Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh | Tagged:

Look! It Moves! #68: Memories Of Monkey by Adi Tantimedh

Played the free demo of the game ENSLAVED because I was interested in the story.  It was scripted by Alex Garland, one of the better screenwriters out there who also gets video games, having written a perfectly decent HALO script a few years back.  The big marketing point they've made about the game's plot is that it's a sort of Sci Fi remake of the Chinese fantasy epic JOURNEY TO THE WEST, and the analogies are thick and fast even in the first twenty minutes of the game: Monkey the hero breaks out of a prison ship and is forced by Trip to help her get to safety after she fits him with an electronic headband that would explode if he tried to kill her or leave her behind.  Along the way, they pick up a pig-like guy as a companion.

So far so good.  All the advance reviews have raved about the game's story.  "Wow!  OMG!  A game whose plot is actually coherent and decent!"  I guess that would still be a big deal in video games these days.  What it did was get me thinking about how it lost in translating JOURNAL TO THE WEST to a Western Sci Fi setting.  It seems a cliché that Monkey in ENSLAVED has to be a big muscle-bound guy when the original was a demigod known more for his wits and mischief than for muscles or brute force.  Tang Xan Guang, or Tripitaka, is now a hot redheaded chick instead of a monk and so on.

JOURNEY TO THE WEST was published back in the 1590s, and was inspired by the real monk Tang Xan Jang's journal to India to obtain a complete set of the Buddhist scriptures as there were none in China at the time.  He probably didn't encounter demons that wanted to eat him, but that's why you get an epic Fantasy novel out of this instead of a nonfiction account.  Interesting that the Chinese got their LORD OF THE RINGS a few hundred years before the West did, no?  But then India got THE MAHABHARATA long before the birth of Christ, so everyone has their epic.  What a lot of people tend not to talk about is that aside from the grounding in Taoism and Buddhism, the story was often a comedy.  Much of it was a satire on the political, material and power greed of the bureaucrat and merchant classes of the time at a time before the term 'bourgeoisie' had even been termed, since Capitalism had not been established yet and this was still Feudal Times.  That the demon generals, merchants and bureaucrats wanted to attain immortality by eating the monk's flesh could be a metaphor for the nouveau riche's attempt to buy or eat their way to Enlightenment.  All the more reason Tang Xan Jang needed protection from three demons and demigods on his journey.  The star of course was Sun Wu Kong, or the Monkey King, and his appeal wasn't that he could beat up anyone, but that he was a trickster, a prankster, he was the original Bart Simpson of fantasy literature.  He stood in for Humanity, unruly, undisciplined, chaotic, impulsive, but endlessly creative, inventive, and with a low tolerance for hypocrisy, lies or bullshit that makes him a habitual shit-kicker.  Sun Wu Kong was actually a rock shaped by rain and wind corrosion into the form of a monkey, so his centuries of quietly observing humans taught him to talk and read, and he learned to perform magic and became a local demigod who led a tribe of real monkeys that had fun pulling pranks on humans.  He was invited to join the court of the gods in heaven, but got so bored and disgusted that he rebelled against them until he was cast down and trapped under a mountain for a hundred years as punishment.  When Tang Xan Jang inadvertently freed him, the moon goddess Kuan Yin gave him another chance by charging him with accompanying the monk to India as his bodyguard as a means to atone for his sins, and the hope that Sun Wu Kong would come to learn the wisdom of tempering his impulsive, almost murderous nature.  She stuck a golden headband on him that would shrink and give him a headache if he tried to rebel against Xan Jang.  Along the way, they picked up Zhu Ba Jia, or Pigsy, who represented greed, gluttony, lust and avarice, but obviously redeemable if he's joined them.  Then there's Sha Wu Jing, or the Sand King, a bearded sand demon who used to be a general in heaven until he was cast down and became a demon until he decides to join Tang Xan Jang as a means of atonement.  Sandy was never as developed or distinctive a character.  We usually just remember him as the guy with the beard who carried the bags.

I've lost count of the TV and movie adaptations from Hong Kong, China and Japan that have been trotted out since the Sixties to the present.  My earliest memory of JOURNEY TO THE WEST was a series of comics that adapted all 100 chapters in a series of pen-and-ink drawings by one of those nameless artist's collectives in China, printed on really bad paper.  British people alive during the 80s would remember JOURNEY as MONKEY, a Japanese-produced TV series that was dubbed into English and popular all over Europe.  There was even a new Japanese TV series that ran a few years ago that was pretty much MONKEY all over again, only with slicker production values.  For my money, the best movie adaptation was the three Shaw Brothers productions that came out in the mid-Seventies, which have been recently remastered for DVD in Asia.  They were the only version that suggested the raunchy material cut out of all the adaptations, which were supposed to all-ages, whereas there was a fair bit of satire on the sexual mores of the Tang Dynasty.

This is the only scan I could find from the comic from the 1970s that now seems to be out of print:

The most notable addition to the JOURNEY story has been the two-part Hong Kong movie A CHINESE ODYSSEY starring Stephen Chow Sing-Chi as Song Wu Kong.  This is more a new chapter during the journey itself, where Song Wu Kong is trapped by a demon general in another time period and forced to live as a bumbling human while two women, one a demon, vie for his affections.  The production definitely shot more material than was in the two feature-length parts and the final two movies ended up feeling like a trailer for much longer movie that doesn't exist.  The prologue where the heroes battle the demon general before Song Wu Kong is trapped in time feels like a "last episode" teaser while the rest of the two movies dealt with Stephen Chow's improvisational comedy as he moved towards regaining his memories and powers as Song Wu Kong.

On top of his flair for improvisational and slapstick comedy, Chow always had proper chops for dramatic acting, as seen in Monkey's cry of rage and anguish when the woman he won't allow himself to love dies for him, and he proceeds to massacre the Demon King with over a thousand blows from his staff in a few seconds.  When he returns to his timeline and rejoins Tang Xan Jang, he comes across a reincarnation of the women who died for him and the human he was trapped as, and uses his magic to give them the happy ending he didn't have, before resuming his journey with the monk to India.

A CHINESE ODYSSEY part 2 DVD cover:

Stephen Chow's version:

I don't think I'll be buying ENSLAVED.  Personally I'm tired of platforming and button-mashing to chain combo strikes.  I'm glad it made me rethink JOURNEY TO THE WEST, though.

Monkeying around at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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© Adisakdi Tantimedh

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