Nice looking chinese animation. It looks very good and... that's about it. And not even everything. The monsters, effects and environment look good, but humans look pretty weird. Can't say the story is really interesting. It is very basic and done a hundred times. Monster meet human, fall in love, but we can't be together, yes we will, fight with a big baddie, the end. It's not even pieced correctly together. I don't know how close it is to the original story though.
If you're not familiar at all with chinese folklore you might miss or not understand lots of stuff, but it's not that important. Though one thing that seem very far from most chinese stories I've seen: the social distinction between characters. The villagers treat Xiao Bai very casually, when it's obvious she is of a very high social status, I mean you can see immediately that just her clothes are probably worth the whole village ten times over. Xuan attitude doesn't vary much when it turns out she's probably an immortal either. As for Xuan, for a dirt poor villager he seems to have extensive knowledge of mystic and magical arts out of nowhere. It should be surprising enough that he can read, but he can identify constellations and their meanings, deactivate magic arrays or find their exits, identify an item made by a secret shop that sells weapons to demons... that's really a lot.
The accelerated love story has not much meaning either. Touching scenes based on "do you rememeber when we did that ?"... it was litterally two days ago, of course she fucking remembers...
Whole final battle is not worth much more, it doesn't make much sense either, be it on who's fighting who, flucuating power levels, how everybody is absorbing everybody's energy, how a minimum level demon can survive for so long in the magic array when one that absorbed everybody's strength is defeated in seconds. The long scene trying to convince villagers to help in the middle, when there is absolutely nothing they can do, nor can they know that there is anybody to save nor if helping won't actually save the bad guy instead.
And that's just a few of the nonsensical parts of the story.
The ending had a very titanic moment
Shout by Saint PaulyBlockedParent2022-02-12T17:18:01Z
Like a Happy Meal toy, this is too shiny, too derivative and not made to last.