Tale takes comic turn

Flashback to March 1996: a barely furnished little office in Prince Edward provides the 'studios' for a group of pioneering film-makers with an ambitious dream. With $10 million in hand and 20 artists in tow, they want to make the first Hong Kong animated feature to give Disney a run for its money. It is called The Clogs' Tale.

Roll film to July 1997: Hong Kong's first animated feature finally makes it to the big screen. Instead of Prince Edward, the 'studio' is now in a dingy industrial building in To Kwa Wan equipped with about 30 workstations.

The 'pioneers' are a group of new faces in the film industry. They have never heard of The Clogs' Tale ; their feature is called A Chinese Ghost Story.

What A Chinese Ghost Story had, which The Clogs' Tale did not, was $40 million invested by four players - Film Workshop, Polygram KK, Win's Entertainment, and Cathay Asia Films - and the name of the now-Hollywood director Tsui Hark as its producer.

Making an animated feature is not cheap or easy: Disney would be the first to attest to that. About 900 artists worked on Hercules, this summer's biggie, which cost upwards of US$85 million (about HK$658.8 million), according to sources, and took about four years in production.

In comparison, A Chinese Ghost Story can only boast three full-time artists, since most of the two-dimensional line drawings were done in a Japanese studio after the character designs were done by Frankie Chung locally.

Like Hercules, the Hong Kong animation - a spin-off from Tsui's hit movie of the same name starring Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing and Joey Wong - took about four years to come to fruition.