Some words about A CHINESE GHOST STORY’S parentage: it was, as previously stated, remade from a 1987 Tsui Hark produced, Siu-Tung Ching directed live actioner, which was itself a remake of the 1960 Shaw Brothers production THE PAINTED SHADOW.

Later they confront Dragon Lady, who ends up reverting back to her initial tree state, after which Ning, Solid Gold and Shine reboard the reincarnation train-this time, it seems, for good. He’s opposed by the less virtuous White Cloud, who gets into an aerial battle with his foe that nearly destroys Ning. Ning and Solid Gold take up with a red bearded ghostbuster identified, appropriately, as Red Beard.

They manage to escape, with Shine stationing herself at the bottom of a lake in order to avoid the sunlight (which is toxic to ghosts), and then hiding in Ning’s folded-up umbrella. Ning, Solid Gold and Shine wind up on a floating reincarnation train upon which the souls of the dead are transported to their next incarnation.

Ning, it seems, is set to be her next victim. Butterfly reveals what she saw to Dragon Lady, an ancient tree who needs to devour souls in order to retain the appearance of a beautiful woman. There Ning once again meets Shine, whose ghostly sister Butterfly spies the two of them engaged in PDA. Together with his dog Solid Gold he’s led into a world of ghostbusting swordsmen, disembodied eyeballs and a literal ghost town in which human body parts are served as delicacies and staircases walk. The protagonist is Ning, a debt collector in Medieval China who upon encountering a ghost beauty named Shine is immediately smitten. It wasn’t nearly as successful as its predecessor, and appears pretty dated nowadays, although the animation-CGI hybrid look lends an appropriately hallucinatory tinge to the proceedings, whose raid fire weirdness is paramount to their effectiveness. Arriving in 1997, a full decade after the enormously successful live action original, this film had a reported four year production period due to its once revolutionary mixture of traditional cell animation and CGI. The one and only animated version of the Hong Kong fantasy-romance classic A CHINESE GHOST STORY, scripted, produced and voiced (in part) by the original film’s producer Tsui Hark.

A chinese ghost story 2012