Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain

In his first film, The Butterfly Murders, Tsui Hark applied a distinctive futuristic style to carving out a whole new era for wuxia films, backing up superhuman stunts with supposedly scientific explanations. Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, however, works the other way round, combining pieces of animation, stop-motion, cutting-edge optical effects and incredible 360-degree circle wire stunts, unrivalled by anything else at the time. The film takes the mystical, supernatural world of wuxia and makes it lifelike. Inspired by the 1977 Star Wars, Tsui made it his mission to develop a Chinese brand of special effects, constructing a purely Eastern kind of fantasy genre. As a result, he caused an unprecedented leap forward in the quality of stunts and special effects in Chinese wuxia films, and trained a whole generation of special effects experts, laying the foundations for the 1980s golden age of Hong Kong cinema.

• 

• 

•