With Disney's sequel to the phenomenon that was 2013's Frozen around the corner, White Snake, co-directed by Ji Zhao and Amp Wong, provides ample competition in the animated fantasy stakes. There are also plenty of similarities where story and character design are concerned, too: White Snake has its own magically-powered heroine in Blanca (Zhang Zhe), a woman who, like Queen Elsa, is searching for an identity in a hostile world, while the film's characters ape the saucer-eyed, anime-esque facial features that have become standardized across Disney's CG movies.

This is really where the comparison ends, however, as where the first Frozen film merely skims the surface of its fairy tale origin, White Snake is rich in sorcery and other-worldly terrors. The movie serves as a prequel story for the Chinese folklore tale that it's based on, "The Legend of the White Snake" or "Madame White Snake," which has been adapted and reimagined multiple times before. Here, writer Da Mao introduces us to Xu Xuan (Yang Tianxiang), a young man with boundless curiosity constrained by the limits of his small, mountainous village, and the aforementioned Blanca, a beautiful woman who quite literally falls into his life with no memory of who she is. The only clue Blanca has is a magical jade hairpin, one that we see her using with deadly precision during the film's opening action sequence -- and before her head goes all fuzzy -- to try and assassinate a dark sorcerer General (Zhang Yaohan) who has a stranglehold on the land.

White Snake

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Like the Sheriff of Nottingham, he has a lackey, Little General (Zhang Boheng), who collects the steep taxes imposed on communities like Xuan's, which is known as Snake Catcher village thanks to an unusually high population of the slithering creatures. Luckily for the townspeople there, snakes double-up as currency to pay the toll; not so lucky, however, for Blanca, who shares quite a few alarming characteristics with the creatures, as well as with the Medusa-like demons who lurk in the undergrowth. But this doesn't perturb the open-hearted, and open-minded, Xuan, creating the building blocks for a classic Romeo and Juliet set-up of lovers tragically divided by birth, circumstance and purpose. Or, more pointedly, a gender-reversed The Shape of Water.

Xuan vows to help Blanca recover her memories, sending them off a sumptuously scenic tour of a world where the veil between natural wonder and supernatural darkness is a porous one. Representative of this idea is the stand-out character of the whole film: a half-woman, half-fox magical weaponsmith credited as "Foxy Boss" (Zhang Lei). Her head flips constantly between a human one and white fox's, belying a trickster streak. She's constantly smoking a long, jade pipe and escorted by a sort of Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb pair of creepy minions, and the interdimensional workshop that she leads a bemused Xuan and Blanca into on their quest that could easily have descended into a classic "Welcome To My Lair" musical number. This is actually one of the areas the film falls down on -- not in its lack of musicality, but in theatricality. There's a little of this to be found in Duduo (Zhang He) -- who doesn't love a talking dog? -- but the dialogue could certainly have done with a little more spicing up. As a result, White Snake's characters are likable enough but not fully endearing.

White Snake

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White Snake looks like a movie made to impress: everything, visually, is turned up to 11, from the color saturation to the speed and energy of the wuxia fight scenes. Light Chaser, the studio behind it, co-produced it with Warner Bros., and having already made the rounds on the international festival circuit, it's clear both companies have high hopes for the film to break new ground globally for Chinese cinema of this kind. Considering this, it's impressive that the story doesn't play things as safe as other family-friendly features often do. At the start, a happy, fairy-tale ending seems assured. Towards the end, though, things start to look less romantic fantasy and more Godzilla as Blanca is forced to further embrace her more magnificently monstrous side, carving a fire and brimstone path of destruction through feudal China. There is also a satisfyingly soulful pay-off to the raised stakes where the central romance is concerned, leaving things on an intriguing, time-bending note clearly designed to leave the door as wide as possible for future continuations.

White Snake

Though undeniably gorgeous to look at, there is still a slight sense of weightlessness in White Snake that 3D CG often suffers from. The characterizations similarly feel a little too thinly-drawn and indistinct, which, again, more moments of levity would have helped a lot with. Despite these minor gripes, anime and martial arts fans will no doubt enjoy the familiarly fast-paced fight choreography and power-ups, while the film's sweeping sense of romance and mysticism will work just as well for everyone else -- especially if snakes are really your thing.

Directed by Amp Wong and Ji Zhao, GKIDS is bringing White Snake to L.A's Nuart Theater on Nov. 15, and select theaters Nov. 29.

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