Big Fish & Begonia

Right­ly hailed as a major step for­ward for Chi­nese ani­ma­tion, Big Fish & Bego­nia is a film that cross­es bor­ders and breaks through bound­aries. Unable to secure fund­ing via tra­di­tion­al means, direc­tors Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun turned to social media and crowd­fund­ing to help turn their 2004 flash short (of the same name) into a full feature.

Once pro­duc­tion was under­way, the bulk of the ani­ma­tion work was han­dled by the Kore­an com­pa­ny Stu­dio Mir, who worked on the Nick­elodeon series Leg­end of Kor­ra, and a melod­ic score was pro­vid­ed by Japan­ese com­pos­er Kiyoshi Yoshi­da. An inter­na­tion­al effort for a specif­i­cal­ly Chi­nese ani­ma­tion inspired by Taoist texts, local leg­ends and ancient mythology.

Deep under the sea, there’s a mys­ti­cal realm pop­u­lat­ed with divine beings who send their young into the human world as part of a com­ing-of-age rit­u­al. A girl named Chun cross­es over in the form of a red dol­phin, but an acci­dent involv­ing a young lad results in her being respon­si­ble for his death. Back home, she sets out to bend the rules of nature to bring the boy back to the land of the liv­ing, tak­ing a mid­night trip by nar­row boat across a sea of clouds, to make a dia­bol­i­cal bar­gain to reclaim the boy’s soul.

In inter­views, Liang and Zhang have cit­ed Hayao Miyaza­ki as a key influ­ence on their work, and it’s hard not to pick up on visu­al and nar­ra­tive con­nec­tions, con­scious or not, that put Big Fish & Bego­nia in a sim­i­lar aes­thet­ic land­scape to Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, from the mag­i­cal under­wa­ter world (and inter­species kin­ship between fish and boy) that recalls Ponyo, to the great blue expans­es of sea and sky, and sim­i­lar accents of colour, to the recent Ghi­b­li co-pro­duc­tion The Red Tur­tle.

That these com­par­isons come so eas­i­ly to mind con­firms that the direc­tors are onto some­thing. Like Spir­it­ed Away, their ful­ly-realised, mag­i­cal world is rich with beguil­ing and unnerv­ing detail, and their ani­ma­tion style utilis­es the form’s sur­re­al capa­bil­i­ties to often sin­is­ter effect. At one point, a char­ac­ter picks a stick insect out of a pot, only to duti­ful­ly pluck off its legs, strike a light, and stoke the poor thing into a cigarette.

Such busi­ness is spec­tac­u­lar­ly ren­dered, but the film’s myr­i­ad char­ac­ters, con­cepts and curi­ous flour­ish­es hang togeth­er loose­ly, like a dream – which is delight­ful in the moment, but some­thing of a con­found­ing slog once the sec­ond hour kicks in. You’re left puz­zled, won­der­ing why a char­ac­ter has just turned into a tree.

Big Fish & Bego­nia is released in the UK and Ire­land on 18 April.