and special effects look nice and the action sequences, while superfluous, are choreographed and edited well, and are easy enough to follow. I’ll also note that during the moments when it’s not trying so hard I actually grew a bit fond of Animal World’s aesthetic. It reminds one of that period in the swingin’ 90s where movies were grimy as all hell and it looked like everything was dripping with tetanus, like 12 Monkeys or The Basketball Diaries. I can appreciate a director who appreciates my personal aesthetic.

I find myself then at a crossroads. There is a lot of dumb stuff in this movie, and if it ever got a sequel (which the ending does set up for), it seems like it would be going down an even dumber direction. On the other hand I am a huge Kaiji fan, and while the movie does become tiresome at points I don’t think I ever became straight-up bored. So do I discard it for the mess it made, or do I commend it for its creativity? Do I denounce it as a shoddy imitation of something I love, or praise for its unorthodox approach at adaptation? It’s a question I’ll answer immediately in the next paragraph, but believe me that it took a couple days to consider. I’m that dedicated to the job.

In the end, I think I’m giving Animal World the recommendation. Thinking over things, the fact that it managed to entertain me rather consistently across two hours (some movies can’t do it in half that) is ultimately what pushed me to the ‘stupid but fun’ side, in spite of the director’s hyperactive approach to storytelling. You should check out the source material as well obviously, as the manga and to a lesser extent the anime are the definitive versions, but pop this in (or click on it, because I believe it’s netflix exclusive) and you’ll probably have a fun Halloween night. Insert witty closing line about taking a gamble on this movie here.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: The Guardian Brothers (2016), directed by Gary Wang

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Feng Shou", by Chen Dacan

       We (that’s the royal ‘we’) here at the Marathon have no problem covering family-friendly/kids movies. I (that’s the non-royal ‘I’) have also made it a point to cover animated films when I can, because of my oft-stated opinion that it is a greatly underutilized and underappreciated artistic and filmmaking medium. A problem arises though when we get to that most dreaded of combinations, the animated children’s movie. Namely that there’s too damn many of them and I don’t have the time or the inclination to sift through them all. We struck gold with Kubo last time around, and that’s going to be how we’re approaching these kinds of movies going forward: It’s gotta be relatively unique or interesting to me, or I’m not going to bother with it. No Disney. No Pixar. No Dreamworks. For the foreseeable future, at least.

Dropped quickly and unceremoniously onto Netflix around 2016, The Guardian Brothers, or Little Door Gods as it’s known in China, is a film that takes place in two worlds: The real world, where all us boring humans live, and the Spirit World, home of the Guardians. Guardians are exactly what it says on the tin, spirits whose purpose in life is to help humans. Trouble is, times have changed and humans no longer care about spirits. In retaliation, the spirits have decided to go on strike, even going so far as to start demolishing the portals that lead to the human world. Work stoppages are far more effective when the other party knows you exist, however, so it seems the spirit world is en route to a slow and undignified demise.

       In this middle of all this are the Guardian Brothers, headstrong Yu Lei and easygoing Shen Tu, divided on the issue of helping humans. The issue comes to a head when the brothers discover the existence of a horrific creature known as the Nian, which terrorized both worlds until the combined forces of spirits and humans were able to seal it away. Believing that the return of a mutual enemy is what will reunite humans and spirits, Yu Lei sets off to the real world in order to locate and break the seals containing the Nian. It is while on Earth that he meets a young girl named Rain, whose mother has inherited an old soup shop, and whose will turn out to be far more important to his quest than she might seem.

       Not much to say about the art style and animation, if you’ve seen any kids movie since the switch from hand-drawn to CGI then you’re getting the same here, but I’d say the biggest difference between The Guardian Bros. and your average Disney release is in how it tells the story. The chief antagonist of the film for example, the Nian, is far less of an active presence that Jafar or Hades are in their respective films, serving more as the end result of Yu Lei’s stubbornness and reckless actions than an actual villainous character. The secondary antagonist, the comically greedy businessman Rogman, is by contrast more active, but his actual relevance to the plot also feels negligible. In his moment of greatest influence on the story, his scheme is thwarted a scene or two later and he is immediately punished for his actions. They are antagonists in the most basic of terms, obstacles that the protagonists overcome on their journey. Fancy roadblocks, essentially.

       The role of Rain in the movie is also a very noticeable shift in storytelling. In similar films, Rain would likely be the focus of the film; the story would revolve around her, somehow she’d probably get into spirit world which would lead to generic shenanigans, and in the end she’d be best friends with all the Guardians. Not the case with The Guardian Brothers. While she is an important character and integral to the plot, she’s also a little girl and and her position in the story reflects that. She’s not fighting monsters, she’s helping her mom run a soup shop and worrying about not having friends, and happens to meet a couple of magical beings along the way. I’ve often said that child actors can either make or break a movie, and that belief goes for animated films as well. To have a movie where a child isn’t pushed into being some sort of overdone saviour of mankind role but also isn’t a burden on the competent characters, similarly, is like getting a homerun off of a bunt. Quite refreshing.

        What isn’t as refreshing however, is the voice acting. While at first glance the cast list seems to be cavalcade of stars, Nicole Kidman, Ed Norton, Mel Brooks, right away you realize why voice acting is even a thing. It just sounds so bad so quickly is the thing, that minutes after I heard Bella Thorne’s obviously adult woman voice come out of couldn’t-be-older-than-eleven Rain that I just had to switch it to another dub entirely. French seemed to work out okay, although as a former anime loving loser I would have preferred to have English subtitles with the original Chinese. If only to see the changes, if any, in the voice direction across the international versions.

       The use of music is also not very inspired, in my opinion. Their soundtrack consists of what feels like 4 songs, two of which (‘Celebration’ by Kool & The Gang and ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ by Carl Douglas) are re-used in other scenes. I can understand why they felt the need to throw in popular music, and I know licensing music is an expensive pain the ass, but much like Bella Thorne it just sounds awkward. It probably would have been better off sticking with an original score, maybe rounding things out with some local talent. It maybe not snag those international points, but at least it wouldn’t feel as weird as watching a Chinese movie that plays ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ without batting an eye.

       Although likely not as high action as you’re used to in your kids movies, The Guardian Brothers’ almost magic-realist take on old folklore still manages to entertain in less than 90 minutes. Recommended, especially for those looking for some family-friendly films this Halloween. And if you’re a parent in a country that primarily speaks English, you might want to do so with a glass or two of hard cider. Makes the viewing experience a lot easier.