Director: MTJJ
Writers: MTJJ, Kexin Peng
Studio: Beijing Hanmu Chunhua Animation, Beijing Jiyin Yinghua, Dream Castle and Heyi Capital
Writers: MTJJ, Kexin Peng
Studio: Beijing Hanmu Chunhua Animation, Beijing Jiyin Yinghua, Dream Castle and Heyi Capital
Watched 27/10/2020
Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for The Legend of Hei (Luo Xiaohei Zhan Ji/罗小黑战记)
Ratings:
The world has been crying out for the next classic (traditionally) animated film over the last few years. After my first watch, I'm ready to say that The Legend of Hei is that film. It's just shy of perfect for me: the cuteness and charm of Ghibli and Disney, coupled with amazing action and a solid, well-told story. It's missing a few things here and there but on the whole is just a wonderful experience. Chinese animation is actually having a bit of a moment right now and if this film is anything to go by, it's very well deserved.
First up, the film is visually stunning. It has these gorgeous fine-art-style backgrounds that blend perfectly with the legitimately beautiful, simple, 'clean' lineart-style characters and foregrounds, where the two could really have clashed. Even just the bright colour palette makes the film super pleasing to the eye. Then we get to the animation: fuck me, it is so brilliant. I can say without a shadow of a doubt, this is the best flash animation I have ever seen. In my (uneducated) opinion, they used flash and the 'simple' artwork absolutely correctly and got the two working in perfect harmony. There were no frozen body parts or eerie, stiff actions; it was full body acting, with complicated poses and motions. From what I could tell, characters were animated much more traditionally for action sequences but whatever they did worked amazingly well. All the fights in the film are intense, clearly articulated, exciting and fun. They also did really well to blend this traditional character animation with 3D modelling and camera techniques to make every fight super dynamic (but never disorientating). In general, the animation was just really well considered and well executed throughout, with lots of nice little details. This is pretty much as good as flash animation can get (again, just my opinion). One tiny criticism: there were a few shots of CGI cars and buildings etc. which looked kinda bad, but they can't have amounted to more than 10 seconds of screen time in total, so animation gets a strong 8 from me.
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| Look at this shit. Bloody beautiful. |
The story is very solid; not life-changing but still really good. There's a nice blurring of good and evil and if the film is watched by kids, there are great lessons to be learned from it. It's also a good example of how to construct a story around a fantasy world; the world-building and story-telling are seemlessly integrated and that's one of the film's real strong suits. You're organically fed information that's essential to understanding the world you're watching, whilst also unravelling the plot. There are some instances where things could have been a bit more clear (like what 'Engulf' was early on) but there's potential stuff was lost in translation, especially since I dowloaded the subtitles from a random person on twitter.
Characters are good. The main characters just about edge their way into being complex and imperfect but there are plenty from the ensemble cast that are very stereotypical. Designs for characters are pretty cool but a bit stale when you consider the genre and region. It's difficult to talk about diversity in a fantastical universe but at the very least, there weren't enough female characters. There were in fact 0 major female characters and this film sadly fails the ol' Bechdel test*. This is the most obvious area for improvement imo. Characters' development and journeys through the film were pretty great and made a lot of sense. The only exception is the first montage bit between Xiao Hei and Wu Xian, which had some corny music (although music was great and very fitting literally everywhere else).
Like I said, the Legend of Hei has practially everything. I would recommend this film to families, tweens, animation students, action fans, people who love cute shit - basically everyone. It's a great film and I'll say it again: this should be considered a classic in the future. It's a shame that it's so relatively unknown. Hopefully it gets distributed worldwide in some form or another.
Small random thoughts: those spirit-y things were a bit too Princess Mononoke for my liking but we'll let them have that one; for directing, using different colours for Feng Xi's and Xiao Hei's 'Realm' attacks in the final battle would have made the fight more readable; on top of being mad cute the film was unexpectedly funny - it also used those anime-comedy-frames very tastefully (more importantly, very sparingly); what the hell was up with that goofy ass dragon??
*Update: Officially made my first submission to BechdelTest.com for this film! (Link)
