Saturday finally brought a bit of relief from the heat. I went to Wanda Cinema and watched two films back to back: Dongji Island and The Little Demons of Langlang Mountain. Sitting with them afterward, I kept thinking the same thing: both were genuinely good, though in very different ways.
It had been a long time since a movie had moved me to tears. Dongji Island did exactly that. At its most stirring moments, I could feel my emotions surging for real, and they did not settle for a long while.
It had also been a long time since a film made me feel strength in such a direct way. The Little Demons of Langlang Mountain did that instead. It gave me a kind of energy that makes you want to set out immediately and live as yourself, with confidence and courage.
I had watched a documentary last year about the sinking of the Lisbon Maru. Because of that, I assumed Dongji Island would simply be a dramatized version of material I already knew. It turned out not to be the case at all. The emotional force of the film went far beyond the documentary.
When disaster strikes at sea, you rescue whoever you can. That instinct feels carved into the bones of island people. Their kindness is not abstract; it is something they act on. And in the face of the Japanese invaders, the arc from resistance, to endurance, to eventual uprising feels like the awakening of every hot-blooded Chinese person.
When Ah Hua led the islanders forward with sails crowding the sea, when everyone shouted in rhythm together, I almost wanted to clap right there in the theater. And then, set against that, the conduct of the Japanese soldiers looked exactly as monstrous as it was.
What makes it hit even harder is that this is not invented drama. It is real history. The year was 1942, now 83 years in the past. The attempts to cover up and deny that history are unforgivable. By the end, one line on screen said everything it needed to say: “Dedicated to the hot-blooded Chinese.”
As for The Little Demons of Langlang Mountain, I went in assuming it was just an animated film for children. But the more I watched, the more I was drawn in.
Four little demons — a pig, a toad, a weasel, and a black ape — travel together on a journey to seek the scriptures. Along the way there are twists, temptations, danger, and setbacks. None of it changes their original resolve: to live honestly and insist on being themselves. Even if they are demons, they still want the dignity of demons.
In the end, they unleash their final move, save the children, and “defeat” the Yellow Brow Monster. The price is steep. They sacrifice their cultivation, lose all memory, and return to their original forms. And yet they have no regrets, because they were doing what they truly wanted to do.
But then the film shifts the ground under your feet. No matter how hard they fought, the level above them remained untouched. Yellow Brow is revived by Maitreya Buddha and goes right back to Little Thunderclap Temple, where he will continue serving as one of the ordeals awaiting the real Tang Monk and his disciples. From that perspective, everything the four little demons did was only part of a game in the world of the immortals.
That is the moment the film suddenly becomes sharper than it first appears. Were their sacrifices worth it? Maybe that question does not matter as much as it seems. Maybe what matters is simply doing what you believe you should do, and being who you want to be. Why obsess over the higher powers looking down from above?
This world often feels like a ramshackle stage anyway. Even after seeing through it, there is still something powerful in insisting on living in a way you can accept. The line at the end stayed with me: “To every self brave enough to set out.”
And still, another thought lingers.
Their sacrifice mattered to ordinary people. In the end, common folk burned incense for them and paid tribute. But does that make it meaningful, or is it only the self-consolation of small people moved by other small people? To the great immortals, what happened may have been no more than a trivial episode in a larger game. The game goes on. The singing goes on, the dancing goes on. The powerful were only passing through the motions, playing their game.
The four little demons, meanwhile, were the only ones who took it seriously.