16 Dec I Am What I Am (2021)

Sacrificial

You may find this a bit hard to see, and I am puzzled why it has not gotten an English dubbed release in our content hungry streaming platforms. I suspect it is because it is so focused on a young Chinese audience that it would not convey.

The village pettiness, the specific notion of an exploited underclass, the hunger for national circus, the ready enlistable violence…

… the very idea of a competitive sport pointing to national identity that is both performance and combat…

all these were noticeably foreign to me, not because I don’t see them, but because the cultural rooting was so unique. This is very ’Stephen Chow’.

What struck me was the quality of the animation, plus its style which seemed unique. It is ultra realistic in texture except for faces which are relatively 2d. The colour palette is unrelentingly brilliant. The editing is frantic, even in meditative story phases. The business of painterly blocking and quick shifts may have been a deliberate mapping of the dancing, and if so, that’s remarkable.

A lot of fat boy jokes.

Oh, but the role of the women! The men are all basically dopes reluctantly or unknowingly doing what they are told and what is expected. We have:

— a young girl our hero’s age and same name that is the magical initiator

— a young wife of our fishmonger who was a hopeful dancer and who allows him his dream, but physically beats him and clearly is the boss in the marriage

— our hero’s mother who manages to take the dad to the employment city and nearly kills him, very much along the same lines as the fishwife

These three women are what pulls the story and act as the noir goddesses in our hero’s life. The men are simply high energy pawns.

Posted in 2024

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

IMDB