Fantasia Festival Review: The Umbrella Fairy is Beguiling Chinese Animation
By Caroline Cao | August 7, 2024 | Celebrity & Culture
I have a tin of stamps that my late father left behind. We all have relationships with our mementos. But The Umbrella Fairy is a tale of the vice versa: mementos who have relationships with their previous human owners.
The Umbrella Fairy—perhaps Fantasia Festival’s most resplendent offering—is a parable about these relationships. Think of it like Toy Story with Woody’s undying loyalty to Andy. The animated film, the feature debut of director Jie Shen, is as glossy and polished in its illustrious veneer, though the characters, donning gorgeous wardrobes, may feel like dolls in a plot. And this may not matter much, these shortcomings buried under layers of silky animation.
This parable is about Qingdai (Nie Xiying), an umbrella fairy whose spirit is tethered to the existence of a jeweled umbrella that once belonged to a Princess. Qingdai is sheltered in the Hall of Relics among other fairies of Relics, and she mourns wistfully for her former owner. There’s a worldbuilding rule here: Unless a living human picks her up and moves her, she cannot venture beyond the Hall.
Her existence returns when the fairy of the Black Sword, her sister, escapes to wreak havoc. So Qingdai joins a repair artisan (Gu Jiangshan), a human who can carry her, on the quest to stop the Black Sword fairy. Their journey brings out the nostalgic sorrow of the connection between humans and their mementos. The grandest sequence arrives at the midpoint when a dancer is given the chance to heal from her grief.
The movie can be so beautiful that it’s like admiring the gift wrapping over the contents and marveling over its silky feel. But the surface beauty does elicit an operatic beauty for its runtime. Objects carry the weight of past relationships, and those relationships will last in meaningful resonance.
For more info about Fantasia Festival, see here.
Photo credit: Fortissimo
