From the BBC press site:
BBC Sport collaborates with Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn for Beijing Olympics. Hewlett and Albarn are the creators of the virtual band Gorillaz, and have brought a similar visual style to the BBC's Olympic credit sequences (larger image
here) , which will be based on the classic folk epic
Journey To The West aka
The Monkey King. (They have already produced, under the direction of Chen Shi-Zheng, a spectacular musical stage adaption,
Monkey - Journey to the West).
Journey to the West is Wu Ch'eng-en's vastly mythologised and embroidered fantasy, written in the mid-1500s, on the real-life journey of the 7th century Chinese monk Xuan Zang, who travelled to India and brought Buddhist scriptures back to China. A while back I found another nice picture, in anodised titanium, of the chief characters on the
September 2004 cover of the materials journal
JOM (like the BBC, I assume,
JOM chose the story as an metaphor for East meeting West). The priest Xuanzang is escorted by Sun Wukong (Monkey, a powerful trickster-god constrained to aid him), and his companions Zhu Bajie (Pigsy) and Sha Wujing (Sandy), who are also divine and forced to atone for misdeeds by demeaning reincarnations - the former as a pig, the latter as a cannibal sand monster. Tripitaka is, incidentally, a misnomer for Xuanzang; it's not actually his name, but an honorific for priests who had mastered the Buddhist scriptural canon called the
Tripitaka - "three baskets" in Sanskrit.
The story has been retold many times. A very accessible book version I recommend is Alison Waley's
Dear Monkey , which abridges down to handy paperback size the partial translation (30 of the 100 chapters) by her father, Sinologist
Arthur Waley. Online,
China-on-site.com has a summary and illustrated
retelling. I'm not ashamed to admit that I know the story primarily from the cult Japanese TV series starring Masaaki Sakai - see
Monkey Heaven and
YouTube). Despite the dire special effects and peculiar English dubbing, the series was remarkably faithful to the original stories; for instance, Monkey's bizarre powers, as described in
this appreciation by Matthew Craig, or the
Five Pillars at the End of the Universe incident, are perfectly authentic.
-
Ray
Addendum: the animation is now up at BBC Sport - see
Meet Monkey.
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Ray
Thanks for that - one look at that youTube link and I'd wasted half-an-hour. I had forgotten the original dubbing, which seems to have involved Bert Kwouk (man without shame).
ReplyDeleteI had a glance too: they're still great fun, although after 30 years the stereotyping is a bit dated. I slightly feel that about the website for the stage show also: the Gorillaz-style artwork is very vivid and characterful, but depicting Chinese characters as slitty-eyed with big toothy grins is so Last Century (see Slitty eyes and buck teeth? It must be China).
ReplyDelete-Ray