Die Legende des Tigers

It's 2009 Hong Kong. Mrs. Lee and her baby grandson Tom are being chased by yaoguai. They are saved by the 12 Chinese Zodiac. Tom is the chosen one. It's 15 years later in San Francisco. Tom is now a bullied high school kid. His grandmother had kept his powers a secret. They are attacked by the wicked magician Loo who is after his Phoenix stone. The 12 Zodiac gather to protect the boy.

The story is pretty simple as in good versus evil. There is a thing to get. There is the boy savior. The difference is mostly the Chinese culture. I would use more generalized English terms for some of these Chinese things. I would definitely give some of the Zodiac better powers. For example, the rooster crows in the sunrise. Why not have him throw off rays of sunlight? Instead, he's throwing feathers like darts. The pig rolls in mud. Why not give him earth power or throwing around mud? It seems random that the monkey can shrink things. The monkey should be super-smart. So on and so on. Finally, it's a French animation company and they are at least a generation behind. The surface work and the designs are all a little off. It's lesser animation.

The Tiger's Apprentice is a mediocre book adaptation where it had good opportunities, but was not exactly as good as I would expect. It does have the right tools to be a good film with the direction the movie is going for with the respectable Chinese representation, decent animation, and action scenes being the best part. But it ended up being an easily forgettable film with a disappointingly dull and rushed story, weak looking human characters, and pretty bland characters. I know not everyone will have Paramount Plus and I agree that their exclusives aren't that great. So I won't see any rush to watch this one. I have never read the book, so I'll just say that maybe those that have read it may be interested in this. It is disappointing that Paramount is not releasing original animated films in theaters, but this one does feel like it fits for streaming.

Wow, that's bad.

Dialogue like "- Hey, you're the new girl. - Been a girl for a while now." already made me pause, like is that supposed to be a joke of some sort? But then there is the whole bullying theme, which is not only cliched, but also does not make sense. Bullies can find the littlest things to bully for, yes, but bullying for grandma making incenses?.. Them calling grandma a witch is understandable, but everything else felt extremely forced (and rushed).

Then there was also the choice of music... It's fine if that's not my style of music (Spider-Verse also has a few tracks that are not my thing), but it just did not fit in any way. I am a strong believer, that music needs to "match" the screen, so that it "expands" the scene, adds to it. When music sounds like an unnecessary noise - it's just poor taste.

These things, albeit minor, already made me want to drop this, but then I did a bit of search, in case I am missing a point, and maybe it will become good after awhile, but... Turned out they changed the premise from the original book. In the book the boy knew who he was (at least to an extent). This minute detail changes the character entirely, and there is absolutely no reason for that, considering that school (and thus bullying) took like 2 minutes of the whole runtime and did not make me relate to the character in any way.

This made me think, that this change, and probably dozens of others (I am assuming here) were done just to push some sort of agenda. No idea what kind of agenda, though, since I dropped it soon after Hu appeared and all his interactions seemed unnatural even for a supernatural being. Either way, I would rather read a book, since it's synopsis sounds way more interesting.

Oh and animation is meh, while the overall style is quite subpar. Probably expected, if it's low budget, though.

Tom is being bullied at school for being a freak. From the beginning it is clear he is no ordinary teenager. Off course, there was the opening of his grandmother fighting fantastical creatures, so yeah, it was pretty obvious.

And then one day Hu turns up at his Grandmother's, and soon after all hell breaks loose as they are being attacked by the same creatures we saw in the opening. Tom's grandmother is once again fighting off the creatures with all she's got, while Hu turns into a tiger.

Turns out Loo, the main antagonist, is after a Phoenix the grandmother wears around her neck. When the grandmother gave the Phoenix to Tom to guard and protect, I couldn't understand why she believed him to be capable of the task, especially since he had no knowledge of the stone or his past before this task was bestowed upon him.

Apparently the Phoenix was used to create humanity, and now Loo wants it to destroy humanity. Nothing is told of the origins of the Phoenix and the story itself wasn't all that well explained or justified. Loo came across as a villain purely for the sake of being a villain. I also didn't find Tom all too believable as the protagonist. Hu, on the other hand, would have been a far better prospect to protect the Phoenix. Only, I found him inconsistent. At times he was a great fighter, and at times he wasn't. He also seemed to randomly shapeshift into a tiger, for whatever reason. It made me wonder whether he was actually able to control his abilities.

We meet some of the other family members, who are all mystical or magical - dare I say - creatures, each with their own abilities. Together they fight the war against Loo and her army of creatures.

'The Tiger's Apprentice' is like an animated film on steroids. I mean this film bombards the viewer with so much going on at once that it was hard to follow the action. I found it overdone. Being an animated film, the intended demographic is kids no doubt, but I'm just wondering if kids will be able to understand this story?

This is a beautifully animated movie and worth seeing, but I doubt very much I will bother watching it again.

Anyone who has watched Kung Fu Panda, of course could see a parallel that a guy unexpectedly got chosen as a guardian of a stone like PO got chosen as the dragon warrior and then began his journey of becoming worthy, here Tom the recently appointed guardian has just known of his power but the movie doesn't spend much time delving into showing him polishing his skills, it's just there, he knows how to use it. Whereas Shifu preparing Po to be a Dragon Warrior has to be one of the most heartwarming master student moment, here they missed the mark. The movie just started and wanted to reach the end at that very moment without any character development.

Chinese mythology and the zodiacs are such rich in content, but barely explored. As someone wrote, it was pretty dumb downed. And casting so many ppl but giving them just bare minimal talking scope. Wastage of Michelle Yeoh and Sandra Oh, but they were stellar. Henry Golding did come through, he started weak but caught up later on. But most impressing was Bowen as Sid the Rat, too good.

The animation is not the best we have seen for last few years like The Spider Verse or Nimona or Blue Eye Samurai etc but loved the Tiger and using of Eye of the Tiger was interesting. And the human form of the Dragon was pretty amazingly drawn along with the Rat. The movie does have good background music.

I just wish the director explored the zodiacs more, it wasn't a theatre release and heard it got a delayed release, so i don't understand the rush they had to put on the screenplay instead of developing a full fledged mythological story.