Deep Sea Review
I’ll admit my knowledge of Chinese animation is extremely lacking but I can tell you it’s from writer-director Xiaopeng Tian, whose previous work Monkey King: Hero is Back made a few ripples internationally a few years ago, at least enough that the title rang a bell in the back of my head somewhere.
The story focuses on Shenxiu, a little girl who is currently unhappy due to her parents having divorced recently, leaving her stuck with her father when really it’s her mother she wants to be with. She ends up on a cruise with her dad, his new wife and their new-born son and while looking out overboard, she thinks she hears her mother’s voice singing their favourite nursery song. While trying to hear it more clearly, she falls overboard and sinks into the titular deep sea but there she’s picked up by a massive neon-sign-ridden submarine restaurant simply called “Deep Sea” run by a strange creature called Nanhe. Shenxiu is soon taken to a new magical realm where she hopes she can meet her mother again.
While this new realm does have some wonders, it also has horrible creatures straight from your worst nightmares (and in Shenxiu’s case, literally from a nightmare she had at the start of the film…). So it’s very much a story that will scare the young people watching as this depressed young girl gets put through the wringer, and as you’d imagine, it ends on a bit of a tear-jerker, no matter what age you are. That all being said if you’re thinking to yourself “unhappy girl goes to a magical place away from her family and faces horror and hardship before becoming a better, happier person at the end of it” rings a bell, well that’s because this movie’s core plot is lacking in originality. Some character/creature designs are a bit more imaginative at least, but it’s definitely a story that gives the feeling of having experienced it before. In its defence, it tells the classic story well, still hitting the right emotional beats, though not always in the right order, occasionally suffering from too sudden a narrative jolt, going from jolly creatures to angst and despair at the drop of a hat.
Honestly CG isn’t my preferred animation choice, instead being something I “put up with” if a favourite franchise goes down that route, and this film isn’t perfect. For example, some of the odder CG characters that were supposed to be fun or cute end up being a little creepy due to some of the animation. What the film does have in its back pocket, however, is its own take on the CG animation style that is frankly hard to describe to the point where the pictures featured here can’t quite get across what it’s like to watch. Part cartoony CG and part watercolour painting, some of the vistas and set-pieces are as close to literally breath-taking as a film has ever taken me, the big finale especially. It honestly felt like the lack of originality with the story didn’t matter because the visual storytelling kept me hooked for the whole runtime.
So to sum Deep Sea up then, is it’s a pretty standard emotional rollercoaster film about an unhappy little girl searching for her mother and ending up in a magical world, but the stunning visual style lifts the generic plot to the point I was still glued to the screen to the credits, and the plot is still effective enough to get emotion out of the viewer once they make it to that end. I definitely recommend Deep Sea if you’re in the mood for this kind of young child’s magical (and harrowing) coming-of-age story so long as that’s all you expect out of the story, and especially if you can see it on the big screen as I imagine that would make for quite the unforgettable experience.
More details can be found here.
