![]() The background art is beautifully coloured and detailed. The way the characters move also represents their personality. The character designs really captured the personality the cast. Keeping that in mind as the basis of judgement, I think the quality is wonderful. This is something I couldn’t really appreciate as a child, but watching the cartoon recently, I can see the limitations in traditional animation from the 90s. When you watch this, you can read into it deeper and delve into some Chinese myth, history, and culture to enrich your experience, or just enjoy this as an easy-viewing fun filled adventure. Now that I’m older I can recognize and appreciate these themes, but honestly as a little kid I just had a blast feeling like I was a part of the adventure and friends with the characters, defeating all those who stand in our way and being badass. It’s a narrative structure that has withstood the test of time, and one that is used by modern stories (like shounen) over and over. The story structure is familiar there is one big overarching adventure with a huge goal that the protagonists slowly approach, and smaller arcs with different antagonists and supporting protagonists. These are the hallmarks of great adventure stories, and are common elements in successful stories today as well. It’s a classic story that works really well for adaptation purposes: it has a huge expansive world, a wide cast of characters firmly cemented in something the audience already knows (in this case, classic Chinese mythology), a tale of unlikely friends banding together to achieve a great goal, dynamic and round characters who all have their own extensive past, a huge variety of obstacles and villains to conquer, etc. ![]() between my impression of this show as a young child first experiencing it and as a young adult revisiting it. ![]() The original story remains a huge influence for modern media, from Dragon Ball, to RWBY, to League of Legends. I swear China has at least one new modern adaptation for “Journey to the West” every year (what can I say – we all love it!), but this cartoon remains one of the best. It made one of China’s “Four Great Classical Novels” extremely accessible to a younger audience. This show was key in introducing my childhood self to ancient Chinese mythology, culture and literature. Note: this review is about the original Chinese release in 1999, not the English dub / edit. ![]()
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