Discover Top Posts Tagged with #yu lei

This was rather cute.

I will forever have a soft spot for interlocking fingers and swinging hand holding.

#so soft and gentle #always brings a smile #feel what you feel #chen ke #yu lei

Yu Lei’s Seafood Wanton Soup Noodles

#wanton soup #chinese food #food photography #photooftheday #photography #fujifilm xt20 #okada #manila #ph #yu lei

when ur guardian spirits but ur also still brothers

#little door gods #yu lei #shen tu #fanart #doodles #artists on tumblr #this movie is so good u guys

The Guardian Brothers

I have just watched this movie in its entirety. It has me a little conflicted though with its cute, quirky poorly dubbed moments and its homage to the Chinese culture. I love the way the tension between tradition and modernity is depicted through the lantern festival as a fun thing to do for some and a serious aspect of the Chinese grieving process; Shen Tu’s readiness to accept that they were irrelevant vs. Yu Lei and Beckett’s drive to protect the humans no matter the cost to them; and Rain’s argument of keeping the grandmother’s recipe the same as it has been for a hundred years vs. her mother’s willingness to change it. I especially liked the use of firecrackers to keep the evil spirits at bay; the piece of jade that acts as a guide for Shen Tu and Rain on their quest to find Yu Lei, and of course the hanging of posters to honor the guardians of the spirit world. These are deeply meaningful things and most likely superficial aspects of such a rich culture.

The aspect that I am grappling with is the presence of evil in the world. The competing shopkeeper whose name escapes me is sleazy and conniving. For me, he illustrates a component of evil that still remains even after the Nian is slain. The Nian is what they refer to in the film as an “ancient evil”, but how is that physical manifestation much more different than the evil that Mr. Rogman represents? If he is in the same vein of evil, then doesn’t that mean that the people still need the guardians to protect them?

The end has me feeling dissatisfied because the story starts out as a mission for the old gods to make a comeback in the humans’ world and it ends with them “rarely coming to visit”. It goes back to the point that I brought up about the world still having the need or them. By the end, everyone just concedes that the modern world has no need for guardians or gods anymore and everyone is just okay with that. The whole reason why the Nian came back, in my opinion, was because both the immortals and the mortals forgot their history. Shen Tu and Yu Lei had no idea about that wall that had been covered depicting the Nian and the humans, especially the children had not learned of their connection to the spirits that protected their ancestors for millennia.

Maybe it’s because I am so into theology and the mythos of cultures ancient or otherwise, but I am not about letting the stories of old go. They give us moral teachings and tell beautiful stories that illuminate our paths in our personal quests in doing the right thing. They have the ability to reveal truths about the nature of humanity through timeless perspectives while being deeply rooted in their own contextual time period. There is something about that sort of thing that really speaks to me on a deep level. All this to say, I thought it was adorable and it left me a little empty in the end.