Soon enough a fight breaks out between the hunters and the disguised royal guard, the net result being the dying queen impregnating Tianyin with her son and heir by spitting the fetus into his stomach (do not even start with the film’s notions of female reproductive biology). A monster civil war is precisely what he wants as it will restore glory and bring high paying patrons to the restaurant (no, really). Xiaonan and Luo, however, are bounty hunters and decidedly not part of the esteemed-and defunct-Monster Hunt Bureau, which regional warlord (maybe?) and restaurateur Ge Qianhu ( Drug War’s Wallace Chung) wants to resurrect. Later, the green monster hunter Xiaonan ( Bai Baihe, Love is not Blind), Zhugao and Pangying, and Xiaonan’s rival hunter Luo Gan ( Jiang Wu, Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin) stop in Yongning, drawn to Tianyin’s home. And Yongning is evidently a monster colony. Even though he can hardly believe his eyes (you can tell because they bug out), the monster queen takes a shine to Tianyin. As the monster conflict spills into the human realm, nearby Yongning village mayor Tianyin ( Jing Boran, Rise of the Legend) stumbles upon the scrum. Now, a civil war among the monsters has erupted and the pregnant monster queen flees into the land of the humans with her husband-and-wife guardians Zhugao and Pangying (Hong Kong comedy veterans Eric Tsang and Sandra Ng).
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As the prologue tells us, humanity got tired of this and started a war with the monsters that ended with the latter driven into the far reaches of the mountains. Some look like stumpy dragons, some vaguely like less hirsute Monchichi (or a daikon radish as the film puts it). Monster Hunt begins in an ancient fantasy world, an Eastern Middle Earth of sorts, where monsters rule the land. Which doesn’t mean the film is without its flaws.
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'Minions: Rise of Gru' Lights Up Record July 4th Box Office Fireworks With $125.2M Opening Overseas success will be tougher given the glut of choices for families looking for this kind of entertainment, but given Monster Hunt’s novel setting and sprinkling of kung fu antics not completely out of the question for programmers at genre festivals and creative distributors in urban centers.
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The result is a film whose CGI looks better than expected, and which should be able to carve out a healthy niche at the box office in China and some parts of Asia, at least until Inside Out opens. The North American-educated and trained Hui may be making his directorial debut, but he’s no stranger to animated entertainment, having put considerable work into popular ’toons like Shrek, Antz and Madagascar. The subject of chatter for its generous $40 million budget as much as for replacing original leading man Kai Ko after his arrest on drug charges with Jackie Chan’s son in 2014, artist and animator Raman Hui’s partly animated, largely live-action fantasy Monster Hunt hits screens just in time for school holiday breaks but in competition with glossy Hollywood juggernauts.