How Tsui Hark and Tony Ching followed up on the classic fantasy film A Chinese Ghost Story
Tsui Hark’s popular martial arts fantasy A Chinese Ghost Story spawned a number of sequels. We look at two of Hark’s follow-ups
Directed by Tony Ching Siu-tung and produced by Tsui Hark, A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) set the style for the colourful fantasy martial arts films of the 1990s.
Here we look at two very different sequels Tsui produced.
A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation (1997)
It keeps the bare bones of the original storyline, but makes it more appealing to younger teens by focusing on a virginal romance, with lots of anime-style ghosts and monsters.
Tsui’s main concern is whizz-bang cartoon action with characters and style in the vein of the Japanese Dragonball Z anime series, which was popular on local television at the time.
“The animated version sees Tsui remould the story for a young 1990s audience,” this writer wrote in the Post in 1997. “It is action-packed, mixing the ghostly atmosphere of the original with some anime style characters and wild computer-generated effects.