Review by Red-Barracuda

This beautiful animated movie set in medieval China. A great painter called Wang-Fo is joined by a devoted acolyte Ling who is mesmerised by the great man's work. Wang-Fo's paintings make reality pale into significance. So much so that Ling's wife commits suicide as a result of feeling inferior to the spellbinding images Wang-Fo paints of her. The Emperor arrests them on the grounds that Wang-Fo's paintings have made him miserable because he now hates reality.

This both celebrates the power of art, while questioning that power. Wang-Fo creates images of extreme beauty but they ultimately leave devastation in the real world. The art work in this feature is very nice, the back drops in particular are stunning; they resemble traditional Japanese landscape art themselves. The tone is reflective, while the ending is very poetic. This is certainly a lovely feature.