

To those unfamiliar, it’s a slapstick-y, accidental parenting story much like Grogu and the Mandalorian. To viewers familiar with the original tale, it’s a good chuckle at all the inside jokes sprinkled throughout the dialogue. He isn’t done with causing chaos for the gods, after all (or for the world at large, for that matter).
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Meanwhile, Sun Wukong himself tries to find out how to restore his former powers. Sun Wukong still falls from power, but instead of being picked up by the Buddhist monk, he is now the reluctant road-trip dad to Jiang Liu’er, a wide-eyed child monk and the Monkey King’s biggest fan. This film inverts their master-disciple dynamic. In the original story, Sun Wukong kills with impunity, and some of the biggest plot points hinge on the pacifist monk’s attempts to teach him compassion. It’s a retelling of the story of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King crushed under a mountain as a punishment for destroying heaven, and his subsequent journey west as the protector of a Buddhist monk. This crowdfunded underdog became a cultural icon when it was released, becoming China’s highest-grossing animated film of the year. Image: Beijing Weiyingshidai Culture & Media, Hengdian Chinese Film Production Co., October Animation Studio, S&C Pictures, Shandong Film and Television Production Center Here’s a guide to get viewers started on taking in the breadth of Chinese animation by checking out some of the best titles the country has to offer.

They’ll be as visually grounded as Disney’s Tangled one second, or as stylized as Into the Spider-Verse the next. The visuals may remind anime fans of Disney, DreamWorks, or anime movies, but they have their own purposes, their own storytelling aesthetics and iconographies. The characters are fun, sassy, or determined, like heroes in stories from any country, but they blend the past, present, and future of an irreplaceable culture.
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Many donghua movies and TV series retell household Chinese tales, and all of them reach out and question the audience’s relationship with the contemporary world. Others have their own tear-jerking, laugh-inducing forms of impact. Donghua titles have been showing up on Crunchyroll and Netflix more and more lately, and some of them, like the fantasy of gods and demons in Heaven’s Official Blessing, follow familiar emotional roller coaster beats. Donghua - Chinese animation, sometimes mistakenly conflated with anime - covers as wide a variety of tones and subjects as any other type of animated story, from sunny necromancers to particularly rebellious children with dragon friends.
