Princess Iron Fan

This 1941 production is of historic value, being the first animated feature film to be produced in China (at a time when China was at war with Japan and money was tight). Unfortunately, whatever artistic value filmmaker Wan Guchan's Princess Iron Fan might have is seriously offset by the woefully inferior archival black-and-white print used in this DVD release, which is both full of scratches and washed-out looking, while the soundtrack is often tinny. And that's a shame, since the film itself is an amusing adventure—based very loosely on the folktale “Journey to the West”—in which the title character possesses a magical fan that can blow away flames, but refuses to share it with unlikely heroes (including a talking monkey and an anthropomorphic pig) who are trying to pass beyond the aptly-named Fire Mountain. Princess Iron Fan makes extensive use of rotoscoping to achieve many of its animated effects, which lends the human character interactions a surprising degree of realism, and the film employs unexpectedly surreal humor, such as when the pig detaches one of his floppy ears and uses it to fan his sweaty face. Overall, this is recommended, with the aforementioned caveat about the poor print quality. (P. Hall)