The 3-D movie Monster Hunt is inspired by Chinese mythology and features computer-animated monsters. (Photo/provided to China Daily)
Hong Kong director Raman Hui has worked in Hollywood for a large part of his adult life. He is best known for the hit DreamWorks animation Shrek.
Now, his Chinese fantasy movie, Monster Hunt, is set to be released.
The 3-D movie features a cast of computer-animated monsters and human stars, including mainland performers Bai Baihe, Jing Boran, Yao Chen and Tang Wei, and veteran Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang and actress Sandra Ng.
Hui says he had wanted to make an animated movie just for Chinese audiences for a long time.
"If China could make classics such as The Monkey King (1964), I believe we can produce more titles like this," the 52-year-old director told China Daily.
Although Hui had wanted a purely animated movie, Monster Hunt producer Bill Kong, president of Hong Kong-based Edko Film, believed a big-budget movie would be a safer choice for the market.
"It's much like gambling. I bet all the money on the film," Kong told media earlier.
Monster Hunt will hit Chinese mainland theaters on July 16.
Kong is known for a number of blockbusters, including Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Hero (2002). The latter is regarded as a landmark film that ended the slump in the mainland market.
Owing to the success of Kong's previous projects, many expect Monster Hunt to do well in the box office.
Inspired by ancient China's mythological collections Shan Hai Jing (Classics of the Mountains and Seas) and Liao Zhai (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio), the script for Monster Hunt took five years to complete, and the filming took another three years.
Set in a fictional world, where humans and monsters have been at war for generations, the tale starts with the birth of a monster, who comes out of a human male womb.
Woba, a four-armed, white, carrot-like creature, is the baby monster and the movie's central character, who takes viewers through an adventurous journey, trying to avoid being hunted down while uniting the two races.
"The actors were all very confused, which made them unnatural while performing," Hui says of the early days of the shoot.
Eventually, he figured out a solution by acting out some computer-animated roles himself.
In addition, Monster Hunt faced other problems, such as the arrest of its former lead actor, Kai Ko (replaced by Jing), along with Jackie Chan's son, Jaycee Chan, in August on drug-related charges.
All of Ko's scenes were finished and special-effects for almost 80 percent of them were completed when the arrest took place, says Hui.
"We had no choice but to delete all of them and do an entire remake."
Ko, the Taiwan superstar, was released by police two weeks after his arrest.
After his release, however, Ko was officially banned from appearing in movies and on TV. Similar bans have been placed on celebrities who have gotten involved in drug or sex scandals.
Hui says the Chinese animation industry has a lot of catching up to do with Hollywood, especially in the special-effects market.
Beginning his career in a Hong Kong studio, Hui moved to Canada in the 1980s and the United States in 1989 to work for a California-based animated studio.
An enthusiast who has devoted his career to the animation, Hui finds China has a large number of animators, but they are short on "time and money", he says.
Hollywood studios such as DreamWorks usually take years to produce good movies, Hui says, adding that he worries that Chinese movies－mostly produced at a rate of one every three months－might be short on creativity.
"The education system is also different. When I was a student in Hong Kong, I was taught to follow the rules. But teenagers in foreign countries are encouraged to make their own rules," he says.
Cultural differences have also brought more innovation to making cartoons in the West, he adds.
