Time to take a trip back into Light Chaser Animation’s universe of steampunk mysticism with a new New Gods feature. And this one actually made it into cinemas over here, instead of going straight to Netflix, and with the kind of visual aesthetics Light Chaser are chasing after here, that is one hell of a good move on their part.
While this doesn’t lean as much into the dieselpunk side of things like Nezha Reborn did, there’s still a lot of weirdo-industrial tones to the world-building, with its initial focus on bounty hunters journeying across the Mortal and Immortal Realms on airships powered by Cosmic Gas. The attention to mechanical detail here, from the ships to the cities to the ancient temples, looks as good as ever, as do the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure-style fight scenes between the reincarnated gods, demons, and anthropomorphic animals. Hell, once it gets to showing the Yin-Yang Scroll, I’d argue that this outdoes Nezha Reborn for sheer animation prowess, looking like something pulled out of a Doctor Strange movie.
As for the
story, while Yang Jian is also a character in Investiture Of The Gods, much as
Nezha was, this seems to take more inspiration from the Chinese folk story of the
Magic Lotus Lantern… albeit with some major tweaks here and there. It involves
Yang Jian, one of the bounty hunters, being sent after Chenxiang, a young thief
who is going after the pieces of the Lotus Lantern. While all three of those
elements are present in the original tale, the alignments have been shifted here,
with Yang Jian as more of a casual and aloof Spike Spiegel-esque figure (right
down to the jazz influence present in the soundtrack), rather than a figure of
authority as in antiquity. It still centres on the conflict between him and Chenxiang, but there's less of a clear 'good guy vs. bad guy' angle to it.
Even without prior reading of the source material, its place as subversion of an older story shows through in how it emphasises the role of Sanshengmu, having her openly question the position women take in these kinds of stories. She was imprisoned in a mountain for marrying a mortal in the original, but is given a bit more agency here which leads to, weirdly enough, a even more mythic tone as her connection to both Yang Jian and Chenxiang becomes clear.
Of course, describing it as ‘clear’ might be pushing it, as it’s quite astonishing just how convoluted this film gets after a while. For the first two-thirds, it works out quite nicely, following Yang Jian and his crew as they hunt after their bounty, but once it starts trying to properly introduce twists into its own story (as opposed to just variations on the source material), it actually started to lose me after a bit. It being delivered as raw exposition dialogue probably didn’t help, but the extent to which it keeps trying to bend and warp character alignments within the space of a single conversation gets more than a little ridiculous, which ends up hindering the film’s attempts at emotionality during the finale.
But that’s nothing all that new for this franchise; I mean, Nezha Reborn was also a bit undercooked narratively, but skated by on how well its design elements fitted together. Except, because this film is even more invested in trying to get the audience invested in its story and its characters, it’s not as easy to overlook the story problems this time around. Especially when what I can make out shows that some serious effort has been put into recontextualising not just the Magic Lantern story, but bits and pieces from a bunch of other historical interpretations of the title character.
Which is quite a shame, as this manages to both underperform the original in story structure and outperform it with the animation quality. I’m certainly interested in seeing where this franchise goes from here, and my hang-ups with this film could possibly be cleared up with a rewatch (and with how good it looks, I’m not discounting that happening), but I’m hoping that what follows will be a bit more cohesive than this.
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