This 1941 feature film
continues my delving into the history of animation. Released in the same year
as Dumbo, and four years before Momotarou: Umi no Shinpei, it is Asia ’s
very first animated feature film, produced as a direct reaction to Snow
White and undertaken by the Wan brothers during the Japanese occupation.
Apparently released on January 1st, it is the fourth ever animated
film to be made for theatrical releases that is entirely in traditional cel
animation, after Snow White, Pinocchio and the Fleischer
Brothers’ Gulliver’s Travels – a sentence I’ve worded carefully to
exclude Fantasia and 41-minute promotional compilation release Academy
Award Review of Walt Disney Cartoons. It also excludes that various other
earlier animated feature films that are realised with stop-motion or cutout animation, by which count Snow White comes
in at #8.
Having seen the breathtaking
advances in animation that Snow White brought, then, did China step up
to deliver something equally magical? Well, not really, no. There is clearly a
fair bit of effort put into Princess Iron Fan, and Momotarou isn’t
really of much better quality, but it is no Disney or Fleisher classic to stand
the test of time. It is in black and white, its animation techniques betray a
far heavier use of rotoscoping and a far more shaky grasp of physics and
timing, and while its story is a solid and interesting one, it assumes
knowledge of the back-story of Journey to the West, being a retelling of
one of the more memorable episodes – also covered in Damon Albarn’s Monkey and
numerous other interpretations of the classic.
You may know the story, but it
has its own twists: the monk Xuan Zang, often called Tripitaka in
English translations, is journeying to the west in order to retrieve some
Buddhist scriptures, aided by the strange supernatural beings Sun Wukong
(Monkey), Zhu Bajie (Pigsy) and Sha Wujing (Sandy ).
In this version, Monkey is quite cute in a design obviously influenced by
Disney, Pigsy is able to play with the laws of physics, not only transforming
himself just like Monkey but even at one point flattening a giant creature and
rolling it up like a carpet, and Sandy has a severe stammer. The four pilgrims’
journey is interrupted by mountains engulfed with a demon’s flames, and the
only way to put them out is to use the magical fan belonging to – you guessed
it – Princess Iron Fan, which is made of – you didn’t guess it – leaves.
Going to the princess’s home,
they are first rebuffed in amusingly blunt fashion by one of the princess’s
family members, then by the woman herself, blowing them away with her fan.
Given a stone that allows him to stay rooted in place by some random monk from
earlier in the journey, Monkey turns into a ladybird and gets swallowed by the
princess, beating her heart from inside her body until she relents and hands
over the fan. It’s a fake one, though, so next – in a variation from the story
– it is Pigsy’s turn. He turns into the princess’s husband, the Bull King, and
tricks her into revealing the secret of the fan and handing it over. He is
tricked in turn, though, when the Bull King turns into Sun Wukong to get the
fan back. The film can then proceed to a great climax with the battle against
the Bull King in his bestial form for possession of the fan, which works well.
But the fact is that the
execution is very clunky indeed. Using a story where characters have incredible
powers and a penchant for metamorphosis lends itself to animation, but the way
things are done have all the bizarreness of very early American cartoons and
more. There’s no reason behind half of the neck-stretching and eye-rolling and it’s
clear that they’ve often just drawn over actors’ movements without being able
to preserve what the motions really mean, making this a film full of inexplicable
motions, awkward pauses and sudden changes from detailed, rotoscoped movements
to highly simplified flights of fancy that don’t have a good sense of flow
between them.
But still, this is a very
interesting historical vignette, the first direct response to Disney’s scope
and ambition in another culture altogether, and it’s very possible that without
its impact on Asia , there would be no Momotarou
and who knows? Perhaps Osamu Tezuka wouldn’t have felt able to pursue the life
he did, leading all the way to modern anime. And there are moments with a lot
of charm, especially when they abandon the obviously filmed reference materials
and just freely animate things like rampaging bull demons and strange firey
masks in the sky.
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