White Snake (2019)

A 2019 Chinese animated fantasy from Light Chaser Animation, adapted loosely from the Legend of the White Snake, in which a snake demon named Blanca loses her memory, is rescued by a snake catcher named Xuan, and falls in love with him while a Daoist general harvests demon spirits for immortality. The plot is dense, the colors are sumptuous, and the whole enterprise is content to be a romance with dragons in it. We have here a film that wants nothing from us but our attention and perhaps our tear ducts. That is a modest request, and it is granted.

What strikes the weary classifier is the sheer absence of instruction. The cast is entirely Chinese, which is a matter of cultural origin and not of casting initiative. The lovers are a man and a woman. The sister is loyal and fierce, and no one pauses to remark upon it. The humans and the snake demons despise each other, but the quarrel is mythological, not sociological. There is a fox demon who sells magical weapons out of a workshop, which is the closest the film comes to an economic thesis, and the thesis is that magical weapons are expensive. Nobody lectures. Nobody explains the moral of the story to the audience in the third act. The film simply ends, five hundred years later, at a port, with a dropped hairpin.

One could argue the general's appetite for immortality is a comment on something. It is not. He is a villain with a trap and a plan. The animation is genuinely beautiful, the pacing sags in the middle, and the romance is earnest enough to survive the sag. It is a folktale doing folktale work, with no interest in the present tense of contemporary discourse. A quiet, well-mannered artifact. We classify it, we file it, and we move on to the next screening.