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Review: Legend of the Demon Cat (妖貓傳) (2017)
This movie was okay. I understand why it would have drawn attention at the time of release. To me, this movie retained traits of some of the mediocre late 2000s/early 2010s Chinese historical films, and that was why I couldn’t really enjoy it fully. That being said, it was not terrible. Which is why I would still rate it as okay.
Spoilers.
Story
This was a mystery story. One of our detectives was Bai Juyi (courtesy name Bai Letian), at the time still a scribe. The other was Kukai, a Japanese monk invited to exorcise the Emperor, who eventually died of a mysterious curse. Bai Juyi at the time of this story was still writing the Song of Everlasting Regret, one of his famous poems about the Emperor and his beloved Consort Yang. He wanted to get down to the truth and I guess Kukai was along for the ride.
A demon cat had made a deal with the wife of Chen Yunqiao, a commander. From then on, Chen Yunqiao became very rich. Kukai and Bai Letian tracked down this demon cat, and found out they had been buried with Consort Yang and was now on a path to exact revenge on those who caused her death. The cat then possessed Chen Yunqiao so that he would kill his wife Chunqin, and then Chen Yunqiao then went insane.
Bai Letian and Kukai tracked down a Japanese scholar Abe who had documented what had happened during the death of Consort Yang. During the An Lushan rebellion, the Emperor was forced to execute Consort Yang. The Emperor had asked Abe to take Consort Yang to Japan but she declined. Huang He, an illusionist, told the Emperor about an acupuncture technique that would mimic the effects of death, but the person could be later revived. Consort Yang agreed to this procedure. However, after she was put to “sleep,” she was buried, with no intention of being revived. The illusionist’s trick was only to trick Consort Yang into agreeing. Huang He’s son, Dan Long, told Huang He’s adoptive son, Bai Long, that there had been poison slipped into Consort Yang’s drink to ensure her death.
Dan Long and Bai Long sought out Consort Yang’s tomb. Grieved, Bai Long transferred his soul into the cat that was buried with Consort Yang so that she would not be alone. Bai Long was also that demon cat that sought revenge on all those who had caused Consort Yang’s death, for three generations.
Bai Letian and Kukai went to the place that Consort Yang’s body had been moved. Bai Long met them there. An illusionist that was seen in the market also arrived, revealing himself to be Dan Long. Dan Long had moved Bai Long’s human body next to Consort Yang’s body, but Bai Long was too weak to return to his own body.
Bai Letian and Kukai return to their lives. Bai Letian had quit his job at the beginning of the movie to pursue poetry full time. As for Kukai, he had been sent by his master to Tang China to find a sutra at a monastery. Kukai went there, and found that Dan Long was a monk there.
The story was very fast-paced, especially in the beginning when it was trying to establish the setting and all of the relations. However, as a whole, I think the pacing of this movie suffered in the same way that the mediocre late 2000s/early 2010s historical Chinese movies did. I’m reminded of the Detective Dee movies, where I just didn’t feel any excitement as the characters went from one event to the next. They were just doing things, without pauses or stops to emphasize the important hints that they had collected.
I think it was a major copout for a huge chunk of the story to be told through a narrative flashback from Abe’s diary. It kind of goes against the point of a mystery.
The reveal was alright. I was actually quite interested when I realized the relation that Dan Long and Bai Long had to Consort Yang and the mystery. Connecting everything back to Bai Long could have been boring, but I think by giving more backstory to Dan Long and Bai Long, it added a human element that made it make sense as to why Bai Long would have been so devoted to Consort Yang. However, they were introduced kind of late, and we only knew about them from Abe’s diaries. We’d met Dan Long as a streetside illusionist but maybe some other clues would have made the reveal cooler.
I guess my first gripe with the story would come back to the fact that there was so much going on. I felt like the pacing was very fast but too consistently so. Chen Kaige never slowed down too much to emphasize the human parts, and it might have been because he just had so much to get through. And while the characters of Bai Letian and Kukai could have been rather iconic, I didn’t think we had enough time to give them style.
About dialogue. It bothered me that so many of the reveals were spoken. For example, much about the past was revealed through Abe’s diary which I again found to be a copout. As well, the demon cat being identified as Bai Long just came out of nowhere. How did Bai Letian and Kukai know that he was Bai Long? How come they didn’t think he was Dan Long?
Overall, story was okay in substance, not so good in execution.
Production
So like I said, this movie was really fast, especially at the beginning. The camera also moved very quickly which was what made this movie feel even faster. I felt like Chen Kaige was allergic to static frames as the camera was always movie. The fast moving camera sometimes worked, and sometimes it distracted. The constantly-moving camera distracted me from the dialogue. Not that I thought it was the most well-written, but a lot of the movie was told in exposition so you still had to pay attention to it.
There were a lot of high angle and low angle shots. Some worked and some didn’t work. Chen Kaige very much wanted to show off this city that he had built, but it became distracting. For example, in an earlier part of the movie, Bai Juyi and Kukai were walking through a structure while conversing. They walked from a street, through a series of connected structures, back out onto the street. I know that that was just an excuse for Chen Kaige to show off all of the pretty buildings, but for me it felt unnecessary. I had thought that they were going into a house to do something, so when they went back out onto the street I was confused. Actually, there were a lot of flashy shots that we only saw for brief moments, and the fact that Chen Kaige wanted to show it all off also contributed to the rushed pacing of this movie.
I also thought there was some weird blocking going on. In the very first scene when Chunqin saw the demon cat, she was afraid of him, understandably so. However, she ran into the house, past the cat, to get away from him. They should have placed the cat elsewhere so that she could run safely to her house.
There was some odd CGI going on, again reminiscent of the Chinese historical movies of nearly a decade earlier. I guess it was expected that there would be a lot of CGI in a story about supernatural elements. It was just sometimes kind of distracting.
I do also have to comment on the aesthetics. I’m going to say it: The Longest Day in Chang’an did it better. Part of it was probably just that the Longest Day in Chang’an as a drama had a much longer screentime to show off the costumes and sets. But I think the lighting for Legend of the Demon Cat made all the colours look the same. No matter how vibrant the clothes were, I could not feel it. And while the Longest Day in Chang’an had a similar colour grading going on, it also gave characters very bright popping colours to give us a better sense of character.
Characters
Bai Juyi/Bai Letian
Bai Letian was one of our main detectives. He was a scribe for the Emperor, but he revealed that his intentions of taking this position was purely so that he could learn more about the Emperor in order to write his great poem, the Song of Everlasting Regret, which is a famous poem in Chinese history. After the Emperor passed away, Bai Letian quit his job. However, he continued sleuthing because he needed to know the truth.
Bai Letian was supposed to be the more emotional and outspoken half of the detective duo, though it didn’t come across too well because both characters were not very established. Once again, there was so much content to get through that our characters were far too focused on sleuthing so we didn’t know much about Bai Letian other than his need to know the truth for his poem. Bai Letian was a decent guy, not a scumbag, but it was hard to say anything else about him. In the end, Bai Letian continued working on his poem.
I like Huang Xuan a lot as an actor but unfortunately he has poor luck in choosing great scripts. I’d say that he did as good a job as he could in this movie. Like I said, it just didn’t give him a lot of opportunity to be a character as opposed to a plot device.
Kukai/Konghai
Kukai was a Japanese monk who had been invited to exorcise the Emperor. He later revealed that it was his master who had been invited. However, his master was old and weak so he sent Kukai instead, and also asked him to go to the Great Qinglong Temple to retrieve a sutra.
Kukai was unable to exorcise the Emperor, but when he died, he’d heard the demon cat and that was how he and Bai Letian began their sleuthing. As mentioned, Kukai was portrayed as the calmer and more reserved of the two. However, he was also portrayed as a monk with vices, such as visiting the courtesan house and dancing with the ladies. While I appreciate the attempt to make him a fun guy, I didn’t feel very convinced. If I had to compare, I felt that Wu Xin in Wu Xin: The Monster Killer was a more convincing interpretation of a monk with vices and that was because Wu Xin picked and chose which parts of religion he took seriously, which was the demon catching part. For Kukai, I guess I didn’t really know him as a monk but more as just a guy. When Kukai was going to the courtesan house and pleased about it, it didn’t feel like he was a monk at all.
Kukai had interactions with a street illusionist, later revealed to be Dan Long. Kukai had not fallen for his illusions, guessing that only one of his watermelons was real. However, he later realized that Dan Long was a great illusionist from how the watermelon would shift back and forth from a bloody fish.
At the end of the movie, Kukai went to the Great Qinglong Temple to seek the sutra for his master and found Dan Long there and asked him for the sutra. It was kind of a weird way to end the movie and I’m not sure if it was because it was supposed to be a set up for a sequel.
Kukai didn’t vibe like a monk to me I guess. Even if he had vices, there would have been parts of him that was serious about the life, and those parts of him just didn’t really stick out to me.
Chen Yunqiao
Yunqiao was a commander whose wife had made a deal with the demon cat for riches. Soon afterward, he became very popular, though his servants gossiped about the deal with the demon cat.
Yunqiao’s connection with the case was that his father was part of the plot to kill Consort Yang. Bai Long’s revenge would last three generations, and that was why Yunqiao was on his hit list.
The demon cat possessed Yunqiao so that he would kill his own wife, and afterwards, Yunqiao lost his mind.
Chunqin
Chunqin was Yunqiao’s wife. He was the one who made a deal with the demon cat and found lots of money. Later on the demon cat possessed Chunqin. He then projected her visage onto the roof and recited a poem that Li Bai had written, and that was what prompted Bai Letian and Kukai to research that poem.
In Chunqin’s body, Bai Letian and Kukai conversed with the demon cat, who revealed that they had been buried with Consort Yang.
After Yunqiao was possessed by the demon cat, he killed Chunqin.
Emperor Xuanzong
Emperor Xuanzong was the famed Emperor who was in love with Consort Yang, and the fact that the dynasty was in ruins was blamed on his infatuation with Consort Yang. In this movie, Xuanzong was portrayed as not the brightest.
Xuanzong was forced by An Lushan to kill Consort Yang. He had asked Abe to take Consort Yang with him to Japan but she refused. Xuanzong knew that Abe was in love with Consort Yang, and had been possessive of her in front of him before, but I guess he trusted Abe to take care of her.
After she refused, Huang He showed Xuanzong a technique that would put Consort Yang in a coma to appear dead to the world. Xuanzong agreed to this, but it was revealed that he knew that it was fake and that he had agreed to have her killed.
Though Xuanzong was remorseful and aggrieved, Bai Long as the demon cat did not forgive him, and cursed him.
Consort Yang
Consort Yang was shown briefly. We didn’t see too much of her love with Xuanzong but I think we can assume that they had a good relationship.
We saw her in a more human sense when she spoke to Dan Long and Bai Long. They had found her hair accessory and returned it to her. In their conversation, it was revealed that both Consort Yang and Bai Long were not raised by their parents. I think Bai Long sort of had an inferiority complex about it, but Consort Yang understood his mentality completely and that was why he was so devoted to her.
Consort Yang refused to go to Japan with Abe, probably wanting to stay with Xuanzong to the end. When the false death scheme was presented to her, I wonder if Consort Yang truly believed it. I got the sense that she had resigned herself to death, but it was presented that she wanted to live and had agreed to the scheme.
However, it appears that the poison didn’t truly work and she did awaken while in the coffin. She screamed and scratched against the top of the coffin but Bailong, in the cat’s body, couldn’t move the top and that was how Consort Yang died.
Abe
Abe was a diplomat from Japan who had fallen in love with Consort Yang and wrote in his diary about her. His widow remained in Tang China and Kukai and Bai Letian retrieved Abe’s diary from her.
Xuanzong seemed to know that Abe was in love with Consort Yang and remained possessive over her in front of him. He asked Abe to smuggle Consort Yang out under pressure from An Lushan but Consort Yang refused.
Huang He
Huang He was an illusionist, the father of Dan Long and adoptive father to Bai Long. He was the one who presented the “false death” trick to Xuanzong, though he had in secret revealed to the Emperor that it was not true.
Dan Long
Dan Long was Huang He’s son. I have a gripe about his character design. If he’s Dan Long, why is he the blue one?! Dan 丹 is a kind of red. This bothered me so much because it confused me. They should have just switched the colours because blue feels closer to white than red.
Dan Long teased Bai Long about not being his father’s son, but I think in the end he did consider them brothers. There was a rift between them when they found out about Consort Yang’s death. Dan Long revealed that there was poison in the wine that Consort Yang had drank that was supposed to kill her but didn’t.
While Dan Long left Consort Yang’s tomb, Bai Long did not. He became the street illusionist that we saw earlier in the movie, who was quite powerful. Dan Long and Bai Long united towards the end of the movie. Dan Long had brought Bai Long’s body for him to resume, but Bai Long could not.
At the end of the movie, Dan Long was found as a monk at the Great Qinglong temple.
Bai Long
Bai Long’s father was a gambler and had sold his son to Huang He. He and Dan Long became the flying crane brothers. Bai Long was touched by Consort Yang’s kindness and sympathy. She understood how it felt to be in the care of someone who was not your parents, to feel both grateful but beholden. But Consort Yang encouraged him by telling him that only with Dan Long and Bai Long together would they be the flying crane brothers.
Bai Long was very aggrieved by Consort Yang’s death. He felt betrayed by Huang He and also Dan Long for not telling him. I think he absorbed some of the damage that had happened to Consort Yang’s body into his own, and then transferred his soul to the black cat that had been left in her tomb.
Then, Bai Long went on a journey of revenge. He would take revenge on those who killed Consort Yang for three generations. So that was why he cursed Xuanzong and his son. It was also why he drove Chen Yunqiao mad.
Themes
I guess revenge might be a theme, in the sense that it was the reason for all of this happening. On its own, it would not have been a strong theme. But I was surprised by the relationship between Consort Yang and Bai Long and I think that if it was expanded on a bit more, it would have been even more convincing.
Overall
Ok movie. Not great, not terrible. Just ok.
Spoilers.
Story
This was a mystery story. One of our detectives was Bai Juyi (courtesy name Bai Letian), at the time still a scribe. The other was Kukai, a Japanese monk invited to exorcise the Emperor, who eventually died of a mysterious curse. Bai Juyi at the time of this story was still writing the Song of Everlasting Regret, one of his famous poems about the Emperor and his beloved Consort Yang. He wanted to get down to the truth and I guess Kukai was along for the ride.
A demon cat had made a deal with the wife of Chen Yunqiao, a commander. From then on, Chen Yunqiao became very rich. Kukai and Bai Letian tracked down this demon cat, and found out they had been buried with Consort Yang and was now on a path to exact revenge on those who caused her death. The cat then possessed Chen Yunqiao so that he would kill his wife Chunqin, and then Chen Yunqiao then went insane.
Bai Letian and Kukai tracked down a Japanese scholar Abe who had documented what had happened during the death of Consort Yang. During the An Lushan rebellion, the Emperor was forced to execute Consort Yang. The Emperor had asked Abe to take Consort Yang to Japan but she declined. Huang He, an illusionist, told the Emperor about an acupuncture technique that would mimic the effects of death, but the person could be later revived. Consort Yang agreed to this procedure. However, after she was put to “sleep,” she was buried, with no intention of being revived. The illusionist’s trick was only to trick Consort Yang into agreeing. Huang He’s son, Dan Long, told Huang He’s adoptive son, Bai Long, that there had been poison slipped into Consort Yang’s drink to ensure her death.
Dan Long and Bai Long sought out Consort Yang’s tomb. Grieved, Bai Long transferred his soul into the cat that was buried with Consort Yang so that she would not be alone. Bai Long was also that demon cat that sought revenge on all those who had caused Consort Yang’s death, for three generations.
Bai Letian and Kukai went to the place that Consort Yang’s body had been moved. Bai Long met them there. An illusionist that was seen in the market also arrived, revealing himself to be Dan Long. Dan Long had moved Bai Long’s human body next to Consort Yang’s body, but Bai Long was too weak to return to his own body.
Bai Letian and Kukai return to their lives. Bai Letian had quit his job at the beginning of the movie to pursue poetry full time. As for Kukai, he had been sent by his master to Tang China to find a sutra at a monastery. Kukai went there, and found that Dan Long was a monk there.
The story was very fast-paced, especially in the beginning when it was trying to establish the setting and all of the relations. However, as a whole, I think the pacing of this movie suffered in the same way that the mediocre late 2000s/early 2010s historical Chinese movies did. I’m reminded of the Detective Dee movies, where I just didn’t feel any excitement as the characters went from one event to the next. They were just doing things, without pauses or stops to emphasize the important hints that they had collected.
I think it was a major copout for a huge chunk of the story to be told through a narrative flashback from Abe’s diary. It kind of goes against the point of a mystery.
The reveal was alright. I was actually quite interested when I realized the relation that Dan Long and Bai Long had to Consort Yang and the mystery. Connecting everything back to Bai Long could have been boring, but I think by giving more backstory to Dan Long and Bai Long, it added a human element that made it make sense as to why Bai Long would have been so devoted to Consort Yang. However, they were introduced kind of late, and we only knew about them from Abe’s diaries. We’d met Dan Long as a streetside illusionist but maybe some other clues would have made the reveal cooler.
I guess my first gripe with the story would come back to the fact that there was so much going on. I felt like the pacing was very fast but too consistently so. Chen Kaige never slowed down too much to emphasize the human parts, and it might have been because he just had so much to get through. And while the characters of Bai Letian and Kukai could have been rather iconic, I didn’t think we had enough time to give them style.
About dialogue. It bothered me that so many of the reveals were spoken. For example, much about the past was revealed through Abe’s diary which I again found to be a copout. As well, the demon cat being identified as Bai Long just came out of nowhere. How did Bai Letian and Kukai know that he was Bai Long? How come they didn’t think he was Dan Long?
Overall, story was okay in substance, not so good in execution.
Production
So like I said, this movie was really fast, especially at the beginning. The camera also moved very quickly which was what made this movie feel even faster. I felt like Chen Kaige was allergic to static frames as the camera was always movie. The fast moving camera sometimes worked, and sometimes it distracted. The constantly-moving camera distracted me from the dialogue. Not that I thought it was the most well-written, but a lot of the movie was told in exposition so you still had to pay attention to it.
There were a lot of high angle and low angle shots. Some worked and some didn’t work. Chen Kaige very much wanted to show off this city that he had built, but it became distracting. For example, in an earlier part of the movie, Bai Juyi and Kukai were walking through a structure while conversing. They walked from a street, through a series of connected structures, back out onto the street. I know that that was just an excuse for Chen Kaige to show off all of the pretty buildings, but for me it felt unnecessary. I had thought that they were going into a house to do something, so when they went back out onto the street I was confused. Actually, there were a lot of flashy shots that we only saw for brief moments, and the fact that Chen Kaige wanted to show it all off also contributed to the rushed pacing of this movie.
I also thought there was some weird blocking going on. In the very first scene when Chunqin saw the demon cat, she was afraid of him, understandably so. However, she ran into the house, past the cat, to get away from him. They should have placed the cat elsewhere so that she could run safely to her house.
There was some odd CGI going on, again reminiscent of the Chinese historical movies of nearly a decade earlier. I guess it was expected that there would be a lot of CGI in a story about supernatural elements. It was just sometimes kind of distracting.
I do also have to comment on the aesthetics. I’m going to say it: The Longest Day in Chang’an did it better. Part of it was probably just that the Longest Day in Chang’an as a drama had a much longer screentime to show off the costumes and sets. But I think the lighting for Legend of the Demon Cat made all the colours look the same. No matter how vibrant the clothes were, I could not feel it. And while the Longest Day in Chang’an had a similar colour grading going on, it also gave characters very bright popping colours to give us a better sense of character.
Characters
Bai Juyi/Bai Letian
Bai Letian was one of our main detectives. He was a scribe for the Emperor, but he revealed that his intentions of taking this position was purely so that he could learn more about the Emperor in order to write his great poem, the Song of Everlasting Regret, which is a famous poem in Chinese history. After the Emperor passed away, Bai Letian quit his job. However, he continued sleuthing because he needed to know the truth.
Bai Letian was supposed to be the more emotional and outspoken half of the detective duo, though it didn’t come across too well because both characters were not very established. Once again, there was so much content to get through that our characters were far too focused on sleuthing so we didn’t know much about Bai Letian other than his need to know the truth for his poem. Bai Letian was a decent guy, not a scumbag, but it was hard to say anything else about him. In the end, Bai Letian continued working on his poem.
I like Huang Xuan a lot as an actor but unfortunately he has poor luck in choosing great scripts. I’d say that he did as good a job as he could in this movie. Like I said, it just didn’t give him a lot of opportunity to be a character as opposed to a plot device.
Kukai/Konghai
Kukai was a Japanese monk who had been invited to exorcise the Emperor. He later revealed that it was his master who had been invited. However, his master was old and weak so he sent Kukai instead, and also asked him to go to the Great Qinglong Temple to retrieve a sutra.
Kukai was unable to exorcise the Emperor, but when he died, he’d heard the demon cat and that was how he and Bai Letian began their sleuthing. As mentioned, Kukai was portrayed as the calmer and more reserved of the two. However, he was also portrayed as a monk with vices, such as visiting the courtesan house and dancing with the ladies. While I appreciate the attempt to make him a fun guy, I didn’t feel very convinced. If I had to compare, I felt that Wu Xin in Wu Xin: The Monster Killer was a more convincing interpretation of a monk with vices and that was because Wu Xin picked and chose which parts of religion he took seriously, which was the demon catching part. For Kukai, I guess I didn’t really know him as a monk but more as just a guy. When Kukai was going to the courtesan house and pleased about it, it didn’t feel like he was a monk at all.
Kukai had interactions with a street illusionist, later revealed to be Dan Long. Kukai had not fallen for his illusions, guessing that only one of his watermelons was real. However, he later realized that Dan Long was a great illusionist from how the watermelon would shift back and forth from a bloody fish.
At the end of the movie, Kukai went to the Great Qinglong Temple to seek the sutra for his master and found Dan Long there and asked him for the sutra. It was kind of a weird way to end the movie and I’m not sure if it was because it was supposed to be a set up for a sequel.
Kukai didn’t vibe like a monk to me I guess. Even if he had vices, there would have been parts of him that was serious about the life, and those parts of him just didn’t really stick out to me.
Chen Yunqiao
Yunqiao was a commander whose wife had made a deal with the demon cat for riches. Soon afterward, he became very popular, though his servants gossiped about the deal with the demon cat.
Yunqiao’s connection with the case was that his father was part of the plot to kill Consort Yang. Bai Long’s revenge would last three generations, and that was why Yunqiao was on his hit list.
The demon cat possessed Yunqiao so that he would kill his own wife, and afterwards, Yunqiao lost his mind.
Chunqin
Chunqin was Yunqiao’s wife. He was the one who made a deal with the demon cat and found lots of money. Later on the demon cat possessed Chunqin. He then projected her visage onto the roof and recited a poem that Li Bai had written, and that was what prompted Bai Letian and Kukai to research that poem.
In Chunqin’s body, Bai Letian and Kukai conversed with the demon cat, who revealed that they had been buried with Consort Yang.
After Yunqiao was possessed by the demon cat, he killed Chunqin.
Emperor Xuanzong
Emperor Xuanzong was the famed Emperor who was in love with Consort Yang, and the fact that the dynasty was in ruins was blamed on his infatuation with Consort Yang. In this movie, Xuanzong was portrayed as not the brightest.
Xuanzong was forced by An Lushan to kill Consort Yang. He had asked Abe to take Consort Yang with him to Japan but she refused. Xuanzong knew that Abe was in love with Consort Yang, and had been possessive of her in front of him before, but I guess he trusted Abe to take care of her.
After she refused, Huang He showed Xuanzong a technique that would put Consort Yang in a coma to appear dead to the world. Xuanzong agreed to this, but it was revealed that he knew that it was fake and that he had agreed to have her killed.
Though Xuanzong was remorseful and aggrieved, Bai Long as the demon cat did not forgive him, and cursed him.
Consort Yang
Consort Yang was shown briefly. We didn’t see too much of her love with Xuanzong but I think we can assume that they had a good relationship.
We saw her in a more human sense when she spoke to Dan Long and Bai Long. They had found her hair accessory and returned it to her. In their conversation, it was revealed that both Consort Yang and Bai Long were not raised by their parents. I think Bai Long sort of had an inferiority complex about it, but Consort Yang understood his mentality completely and that was why he was so devoted to her.
Consort Yang refused to go to Japan with Abe, probably wanting to stay with Xuanzong to the end. When the false death scheme was presented to her, I wonder if Consort Yang truly believed it. I got the sense that she had resigned herself to death, but it was presented that she wanted to live and had agreed to the scheme.
However, it appears that the poison didn’t truly work and she did awaken while in the coffin. She screamed and scratched against the top of the coffin but Bailong, in the cat’s body, couldn’t move the top and that was how Consort Yang died.
Abe
Abe was a diplomat from Japan who had fallen in love with Consort Yang and wrote in his diary about her. His widow remained in Tang China and Kukai and Bai Letian retrieved Abe’s diary from her.
Xuanzong seemed to know that Abe was in love with Consort Yang and remained possessive over her in front of him. He asked Abe to smuggle Consort Yang out under pressure from An Lushan but Consort Yang refused.
Huang He
Huang He was an illusionist, the father of Dan Long and adoptive father to Bai Long. He was the one who presented the “false death” trick to Xuanzong, though he had in secret revealed to the Emperor that it was not true.
Dan Long
Dan Long was Huang He’s son. I have a gripe about his character design. If he’s Dan Long, why is he the blue one?! Dan 丹 is a kind of red. This bothered me so much because it confused me. They should have just switched the colours because blue feels closer to white than red.
Dan Long teased Bai Long about not being his father’s son, but I think in the end he did consider them brothers. There was a rift between them when they found out about Consort Yang’s death. Dan Long revealed that there was poison in the wine that Consort Yang had drank that was supposed to kill her but didn’t.
While Dan Long left Consort Yang’s tomb, Bai Long did not. He became the street illusionist that we saw earlier in the movie, who was quite powerful. Dan Long and Bai Long united towards the end of the movie. Dan Long had brought Bai Long’s body for him to resume, but Bai Long could not.
At the end of the movie, Dan Long was found as a monk at the Great Qinglong temple.
Bai Long
Bai Long’s father was a gambler and had sold his son to Huang He. He and Dan Long became the flying crane brothers. Bai Long was touched by Consort Yang’s kindness and sympathy. She understood how it felt to be in the care of someone who was not your parents, to feel both grateful but beholden. But Consort Yang encouraged him by telling him that only with Dan Long and Bai Long together would they be the flying crane brothers.
Bai Long was very aggrieved by Consort Yang’s death. He felt betrayed by Huang He and also Dan Long for not telling him. I think he absorbed some of the damage that had happened to Consort Yang’s body into his own, and then transferred his soul to the black cat that had been left in her tomb.
Then, Bai Long went on a journey of revenge. He would take revenge on those who killed Consort Yang for three generations. So that was why he cursed Xuanzong and his son. It was also why he drove Chen Yunqiao mad.
Themes
I guess revenge might be a theme, in the sense that it was the reason for all of this happening. On its own, it would not have been a strong theme. But I was surprised by the relationship between Consort Yang and Bai Long and I think that if it was expanded on a bit more, it would have been even more convincing.
Overall
Ok movie. Not great, not terrible. Just ok.