The Legend of Hei (2019)

The Legend of Hei opens by leveling a forest. Luo Xiaohei, a cat spirit, loses his home in the first minutes, and the remaining runtime is a long negotiation over who has the right to live where. The environmental argument is not subtext. It is the plot. Humans cut, build, and expand, and the spirits they displace are left to wander, bargain, or fight. For a 2019 Chinese animated feature, this is committed ecological storytelling, and it never softens the indictment of industrial encroachment.

Feng Xi and his faction want the land back by force, and the film gives them a fair hearing without endorsing their verdict. Wuxian, the human who abducts Xiaohei more or less by accident, supplies the counterweight: decency without apology. The struggle between development and the natural world carries a clear anti-exploitation charge, though the movie declines to deliver a speech about it. The moral arrives through Xiaohei's drifting and his gradual change of heart, which is the better method.

Elsewhere the film is quiet. There is no LGBTQ content, no ethnic framing (the divide is between species, not peoples), no commentary on body image, and no engagement with neurodivergence. Female spirits appear throughout without the film building a case about gender roles. The cast is a menagerie of creature designs, which we may charitably file under representational ambition, though the film itself never makes that claim. The sermonizing stays minimal. The film trusts its audience, which after two decades of animated features that do not, comes as a small relief.

A modest, well-mannered entry in the catalogue. It has a conscience about trees and very little to say about anything else, and it says even that with restraint. We log it and move on to the next screening.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}