‘Adventure’ Time
What? Two animated features from Hong Kong in cinemas within a year?
A MIghty Adventure
Director: To Yuen • Writer: To Yuen
Hong Kong • 1hr 17mins
Opens Hong Kong August 22 • I
Grade: B+
Last year, Smurfs landed with a massive thud, an alleged family film that was a kind of road trip adventure that took the blue Belgian troll-y things away from their… where do they live? Smurfland home to the city to rescue one of their own or some shit. It’s terrible, but its most egregious failure was that the film flirted with inserting the Smurfs into a real environment – Paris – to watch the highjinks and then never truly followed through with the concept. Everything was static when the filmmakers bothered to exploit the idea at all; the action of any consequence was animated.
Toe Yuen Kin-to’s A Mighty Adventure | 小蟲蟲大冒險 remedies that in a big way. Yuen is, of course, known for the one-two punch of My Life as McDull and McDull, Prince de la Bun from 2001 and 2004, and then 2019’s The Great Detective Sherlock Holmes: The Great Jail-Breaker, all of which were traditional animation; for the record Sherlock is way, way underrated. For the six-years-in-the-making AMA, Yuen used real locations in Taiwan as the background for his 3D generated butterfly, grasshopper and spider road trippers, and actually put them in spaces with real stakes for the characters. AMA is a gorgeously coloured, smoothly animated, dialogue-free modest family adventure that makes the most of its premise and, best of all, never wears out its welcome. It’s also a little more realistic in its storytelling, and never talks down to younger audiences. Yeah, kids. Sometimes things suck and don’t go your way. How very McDull.
Kicking Smurf ass
To put it out there immediately: Yes, Yuen’s trio of insects are indeed anthropomorphised. They raise “eyebrows” and smirk and frown and look visibly perplexed with the best of any Disney cartoon. Maybe not quite as dramatically – everything about AMA is low key rather that over the top – but that humanising quality is there. If that’s a pet peeve then you might be well peeved. But it’s a minor quibble in an otherwise fully realised demonstration of visual storytelling. Combining the stress-inducing journey home of Flow with the bittersweet lost and found of Robot Dreams, AMA brings together a trio of random strangers that becomes a trio of friends united against the hazards of Taipei/Taichung, all working to get home to the forest – more likely a municipal park. Grasshopper becomes enamoured of Butterfly at first sight during grasshopper training, and Spider when he wanders away from training. Grasshopper is immediately enamoured of Butterfly, and irritated by little brother-type Spider, but when the first two are caught by a kid’s insect net and whisked off, destined for the cork board, Spider chases after them on a rescue mission. Mission accomplished, they have to get back. It’s on the way home that they discover all sorts of wonders of the world, and also that Grasshopper and Butterfly seem to bond more closely than either does with Spider, and their shared ability to fly in some capacity eventually renders Spider a dreaded third wheel. After dodging paint sets, birds, sewer roaches, Roombas, goldfish and runaway fruit, as a start, they get home, but things just aren’t the same.
A Might Adventure can be read as no-frills family fare that will get “Oooh”s and “Aaah”s from little ones, rightly so, and respect from older viewers for Yuen’s seamless artistry; these bugs look like they’re navigating a skyscraper or soaring over a football pitch. But there’s a deeper level the film can be appreciated on, one that grapples with existential angst, fear of never fitting in and of being left alone. Yuen isn’t afraid to make Grasshopper a bit of a dick on more than one occasion, and make it hard not to think poor Spider should dump his ass and leave him on the apartment roof. But in the end the three do become genuine friends – even if that means some of them having to let go. It’s not Sartre, but a picture is worth 1,000 words, and even without 50-cent words, the film’s resonant, universal ideas about the fragility of relationships and the need to go your own way sometimes come through loud and clear. Or not. It may just be about a snarky grasshopper growing up and a persistent spider who just won’t take no for an answer. As of AMA Yuen is pretty much 4/4 on features, and with a sequel to Sherlock rumoured to be in production, he may finally get his due as the vanguard of Hong Kong’s second animation wave.