Tripping (2006)
It's the story of a rebellious Japanese-Taiwanese girl (played by Rena Tanaka from “Kitaro”) who gets transported back to ancient times and embarks on an adventure with a Taoist priest and a thief. On the road, the group encounters numerous dangers, stumbling upon a conspiracy involving a powerhungry sorcerer and the corrupt court.
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"Shen you qing ren"/"Gen yu den" is a Taiwanese/Japanese movie about a Japanese girl, living in todays Taiwan, "tripping" into a Chinese realm of ancient times. It's a realm of demons and magic. A rather nice idea was to include a bizarre death transport, where a taoist monk has skills of a zombie-master. But overall this ancient realm stays colorless. The demon-story lacks originality, depth and is actually quite unimportant to the story. The movie has few and simple effects, but they are always well used and sufficient in quality. The set and locations are also very nice and the actors are decent. But the problem with this movie is, that appears like patchwork. There is nothing that keeps you engaged. In the beginning you have this immature, noisy young woman and it's quite funny, seeing her wandering around clueless. But her maturing process is quite unconvincing and most of all uninteresting. Too many characters have no depth at all. And what disturbed me most was, I felt too often, that the movie does not meet the right mood. It felt really off at times. It is not really a bad movie, but there is also nothing really special about it, that makes it worth watching. So, for genre-fans it might be interesting if nothing better is at hand.