A couple of months ago I finished reading a little book called A Journey To The West and now, just like I do after every book I read, I've been trying to watch everything I can find that is based on it. There is a very comprehensive list on Wikipedia, and I was able to find most of it. But one particular movie had been eluding me for a while. And among the thousands of works based on the most famous Chinese novel of all time, not being able to watch that particular movie was really bothering me because it was the very first non-Chinese live action version of the story. The movie I'm talking about is
Son Goku (1959) and now, thanks to a very generous members of Toho Kingdom, I was finally able to watch it.
KaijusHunter, you rock!!!
First and foremost let me tell you guys that I liked the movie and as non-Chinese adaptations go, this one is one of the best. I also want to say that I am not sure I should have used "first and foremost" after having already written a whole paragraph, but that is not important. And although I won't tell the story here, this post will have spoilers for both the book and the movie, so you'd better first read the book and watch the movie and then read the rest of my "review."
The movie starts with an old man doing Puppetry for a bunch of children. He is telling them about our heroes and, a couple of minutes later we dive into his make believe world and his puppets and scenery become real. The cool thing about this aspect of the movie is that it allowed the filmmakers to use cartoonish drawings as some of the backgrounds, which in my opinion (well, everything I am writing here is my opinion, but I digress...), where was I? Oh, yeah, in my opinion those cartoonish backgrounds worked great. In fact, they worked way better than those realistic matte paintings we see in pre-CGI/low budget movies. Don't get me wrong, some matte paintings are great and the artists responsible for them are awesome, but no matter how great the art, how expensive the movie is, those paintings were never able to fool me. Then again, maybe I am just jaded. Anyway, I think what they did in this movie was great and worked perfectly.
One of the first characters we meet is our holy monk. The strongest trait of the monk character in the novel is also present here - he is -------- and always tries to stop people from killing eachother. As long as the one doing the killing are the heroes... He does not seem to have much problem with the bad guys killing other people but, boy, this crazy monk sure gets in the way of people trying to help him. In fact, it gets so annoying that when I was reading the book I started rooting for the bad guys. Come on evil spirit! Kill that monk. Kill him!!! That annoying personality trait was translated perfectly to the movie. In the beginning of the movie our monk gets surrounded by "indians," in a scene that even includes a western soundtrack (really!!!), and he does not let his general attack the enemy because he might kill them. The problem is that he forgets to pass his peace and love message to the enemy, and so the enemy kills everybody. Everybody but the guy responsible for the massacre. I guess it can be seen as a foreshadow to gun control laws - you see, the bad guys, they don't obey laws.
The title character, our beloved Goku, still is the strongest of all and can perform many magic spells. And just like in the novel, he can create stuff by plucking hairs from his body. But very unlike the novel, or pretty much all the other movies I saw, they went for a more realistic approach here - plucking hairs is not easy and very painful, just like it would be in real life.
The VFX are quite good for a movie of the pre-computer graphics era. The blue-screen effects are very good and, you know those quick cuts they do when someone or something had to magically appear or disappear from the screen? Those are extremely well done. You barely notice any movement at all. Very impressive. At least most of the time.
As for the costumes, the villains are not so bad, but the heroes suck. And even though Pig seems to be played by a fat guy, they gave him a bad fake belly. I guess he wasn't fat enough. The Shaw Brothers' "quadrilogy" that would come out a few years later did not suffer from this problem and had the perfect actor for the part. But you kind of forget about Pig when the 3rd disciple appears. In the Toho version they decided to mix two disciples into one - Dragon and Sand were merged into a frog like guy. And he spends the whole movie wearing a "mom does not have time for this Halloween crap" costume.
Sometimes people break into song, very Disney-like. Don't know if they were dubbed, but whoever was singing had a great voice.
The comedy here is more universal than in the original story. I can't really read the original story in its original language, and I don't speak Mandarin nor Cantonese, but as far as I know, the book is supposed to have several funny passages, but most of them get lost in the translation. In this movie, though, they went for more slapstick and craziness, with things like having one of those modern day TV cooks in the middle of an epic fantasy story. And during one of the fights the characters change clothes and dress just like they would be dressing if they were interpreting the story in the Chinese Opera. And instead of fighting, they dance, just like in the opera. They even used that annoying "keep hitting a metal pan until you drive everybody crazy" soundtrack they use in the opera too. Awesome!
The Chinese Opera part is indeed one of the best parts of the movie. Unfortunately I believe it will probably pass right over the heads of most Westerners, since very few of them have ever heard about the Chinese Opera. Luckly, I had just watched
Hong hai er (The Fantastic Magic Baby) (1975) just a few days before watching this movie and, at least in the version I got, the last 30 minutes or so showed a real Chinese Opera interpretation of a Journey To The West, so it was very fresh in my mind and it made that scene so much funnier.
Talking about fights, the original story is full of them, but I was several minutes into the movie and I had not seen any. And it is not like the Japanese don't know how to do sword/weapon fighting (Zatoichi anyone?). But, just when I was about to complain about the lack of battles, I reached that Chinese Opera scene. And then, as if that hilarious Chinese Opera style battle had not been awesome enough, Monkey gets tired, reverts back to his original form and then we see some good old regular fighting, with a little bit of comedy mixed in, courtesy of Pig.
A little bit later the Spider lady appears and the movie decides to go full Broadway musical. That lasts only a couple of minutes, though, and the movie then reverts back to what it was.
Even though the essence of the story remained pretty much the same - monk needs to get to India and is helped by a monkey, a pig, 2 other disciples and a holy Deus Ex-Machina lady, there were lots of changes. But even with those changes, elements of the original story were sprinkled here and there and people familiar with the story will certainly recognize them and enjoy the movie more. Or hate it even more... I belong to the first group.
Now, leaving the story aside for a while, let's talk about changes made to the characters. In this movie Pig is not a degenerate womanizer and does not try to abandon the quest every chance he gets. That means he is not as funny, but those changes are OK and can be attributed to lack of time. But the same can not be said about Sand, Dragon and Monkey.
Sand and Dragon (I'm sure Dragon has a name. I just forgot. Anyway, in the book he becomes the white horse the monk rides throughout the story), where was I? Yes, Sand and Dragon were pretty much merged into one character and transformed into a green guy that dies if he gets too dry. Well... at least that lead to some comedy.
As for Monkey, our beloved Goku, in the novel he is pretty much assexual, a very helpful trait that allows him to avoid several traps laid down by monsters disguised as pretty women (Pig falls in every single one of them), but in this movie he seemed to be very interested in the ladies. Here he is also not as invincible as he is in the novel. Heck, the dude even dies here! In the book he defeated, by himself, thousands of soldiers from the armies of heaven and they literally had to call the Budha (a Budha? Sorry, I am not very familiar with religions) to defeat him. And even then, the best they could do was to imprison him inside a mountain (which is why the monk finds him inside one in the movie). And as if that wasn't bad enough, they went full Beauty And The Beast here and in the end Goku becomes a human!!!
The monk is the one that remained mostly the same. His essential traits are to walk blindly into traps and admonish Monkey everytime Monkey saves his life by killing an evil monster that is trying to kill him. So, yeah, I'd say this movie did a great job portraying the holy Monk.
And now that I've shown everybody how smart I am by listing those differences, let's talk about the movie's final battle. In the final battle Goku is stopped by fire, which is kind of related to a very famous passage of the novel. In fact, that passage is so famous that people made lots of movies and animations based entirely on it, but I digress... So, Goku is stopped by fire and then, when all seems lost, Pig opens a hole in the ceiling and the enemies are defeated by sunlight. "Were they vampires?", an astute viewer might ask. Nope. The filmmakers simply decided that sunlight would kill them and, when it touched them, they melted. Because.
Anyway, I wish my Japanese was way better than it is. I think I missed most of the dialogue based comedy. Hopefully one day we'll see a good subtitled version of this movie, but I am afraid that, just like it happened with the original novel, a lot of the comedy will be lost in the translation.
In the end, despite all the changes, I think this was a very cool adaptation and I am really glad that, with the help of
KaijusHunter, I was finally able to watch it.
If you liked this review, thank
KaijusHunter. He is the one who asked me to do it. He is awesome. If you hated it, blame
KaijusHunter, he is the one who asked me to do it. Stupid KaijusHunter...
And if anyone out there can speak Japanese and has a lot of free time in your hands, know that this movie is in need of your services. And even if you don't have a lot of free time, know that I would really, really love to be able to understand what exactly the characters were saying in that scene that lead to the Chinese Opera battle.
