Animated Feature Contenders: China's "White Snake"
Sunday, December 1, 2019 at 2:00PM by Tim
The original Chinese title for the new animated mythological epic White Snake is just a hair different from the one that distributor GKIDS is using to promote the film. The literal translation is White Snake: Origin, which tells us quite a lot, in fact. This isn't just any old fantasy adventure, you see: it is, in fact, an original prequel to one of the most important of all traditional Chinese folk tales, "Legend of the White Snake." This matters for a couple of reasons: first, because it explains something that a lot of American critics have been complaining about, which is the film's frequently inscrutable narrative progression. Which is, to be fair, a little bit inscrutable, but much less so if you keep in mind that, for the target audience, many of the things that seem most inexplicable have already been explained simply by the film announcing up front that it takes place in a certain kind of generic universe where certain rules apply. Which sucks if you're not part of that target audience, but we can at least try to meet the film where it lives.
Second, even if you (like me) don't know much or anything about "Legend of the White Snake," you probably at least know one or two folk tales from your own background culture, and wherever you come from in the world, folklore has a very distinct cadence...
Characters will be introduced in terms of their only personality trait and psychological development simply isn't much of a priority. The story leaps from incident to incident without caring to stitch them together beyond "this happened, and then this happened." If storytelling logic needs to be overlooked to advance the story, then it will happen. I consider it a strength of White Snake that it evokes all of this in its elliptical, wandering storytelling, but it would be unfair to fault anybody for thinking otherwise.
Still, there's something magical to it. The story is, in brief that a snake spirit has entered the human world and in so doing lost her memory; she genuinely believes herself to be Blanca (in the English dub, voiced by Stephanie Sheh) or Xiao Bai (in the original Chinese, voiced by Zhang Zhe), and much of the film's story consists of her slowly recovering her identity as she falls in love with a snake-catcher, Ah Xuan (Paul Yen/Yang Tianxiang). This sometimes involves transforming into a massive white snake the size of a commuter train.
Meanwhile a human warlord and the queen of the snake spirits are edging towards open conflict. Plus a great deal of other stuff that does very little other than the casually plunge us into the world of non-human spirits and magical beings. White Snake offers a dizzying tour of strange folkloric creatures, presented without much explanation or comment. We simply figure out what's going on by watching, and the result is one of the most persuasive depictions of a world where magic and nature spirits simply are that I've seen in ages. It is a uniquely transporting film, taking place in a different world and a different time period and the weight of those differences is very important.
This world is brought to life by some truly dazzling design. Nothing about this seems necessarily radical, stylistically, and yet I can't name another film that looks quite like this. The locations throughout the film fall into some combination of realism and storybook fantasy that's hard to articulate: the lighting and sense of deep space are both very physically real and present, but the surfaces have a dreamy, painted smeariness.
And the colors are rich and vivid in a way that's almost hyper-real, like our senses have been keyed up so that we notice everything as strongly as possible. It's gorgeous and more than a bit peculiar, as one's brain keeps flipping between attending to the realistic touches and being moved by the artful fantasy of it.
Adding to this peculiarity, so well that I almost want to credit it as a choice and not an aesthetic limitation: the character animation is at least slightly lousy. Everyone moves stiffly, with extreme gestures that leave almost no room for nuanced visual performance; worse still, they have skin that seems glued rigidly to their bodies, like every last human is molded from plastic (the snake people generally look a bit better, probably because we already expect them to be uncanny). The clean, archetypal design of the characters' faces makes them appealling, emotionally expressive, and easy to tell apart, but the moment those faces move, we find ourselves racing down into the Uncanny Valley. Somehow, though, the inexplicable disjunction between the crummy character animation and the breathtaking beauty of the environment animation ends up being just one more way that the film underlines the otherworldly qualities of the setting.
All told, it's a remarkable experience, among the most unique-looking of all the many attempts by the Chinese animation industry to match the Hollywood animation studios, with a far weirder screenplay, and it's certainly worth seeing. The only question that lingers is: worth seeing for whom? Honestly, White Snake doesn't seem to have a clue who its audience is. It is unblinkingly violent, with multiple blood spurts that accompany stabbings, several more onscreen deaths, and a willingness to let us see the depravity in the villains' faces. It's also deeply creepy in its depiction of the various monstrous beings of this fantasy world. Yet the simplicity of the narrative is pure bedtime story, as is the unbalancing introduction of a wacky talking dog sidekick. So it's at once a grave, weighty fantasy for adults, and a zippy yarn for kids. I don't really know how to solve that problem beyond noting that it is a problem, but at least I can promise that animation fans owe it to themselves to catch up with this very remarkable and very strange example of a set of aesthetic choices notably off-kilter from the familiar Disney/Pixar model used by all the American studios.
More on the Animated Contenders
Frozen 2
Klaus
This Magnificent Cake
Missing Link (Interview)
Ne Zha
I Lost My Body
How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
The 32 Eligible Films
Current Predictions
Reader Comments (3)
I just saw the trailer and the animation is gorgeous
The foreign titles fighting for the token spot are taken, thank you for stopping by. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
The trailer is beautiful as the images are, but it's visible, even with all that beauty, that the computer has its aesthetic limitations in a way that paper can't have.