Stroke of Midnight
By Fearless Young Orphan Year of the Fish (2007) Directed by David Kaplan
If there is anything that fairy tales have taught me, it’s that one should always take fish seriously. These unassuming creatures seem to have a pipeline to the magical world, so ignore their tales at your own risk. Here is a fairy tale told to us by a wise Chinese goldfish.
The story is that of Cinderella in structure, as a poor young woman with a noble heart struggles against her oppressors to find love and happiness. Our heroine is 17-year-old Ye Xian, an immigrant from China who has been transported to modern New York City’s Chinatown to earn money for her sick father. Her “aunt,” Mrs. Su, provided the funds to get her here, with the understanding that Ye Xian would work in Mrs. Su’s beauty parlor until the debt was paid off. You can sort of guess where this is going, can’t you? Mrs. Su is nobody’s kindly aunt, and her beauty parlor is not a beauty parlor but a “happy endings” styled massage parlor. Ye Xian, a traditional young innocent, is mortified by this but has nowhere to go. Since she refuses to, ahem, work with customers, she is made instead to do all the chores and cooking for the establishment. Newcomer An Nguyen plays the not- easy role of Ye Xian, who must be excruciatingly modest and meek while not losing our sympathy, and does so by showing us a brave and stubborn side, a loving nature and a smile that could light up Times Square.
In running her errands around Chinatown for the heartless Mrs. Su (think wicked stepmother, and a meaner one you’ll never find), Ye Xian meets three important characters. One is Johnny (Ken Leung, whom you may remember as Miles on Lost) a good- hearted, thoroughly decent young street musician. He and Xian exchange one smile and are smitten with each other, though Chinatown is a big place and their meetings are haphazard and brief. Another is Aunty Yaga, a fearsome, hideous but magnetic fortune teller known and feared by everyone. This hag, who not only deals in sorcery but in the running of a sweat shop, takes an interest in Xian and will serve as a very scary fairy godmother. Finally, there is the goldfish, a gift from Aunty Yaga to Ye Xian, to bring her luck. He begins as a little fish in a plastic bag but under the loving attention of Ye Xian grows, rapidly, to be the biggest damn goldfish I’ve ever seen. He is our narrator. He is quietly determined to bring Ye Xian the luck he has promised her. The plot follows the Cinderella arc with pleasing accuracy, right down to the search for the missing princess at the end.
The most notable thing about the movie, and in my opinion, the thing that distinguishes it, is that the film is rotoscope-animated. I thought it looked beautiful. Sometimes the touch of the animation is so light that a casual viewer might not even notice it, and sometimes the scenes seem to be set in a watercolor painting or an impressionistic landscape. The level of saturation actually reflects the mood of the film. I have seen other live-action film animated similarly, most notably the science fiction flick Through a Glass Darkly and also a series of financial planning commercials. Well, the financial planning commercials creeped me out, and Through a Glass Darkly took a lot of visual adjustment for me. But in the case of Year of the Fish, for some reason, my eyes took to it like they would take to a Monet painting. I appreciated too that the animation never obscured the faces of the characters when it was important that we see them, and it obscured magnificently everything that needed to be obscured. I have seldom seen a fairy tale that looked more dreamlike, akin to stepping into an illustrated children’s book.
That being said, this movie is not really for children. Cinderella story or not, the business of the massage parlor is discussed rather frankly, there is some minor nudity, talk of rape and slavery, and Aunty Yaga and her crew are a rather frightening bunch. So don’t show this to your six-year-old niece because she likes the Disney Princess tales. She’ll be confused and freaked out probably. I’d clear it for anyone who is old enough to understand what the massage parlor does without being perplexed by it.
Otherwise my recommendation is for those who love the dark side of fairy tales, dreamily transported into a painted New York City and narrated by a wise fish. I grew to adore that fish, by the way, but if that doesn’t seem likely for you, then maybe this is not your kind of film. I really have only one complaint, and that was a lack of subtitles. The movie was in English but to my ears the accents were quite thick and I had trouble understanding sometimes. Aside from that, I was happy to be magically transported into a tale of scares, hardships, romance and beauty that is worthy of any favorite storybook from my childhood, assuming those stories had included a happy-endings massage parlor.