Movie Review: The Twelve Animals (新十二生肖)

   Today is a holiday, so as usual, I just spent the day at home. I've watched another movie entitled, 'Xin shi er sheng xiao' 新十二生肖. It's a fantasy film about the Chinese Zodiac animals. I was interested because it was mentioned by my Chinese teacher in our class. She said that Chinese people often ask someone's zodiac sign. In that way they can somehow know the personality of a person by basing it on the year the person was born.

    At the beginning of the movie there's an explanation of how the 12 animals came to be assigned.

Long time ago the humans don’t know how to count the date.They ask heaven’s help. Buddha decided to use heaven’s river as the line to have an animal’s marathon. To pick the first twelve animals arrive the finishing point. As the human being’s guard of the year.

      My animal sign is a monkey. I remember, I really like the monkey character before. The monkey character designed by Paul Frank apparel became even famous when Barbie Hsu wore it in the hit series Meteor Garden.

     My Chinese animal year of birth sign is 'hou' 猴. Like the monkey, I really like bananas. Before I would always bring a banana with me at the office, and my officemates would sometimes makes fun of me calling me, 'banana girl'. My former boss told me that I should not eat banana always because she read in a newspaper that there's a chemical or component in the banana that attracts the mosquitoes. I had dengue thrice already, so I'm a bit alarmed by what she told me. Anyway, I still eat bananas up to now, for I've read they're very nutritious. My aunt even gave me a monkey fancy ring when I was still a teen but I lost it.

    Anyway, back to the movie. The movie is about a pretty young girl called 'Bai Ma', who's in search for the 12 animals, to fight the evil leader in the devil island. Her guardian who is always at her side and who protects her like a loyal guard dog is called 'Kan Chu'.  Even if the film is quite old I really enjoyed watching it. There's an animation that was shown at the beginning of the film. I'm just not that overjoyed since the monkey was not given a very good role and exposure. As we all know the dragon is said to have been the luckiest of all in the Chinese zodiac animals, so in the movie the dragon is one of the leading characters. I also like a bit of twist at the end of the movie, I never expected it to be like that. Overall the movie was good.