That night, he meets a beautiful and alluring young maiden, Nip Siu-sin, and falls in love with her. He has no choice but to take shelter in a deserted temple in the forest on the outskirts of the town. Ning Choi-san, a timid debt collector, goes to a rural town to collect debts but fails and runs out of money. The film was ranked number 50 of the Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures presented at the 24th Hong Kong Film Awards, the Special Jury Special Award of the 16th French Science Fiction Film Festival and the Best Film Award of the Portuguese Science Fiction Film Festival. Most notably it boosted the stardom of Joey Wong, won Leslie Cheung popularity in Japan, and sparked a trend of folklore ghost films in the Hong Kong film industry, including two sequels, an animated film, a television series and a 2011 remake. Although the film could not gain access to movie theaters in mainland China when it was first released, it became a cult film among young people in the mainland, especially the generation born in the 1980s. The film was popular in Hong Kong and several Asian countries, including South Korea and Japan. The plot is loosely based on a short story about Nie Xiaoqian from Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio and is also inspired by the 1960 Shaw Brothers Studio film The Enchanting Shadow. 'The Ethereal Spirit of a Beauty') is a 1987 Hong Kong romantic comedy horror film starring Leslie Cheung, Joey Wong and Wu Ma, directed by Ching Siu-tung and produced by Tsui Hark. It all makes for a film that’s consistently watchable and entertaining, even if it rarely ever makes sense.A Chinese Ghost Story ( Chinese: 倩女幽魂 Wade–Giles: Ch'ien-nü Yu-hun lit. The craziness is furthered by the traditional anime visuals (all the characters have very large eyes and mouths) situated amid computerized landscapes of rock, flowing water and waving grass. The film, in fact, is far closer in spirit to the rapid fire insanity of Tsui Hark’s famously unfettered fantasy epic ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (1983) than the comparatively stately and restrained 1987 CHINESE GHOST STORY. The present version is, I believe, the most interesting of the lot, and certainly the wildest, with music numbers and a great deal of bizarre imagery taken directly from Chinese folklore. A CHINESE GHOST STORY also inspired two sequels in 1990 and ‘91, and a live action remake in 2011. “The Magic Sword”), found in the collection STRANGE STORIES FROM A CHINESE STUDIO. All three films were loosely adapted from a 17 th Century story by Pu Songling called “Nie Xiaoqian” (a.k.a. Some words about A CHINESE GHOST STORY’S parentage: it was, as previously stated, remade from a 1987 Tsui Hark produced, Siu-Tung Ching directed live actioner, which was itself a remake of the 1960 Shaw Brothers production THE PAINTED SHADOW. Later they confront Dragon Lady, who ends up reverting back to her initial tree state, after which Ning, Solid Gold and Shine reboard the reincarnation train-this time, it seems, for good. He’s opposed by the less virtuous White Cloud, who gets into an aerial battle with his foe that nearly destroys Ning. Ning and Solid Gold take up with a red bearded ghostbuster identified, appropriately, as Red Beard. They manage to escape, with Shine stationing herself at the bottom of a lake in order to avoid the sunlight (which is toxic to ghosts), and then hiding in Ning’s folded-up umbrella. Ning, Solid Gold and Shine wind up on a floating reincarnation train upon which the souls of the dead are transported to their next incarnation. Ning, it seems, is set to be her next victim. Butterfly reveals what she saw to Dragon Lady, an ancient tree who needs to devour souls in order to retain the appearance of a beautiful woman. There Ning once again meets Shine, whose ghostly sister Butterfly spies the two of them engaged in PDA. Together with his dog Solid Gold he’s led into a world of ghostbusting swordsmen, disembodied eyeballs and a literal ghost town in which human body parts are served as delicacies and staircases walk. The protagonist is Ning, a debt collector in Medieval China who upon encountering a ghost beauty named Shine is immediately smitten. It wasn’t nearly as successful as its predecessor, and appears pretty dated nowadays, although the animation-CGI hybrid look lends an appropriately hallucinatory tinge to the proceedings, whose raid fire weirdness is paramount to their effectiveness. Arriving in 1997, a full decade after the enormously successful live action original, this film had a reported four year production period due to its once revolutionary mixture of traditional cell animation and CGI. The one and only animated version of the Hong Kong fantasy-romance classic A CHINESE GHOST STORY, scripted, produced and voiced (in part) by the original film’s producer Tsui Hark.
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