Film: Dushi Fengguang (1935)

aka Scenes of City Life

A novelist uses all his money to buy gifts for the woman he loves who in turn is also seeing a business man, using him for expensive presents. As a consequence the writer is unable to pay the rent, whilst the womans family goes hungry as her fathers business suffers.

A joyful comedy that expresses the dangers of consumerism for the careless spender.

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Film: Malu Tianshi (1937)

Aka Street Angel

A street musician helps a girl from being sold into marriage.

Chinese comedy that was also a social commentary of the times for the lower class.

I found this film absolutely brilliant although i had a lot of trouble with the subtitles. I downloaded the film and subtitles separately and they were out of sync for the entirety, fixing it was frustrating and only solved the problem for so long. Next time i see this it will be on DVD with proper subs.

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Film: Tie shan gong zhu (1941)

Aka Princess Iron Fan this is an early Chinese animated feature, I've heard to be one of the first even. Based on the book Journey to the West I watched this without subtitles but managed to barely follow the story. Three disciples of a traveling monk, a monkey king, a pig and water spirit attempt to steal a power fan from a princess in order to defeat an angry fire demon who is causing a massive heat wave. That about makes up the first half, the second I wasn't too sure about but it involved the fan again and also some singing along the way.

Having previously only watched the English dub of the Japanese Monkey series it was nice to see another adaption of Journey To the West, especially such an early one. The animation is crude as can be and the shots seem to make more movement then necessary (there are shots where the camera appears to dart back and forth for little reason), the former however being acceptable.

As i say it was nice seeing such a rare piece but would of been nice with subtitles. The animation is available to download from archive.org

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