Director – Chang Gwang Xi – 1999 – China – Cert. N/C U – 85m
*1/2
A boy must rescue his goddess mother from Heavenly wrath invoked when she fell for his father, a mortal – available to rent online in the UK & Ireland as part of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio Retro in the Chinese Cinema Season 2021 from Friday, February 12th to Wednesday, May 12th
Immortal Goddess Sanshengmu (voice: Xu Fan) falls in love with mortal man Liu Yanchang and leaves Heaven to pursue love with him on Earth. This goes down badly with her brother Yang Jian (Jiang Wen) since it’s against the Law of Heaven, so he sends an army of hounds down to earth in pursuit. She is however able to evade capture by keeping a lotus lantern close to her to make sure it’s not accidentally lit as this would give away her location.
Seven years later, while boating on a river with her young son Chenxian (Yu Pengfei), the lantern’s accidental lighting reveals her whereabouts to her brother, who promptly whisks the boy to heaven. When she arrives to demand her son’s return, her brother instead imprisons her in a mountain.
The adventures of young boy then teen protagonist Chenxian (Yang Shuo) follow as he (eventually) attempts to rescue his mother, with the nonsensical narrative throwing in numerous other characters seemingly at whim. These include young girl then teen Ga Mei (Ning Jing) likewise kidnapped by Yang Jian, in her case to encourage her father to sculpt a giant rock, and the Monkey King (Chen Peisi) – now seated on a floating lotus flower like the Buddha – who sends Chenxian off to ride to his destiny on a white horse.
A volcano erupts near Ga Mei’s village where natives clad in loincloths later pastiche a Busby Berkeley dance routine. There are echoes of Disney: Ave Maria from Fantasia (episode by Wilfred Jackson, 1940) as fireflies float through a forest and The Lion King (Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff, 1994) in both overhead shots of flying cranes and a sequence where Chenxiang’s mother appears in the sky to offer him serious life advice.
Gratuitous pop songs appear as Chenxiang and the monkey cross a first a desert then (on an inflated something or other) a sea which turns into a waterfall then a river before being discovered by a bunch of animals (presumably there as a producer’s sop for the kids market, because kids love animals), and as an excuse to show young animals loving their mothers and throw in another treacly sentimental song.
Like The Monkey King (Wan Laiming, Cheng Tang, 1961, 1964) this takes its story from Chinese mythology. Indeed, it uses some of the same characters and at one point its young boy protagonist Chenxiang is shown a vast mural depicting the events of that earlier film (Yang Jian is in there too, as one of the characters with whom the Monkey King does battle, the name being an alternative moniker to Erlung – and in case we missed it Chenxiang recognises him in the mural), right down to the art direction and groundbreaking character design. This hint at what Lotus Lantern might have been shows it up for what it is. Gone are The Monkey King‘s dazzling art direction and character design along with any overall innovation. In its place is an uninspiring, bland and pedestrian animation style, occasional visual flourishes notwithstanding.
Beyond the clichéd mis-en-scene lies the highly bizarre. A sequence where Chenxiang is captured by the giant terracotta warrior guards of Heaven’s Temple has a gag where his monkey companion gets trapped in a boot one of the giants has taken off, escaping from it only when Chenxiang pushes the boot underneath an ornamental pig from which he removes a plug letting air enter the pig so that water can gush out of its penis and fill the boot, allowing the money to float to the top and escape.
Another gag shortly after has the same warrior falls through a circle cut through the floor of the Heavenly Temple to fall several thousand feet into a hillside below to land upright in a convenient space in a buried army of terracotta warriors. You can imagine the whole scene as a terrific action set piece in the Ray Harryhausen mould (think: the giant Talos statue which comes to life in Jason And The Argonauts, 1963) Indeed, Tsui Hark produced something along these lines in A Terracotta Warrior (Ching Siu Tung, 1989). In Lotus Lantern, the action is instead played like Tom And Jerry with all the slapstick sound effects but none of the panache or comedic timing.
The whole thing comes across not as a movie made for love of animation artistry but as a hard-nosed, commercial production stuffed with big Chinese actor and singer names. This was apparently enough to garner the studio a sorely needed, domestic box office hit and keep it in business. However, compared to either the classic earlier fare of The Monkey King or the later knockabout antics of Black Cat Detective (Dai Tielang, 2010), it’s hard going.
Lotus Lantern is available to rent online in the UK & Ireland as part of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio Retro in the Chinese Cinema Season 2021 from Friday, February 12th to Wednesday, May 12th
Free to watch: The History of Shanghai Animation Film Studio