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Notes -
I'm late but I finally saw it and here are my two cents:
The movie is being mentioned in the same breath as Black Myth: Wukong for a reason - to anyone who's seen it at all, the quality is so obvious that it's difficult to smear it. Of course, this has its own problems, like the movie being used as a canard to beat the nationalism drum inside and outside China.
It's not perfect. The scatological humor causes whiplash with some of the more dramatic, somber and darker sequences. It's too long and the third act emotional high points are dragged out too much. But on a visuals and animation perspective this matches, or even clears, the already high bar in animated features set these last couple of years by studios not owned by the Mouse.
Someone more technically minded than me can probably explain it more accurately, but there are high benchmarks for water, fire, chains, all kinds of effects and lighting playing off each other in the same sequences, nearly all of them highly dynamic action ones with wuxia sfx married to high-octane kung-fu choreography. There are also multiple instances of what I've taken to calling 'animator's animation sequences' in this, where a sequence was clearly boarded and done in animatic and the animation team were so pleased with the animatic that they didn't want to cut any of it (The Wild Robot has multiple of these sequences).
Oh, and on a writing standpoint I have zero clue how a western audience will react to this. The cosmology and worldview is distinctly Chinese; everyone in the movie understands the will to power, and in the hierarchy of heavenly bureaucracy and tiers shit rolls downhill. It is the fate of those who are below others to suffer at the whims of those above them, and the only way is to attain power yourself. Those who are below die horrible deaths, or worse, so striving for higher and greater by any means necessary is considered normal.
Final note: the movie's director ('Jiaozi' or 'Dumpling') has one of the most crazy origin stories to the point where I almost wonder if it's made up propaganda. He got a degree in pharma, then a job in marketing, and then threw it all away to do nothing but study animation for 3 years after his dad died and his mom was jobless, subsisting on his mother's 1000RMB a month retirement pension. As of last week, the guy became the highest grossing film director of all time in China, which is hilarious.
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