Film

'Year of the Fish': Cinderella in New York

By Daniel Montgomery

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Cinderella story has been retold by Hollywood ad infinitum, but it’s safe to say that this is a new one. ‘Year of the Fish’ is the feature directing debut of David Kaplan, but it isn’t his first fairy tale; he has made short films with familiar titles like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Frog King’. The inspiration for his latest was a 9th Century Chinese tale that predates the better known Cinderella story by some eight centuries. It involves a girl, a stepmother, and, yes, a fish, but in this story the girl is an immigrant living in New York City’s Chinatown, the stepmother is the manager of an illicit massage parlor, and the fish is, well, still a fish.

Ye Xian (An Nguyen, making an impressive film debut) endures the lonesome culture shock of America out of necessity; she must earn money for her father back home. Entering the parlor for the first time, she is introduced to the kindly Mrs. Su (Tsai Chin), and her kindly “stepsisters,” the parlor’s employees, but she will quickly discover that those who seem the kindliest are actually the most monstrous. She is naive; we figure out much sooner than she does what her new job entails. And when she is unable to stomach the task, Mrs. Su shows her true colors, putting her new charge to work washing towels and cleaning toilets.

The fish is a gift from Auntie Yaga (Randall Duk Kim), a street-corner mystic who at first seems monstrous. She is a fairy godmother of sorts, but she’s no fairy, and she’s neither godly nor motherly, and that makes her the film’s most interesting character. She is an old wives’ tale, the kind that is probably used to keep children in line — as in, “If you don’t clean your room, Auntie Yaga will take you to work in her sweatshop.” But Yaga is real, and when Kaplan finally takes us inside her sweatshop, it produces the film’s most transfixing sequence. As Ye Xian ascends the staircase to Yaga’s lair, this Cinderella story transforms into a darker fantasy in which the magic is both beautiful and fearsome. It has a Lynchian quality, hypnotic, and indeed Auntie Yaga reminded me of the man behind Winkies in Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’, another enigmatic figure with unknown motives and mysterious power.

Prince Charming is a struggling musician named Johnny (Ken Leung), who is so generous that he pays his bandmates out of pocket when he’s stiffed by the owner of a venue. He and Ye Xian have only a few brief encounters, but we believe their romance, because they both desperately need someone to care for them. Johnny’s girlfriend wantonly cheats on him, so he is drawn to Ye Xian for her purity and innocence. And Ye Xian, who is at first drawn to his music, soon finds that he is someone who might protect her. Their climactic dance in a dim sum restaurant is genuinely romantic.

The film was animated using a rotoscoping process that, according to the production notes, used “advanced algorithmic digital painting software based on cognitive neuroscience studies into the nature of human visual perception.” If you know what that means, you can explain it to me. Put more simply, the film is shot in live-action and traced, frame-by-frame, to produce the animated version. It’s the same process used to animate the Richard Linklater films ‘Waking Life’ and ‘A Scanner Darkly’. I prefer the polished fluidity of the Linklater films, which are more thoroughly dreamlike in their effect. Nevertheless, there are beautiful shots in Kaplan’s film, in particular his first shot of Johnny, forlornly playing his accordion on the sidewalk as Ye Xian watches.

Otherwise, the animation does no less than it needs to; it achieves an otherworldly atmosphere that is integral to the film. The same script and the same actors with the same shot composition would have fallen flat with natural photography. The reality of New York City streets wouldn’t jibe with Kaplan’s sentimental fantasy. It would be too literal, making the fairy tale elements preposterous by contrast, like Enchanted without the pleasing irony. Kaplan’s painted visuals free us to relinquish ourselves to fearsome magic and happily ever after. His creates a New York of the imagination.

Check out ‘The Year of the Fish’ Official Site