ANI-MOVIES, *The Monkey King

The story of Sun Wukong has been adapted more times than nearly any other character in the world. Journey To The West was turned into dozens of movie and TV shows both live action and animated, plus video games, some of the most popular being Saiyuki, Alakazam The Great, and a little something called Dragonball. The Monkey King is the latest interpretation of the Chinese legend produced by Netflix Animation and Pearl Studio in their follow up to Abominable and Over The Moon. Both studios pushed to make this a mainstream animated family adventure, although it didn't get the kind of reception that Netlix got a year later when they screened Sony's theatrically-rejected K-Pop Demon Hunters. Even though this takes place in ancient China, this was written to be a snappy comedy hoping to appeal to Generation Z which does work against it at times. The film is CGI, although there is an impressive 2D sequence that you wish got its own full movie. The computer animation is pretty fluid with some electrifying fighting scenes and fast-paced magic duels.

A monkey is hatched from a rock and immediately starts ticking off the other monkeys since he doesn't have any parental figure. A tiger demon has been feasting on the younger monkeys, so this unnatural monkey spends the next few years training himself to fight, and then swims to the underwater palace of the Dragon King to take the prized magical staff that our monkey hero can talk to. After using the staff he calls Stick to defeat the demon, he is proclaimed Monkey King by the other monkeys, he however doesn't want to just rule some simians and sets his sights on the heavenly palace and taking his place among the gods. In order to get their attention, Monkey King goes out and kills 99 more demons for an even 100, but his efforts go unnoticed by the gods, so he sets out to become immortal, and takes on a young girl named Lin as his assistant as they go to the underworld to erase his name on Scroll of Life giving himself no expiration date. This only makes him half-immortal, so he and Lin go to the heavens to get a special elixir to make him fully-immortal, but what Monkey King doesn't know is that Lin is secretly working for the Dragon King to get Stick so he can cover the world in water. Once he gets Stick back, Dragon King does a memorable evil villain song and grows to kaiju-size, but he is defeated by Monkey King who feeds of magic lightning and turns into a titan himself. After defeating Dragon King, Monkey King goes a little mad with power, so Buddha shows up and uses Lin as a speaker to get him to calm down and imprisons him inside a mountain for 500 years where he begins his quest to the West.

The Monkey King does grab your attention for most of the run time, although this can get tiresome after a while. After watching this the one time, it takes a sturdy frame to be able keep up with the unrelenting pace. There is too much ego-driven dialogue and situations that instantly escalate into world-shattering threats to keep a bead on any character progression. There is currently a huge amount of movies bearing Monkey King in their total, although this version of Sun Wukong can be slightly intolerable, he's no more narcissistic than any of the other revamp of the hairy hero.