Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (1979)

[Drunk Monk]

Researching Nezha brought me to this classic animated film. It's astonishingly good. Vibrant color schemes, surreal hand drawn animation, swordfights (between shellfish no less), a unique style of bsckgrounds based on classic Chinese landscape painting, The story is the same as what is told in Ne Zha 1 + 2, but a completely different interpretation of many of the characters, especially Nezha. Ne Zha 2025 is a brat punk. Nezha 1979 is a beautiful prepubescent boy that's all powerful, mischeivious and dances about a lot. He is also bare assed for most of the film. He emerges from an egg that his mom carried for 3 years, rising on a lotus blosson, and he takes a petal and throws it up and it transforms into one of those red bandanas babies wear over the front of their bodies. But there's no back but strings. Bare assed. Not sure what message that's sendung. The music vacillated between sort of a classical orchestral sound akin to old Diseny films of the period and classic Chinese opera for the battle scenes, plus a few more. There's this traditional opera battle sound - tinny claning cymbals and big drums with a stringed pipa (?). There were also long gratuitous scenes of Nezha dancing to classical opera, also praticng his magic weapons or riding his deer mount. There's an oddly long shot of Nezha's dad Li Jing playing guzhen - that's a beautiful segment musically but the animateion didn't quite work. The film kept me guessing as where it might go next and there were many scenes that had a lovely vintage style to them. I confess that I haven't seen that much Chinese animation from the 70s & 80s. Honestly the only thing that comes to mind is this - http://www.brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomFor...p?tid=7753. This was the first feature length animated film for China, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. It was creened out of competition at Cannes in 1980 and was a Google Doodle in 2014 (35th anniversary)

Overall, very enjoyable in that artsy postcard from another era of animation way. Recommended for Nezha fans. 

Seen on the Internet Archive.  https://archive.org/details/nezha-conque...ragon-king