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Three filmmakers talk about their new animated film of a classic comic.
While Japanese animation and manga are expanding their global appeal with captivating stories and sophisticated production values, the local animation industry is struggling. Storm Rider: Clash of Evils is released this month, what kind of response will it get? bc spoke to three people involved in the making of Storm Rider – director Dante Lam Chiu-yin (Jiang Hu – The Triad Zone, Option Zero), producer Gordon Chin and storyboard director Lam Wai-hong.
This wuxia (martial arts) animation originated from one of Hong Kong’s all time popular comics – Wind and Cloud (or Fung Wan) by Ma Wing Shing. The comic had previously been adapted for film – Andrew Lau’s The Storm Rider in 1998 starred Ekin Cheng and Aaron Kwok. But Dante Lam wasn’t altogether comfortable with either that or the TV drama also based on the comic. “If you want to make a Hong Kong animation, of course you have to get something that every Hongkonger knows,” he says. “Storm Rider is the classic, in its time it smashed the local comic industry. Although we already have a movie and TV drama version of it, for me, a comic must be adapted into an animation to bring out its liveliness.”
Animation is a time and work intensive process, much more so than ‘real’ film production, and Storm Rider took five years to finish. When Lam Wai-Hong talks about it, the description sounds almost as endless the process itself. “The five-year production is actually divided into many stages,” he says. “Initially, we spent one and a half years in the planning stage which included script writing and character building. That was mostly handled by the director. After that, Gordon and I worked on the actual production – that is drawing the pictures and putting them into sequence. That was the longest stage in the whole production. And then the director again took over for the post production such as music and editing.” Chin admits that they miscalculated how long it would take to complete the project. “It is a bit behind schedule, it should have been released last year,” he says. “However, since we had already put a huge effort into the work, when it still wasn’t ready, we couldn’t push it out just for the sake of meeting a deadline. It would have wasted all the participants’ efforts. We had to respect their hard work.”
It may appear that animation gives filmmakers more room for imagination and creativity than films using real actors and settings, but Dante Lam doubts it is altogether so. “Directing animation is more difficult than I imagined! When filming movies, there are always exchanges between actors and directors which create a lot of chemistry. Actors can decide themselves on how to act and interpret; but in animation, we can’t rely on the characters. Gordon and Wai-hong had already warned me that there are restrictions on animated characters to express emotions. So then I had a dilemma: I am a movie director and I am used to capturing emotional change. It was a great challenge to me, I tried my very best to create a balance. But of course, to a great extent, animation allows more imagination: it is not possible to film a lot of animated scenes in reality!”
“We all have gained a lot through the process,” Lam Wai-hong adds. “We have made a good start and it is a very good step to developing our next animation. Perhaps we’ll just need two to three years [to make] the next one because we have already got the skills and experience.” So, does that imply that they are thinking about another such project? Chin replies, after exchanging a glance and smile with Dante Lam, “We have something in mind already, but we can’t disclose it now.”
Storm Rider: Clash of Evils is out now