When I walked out of the cinema last Sunday, I heard a man said to his girlfriend behind me, 'A waste of money, innit?' Many people says that. I've read a review before watching it, and the reviewer mainly held that the scenes were certainly beautiful, and we could see that the crew had dedicated all for it, but according to the plot, Chun ignored her family, her friends, ignored Qiu who genuinely loved her, even her entire world, to pay the life back to a human boy who had once saved her, and this needed to be reconsidered. Well, I admit that this animation is not perfect, whether it's the plot, or the characters, or the pictures. But I feel that this work should be judged in a purer way, and not to focus too much on whether the deeds of Chun were 'worthy' or not. The concept of 'worthy' is different for a teen and an adult, and here, for a sixteen-year-old girl, what she did was worthy. It's extremely childish, childishly selfish, but it's what she believed was right, and she wasn't all unreasonable. Let's think in another way. What were all the grown-ups doing? Trying to eliminate Kun. Why? Because he saved Chun, and Chun wanted to pay her debt of gratitude, which caused all the disorders of their world. Was this reasonable then? Couldn't they spare a bit of the effort they paid to kill Kun to hold the situation back when it first became urgent? They probably could. Chun actually stopped the sky from cracking by giving everything she had to her grandpa. If all others had stood together like how they built the bridge, it probably would have costed less to do it. But they gave their all to kill another life they thought was blamable, and if they had succeeded, Chun would have died too, and they would be sad and would regret, and someone else would lose half a lifetime to bring her back. In fact, no one in this entire animation was absolutely reasonable, neither there was in the real world. I suggest that we put the adult logic away for a while, and appreciate the effort the crew paid and the pure 'life for life' values. I'm not comparing it to other Chinese animations because I haven't watched them, but it deserves 3 stars for pictures, 3 stars for voice and music, and 1 star for thestory.
Review of Big Fish & Begonia
