White Snake

The legend of the white snake is a family-know fairly tale among the Chinese people. I have already seen many editions about the love story between lady White snake and the Dr. Xu. But there are only few words describing why Lady W fall in love with her boy friend. In this movie, the screen writer successfully combined the legend of white snake and another famous classic novel - the story of snake catchers. I think it is a great idea. in addition, the film scenes are fantastic and the characters are beautiful. 9/10 is a reasonable grade for it.

The animation was excellent. It was visually stunning to sit there and watch the animation go by, which works well for me because I don't speak the language and I don't like to read and watch animation. Overall, a great experience.

1. Animation quality was uncharacteristically quite good for a Chinese animation. Backgrounds were more detailed than usual, except lower rating because they were static unmoving. Foreground central character/scenes were quite realistic in some respects such as hair & movement, except facial & other main details were 2-D flat. 2. English voicing was quite good possibly using Hong Kong educated voice actors - not sure. 3. Storyline was exceptional. An actual historic myth slightly modified to be movie appealing to most audiences (younger viewers may not like the violence). Very creative, seldom seen twists 'n' turns. China has many myths that translate well as animations and I hope this production crew continues with more such stories.

At first I thought this was a condensed alternate retelling of the Legend of White Snake main story, but by the end they make it obvious this is a prequel, this is just a "past life" of our main characters. The main story is what you can see in the 36-episode 2019 TV series "The Legend of White Snake".

The CGI here is excellent in terms of still-image look, but when animated it suffers from excessive speed, especially during combat scenes, and from a lack of weight of most characters and objects - everything lands like a feather on top of everything else, there is no impact, nothing has weight, which makes it less believable. Then there are some weird choices with oversexualizing the female characters in some scenes, and even the male character at one point, even though it's supposedly done as a joke. OTOH there was also some Disney-style comic relief thrown in, which also seemed out of place in an essentially Chinese production.

The plot is not too coherent or compelling but it works, and the main love story is also unconvincing, with no real chemistry between the two, but for me this was fine - I had already seen the main story in the TV series, and that had more than enough chemistry going on, and in a perfect family-friendly winter season PG-13 type presentation.

"Bai She 2" from 2021 you can just ignore, it's a complete perversion with cars and motorcycles, the true sequel to this movie is the 2019 Legend of White Snake TV series.

Recently I saw a Chinese animated film "Bai She". I give this movie a 10/10. I loved it. It was beautiful, entertaining, sexy, a sophisticated animated film intended for adults. The quality of the animation was superb. I was truly blown away. I don't think I've ever seen an animated film as good as this. I hope that everyone around the world gets a chance to see "Bai She"!