Bai She: Yuan qi

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.

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.

I have read a lot reviews about this movie. And when it comes to Chinese movies, reviews more or less come with political bias. And I hope, my review can clear things up a bit. This is a well animated movie, for average movie goers the animation is more than acceptable. But does the animation reaches 2019 Pixar standards? No, the expression on the character is limited, specially on Ah Xuan. The skin and body lack elasticity and weight, and the cloth dynamic is weird. What stands out technical wise, is the background and sets. They are painstaking made to resemble traditional Chinese ink paintings. The animator took the full liberty of making the fight scene, they are a visual spectacle. Super-nature powers, light beams, mythical creatures fills up the screen at times, which may not be everybody's cup of tea. But sure is entertaining. There are complains about the storytelling element. For the Chinese, the story of white snake is one of the most well known fiery tells. It is like the story of Santa Claus or tooth fiery for the westerner. For that reason, the creators did skip the world building part, expecting the viewers can fill in the rest. It is also true that the tempo is sometimes slow for this movie, but after all, the white snake story was always a love story and not a action film. And the biggest controversy of this film, the sexual under tone. This movie features an animated kiss scene, sexy villain and implied sex scene. Some people are offended because they think CG animation are for Children. But this is a love story, more importantly in the fiery tell white snake was pregnant with Xu Xian's child. How do they have a Child without having sex? And I don't want to Discourage anyone, the sexual tone is a very minor part of this story. It kind of feel like 2D Disney style sexual tone.

In conclusion, great movie with a non-western story. I see you are a man of culture as well.

It was and felt good to see it. The animation was very good, right up there with the disney standards if not better. The story it seems is deep rooted in the chinese culture but otherwise too it made some impact. Nice, swashbuckling adventurous ballad for all ages. Once again, the animation was way up there with the leaders in the Market.

I'm not usually one for animated movies, let alone having to read them as well as way them. I literally could not take my eyes off the movie, the subtitles didn't even matter around 10 minutes into the movie. The graphics were great, the story was amazing, and actors although i couldn't understand them, still drove emotion into the characters that i ( a stern movie critic ) absolutely loved. I can't wait until there is a number 2 of this, and by heck i believe there should be. Thank you all for the movie, i thoroughly loved it.