Hua qian gu

One of the best fantasy drama. Zanilia Zhao and Wallace Huo gave great performances as the student and teacher who fell in forbidden love.

This epic tv series is about the incredible journey of a young girl whose heart is pure and filled with love. We all know that feeling of innocence when the distinction between right and wrong is crystal clear, just the way it was handed down to us by our ancestors. However, in an obsessive love story like that of Flower and her Immortal Superior Master, many prejudices will be destroyed and the line dividing good from evil often blurred or even crossed. The landscape, the misty and dreamy immortal highlands suspended in the sky as well as the demon headquarter, they all give you either a dreamy or a nightmarish feel. Fantasy and action are perfectly blended in this incredible journey where you really need to open your mind to destroy your preconceived believes about good and evil. The costumes, the architecture of the celestial buildings and even the Heavenly food have been carefully created for the purpose of this tv series. There is not a single detail which is left to chance. The CGI is good and there are tons of special effects and music to accompany each single moment of the journey. In the end I discovered that the opening song - which sounds as if it were sang by an angel - is in fact sang in turns by the two leading actors: Zanilia Zhao and Wallace Huo. The acting performance of the two brilliant lead characters is absolutely superb. To be honest, every single actor in the series did an outstanding job. In particular, I was really impressed by Danfeng Zhang, Ke Ma and Yuexi and the actor who played the Custodian of the Law (demon faction, I don't know his name). The romance is very profound and sometimes can get overwhelming for some but I promise you that if you manage to get to the end of the series, everything will make sense!

For the lovers of fantasy and romance, this is a true pearl!

Heart-wrenching and twisted, this drama is supposed to bring closer to life GuoGuo's story with the same name, "Hua Qian Gu".

The original story was meant to be about perseverance in love, being ready to go to extremes to the point of harming people, including oneself. As love may have various aspects, the book presents more than one: a master's care for his disciple, a best friend's feelings, a lover's desire, a brother's affection for his sister, parent-child attachments. Though all of these kinds of affection are strong and beautiful, the author's idea is that most people will prefer the figure of the wise and powerful master, the evolved being everyone would admire, even if only from afar.

However, what the drama offers is an incredibly fuzzy definition of a master, an unusually dumb and stressed automaton operating on a set of rules "known to work", incapable of real kindness - be it towards the whole world or towards his disciple. The very concept of reaching immortality through a suppression of feelings or emotions becomes questionable watching the interpretation of this master, Bai Zi Hua. As the plot unfolds, it is increasingly more difficult to sympathize with him, his character becomes more and more unlikable. There is nothing appealing in Bai Zi Hua. One starts with being on his side, as the grand master of the most powerful of the righteous sects, and gradually slips into the dark side, rooting for the demon lord. In contrast, the demon lord appears truly commanding, powerful and surprisingly humane. He looks indeed like a superior being while Bai Zi Hua seems to be a broken robot, lacking both emotions and force. The demon lord is considered the top of evilness yet he is capable of genuine kindness. All of his words and gestures feel real. The spectator is left wondering whether the director actually intended Bai Zi Hua to act like a piece of furniture or he got the male protagonist wrong. The so-called attraction of the heroine to her master is incredibly hard to believe and at a certain point the story just flops. The last two chapters had better have been omitted. The ending proposed to the series seems far-fetched if not plain wrong.

All in all this drama makes a good case for not painting the world in black and white or wrong and right, keeping an open mind and the value of being kind. "What a true master is like" is probably the subject of other dramas.