YEAR OF THE FISH
Edited, Written & Directed by David Kaplan
Produced by Kaplan & Rocco Caruso
Released by Gigantic Pictures
USA. 96 min. Not Rated
With An Nguyen, Ken Leung, Tsai Chin, Randall Duk Kim, Hettienne Park, Lee Wong, Corrine Wu, Sally Leung Bayer & Lori Tan Chinn
 

Year of the Fish is yet another retelling of the old Cinderella fable: young, innocent girl is at the mercy of a terrible older woman and her rotten young girls and treated like dirt. By magical intervention, she gets the chance to meet her Prince Charming during a big celebration/event.

In first-time feature director David Kaplan’s hands, its a rotoscoped (animation on top of live action) tale of Ye Xian (An Nguyen), a Chinese girl sent by her father to New York City to what she thinks is a beauty parlor but is really a massage parlor with the happy ending deal. She refuses to participate and is then forced by the ugly Mrs. Su (Tsai Chin) to do all of the menial janitorial and laundry work (on top of the increasing sexual taunting by Su’s creepy brother). Her only respite comes with a goldfish given to her on the street one day by the creepy and mysterious old Auntie Yaga (Randall Duk Kim, yes, a man playing multiple parts) and a street musician, Johnny (Ken Leung).

It only gets stranger and, oddly enough, more conventional from there. What makes Year of the Fish stand out, for better or worse, is its use of rotoscoping throughout. While it’s not without its moment or two of real ingenuity, it’s mostly a distraction at best, and at worst it’s cheap and drab in design. Unlike a film that actually benefits from the perspective of an extra layer of animation on top of reality, like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly, here it does little to improve the atmosphere or look of the production (which, I might add, is super low budget). It is, ultimately, a superfluous stylistic gesture, though separating it from other stories of its ilk.

Ironically, the story and characters in the fairy tale framework work reasonably well. Kaplan can’t help but throw on the sentimentality, particularly towards the end with the fish narrating. (At one point, in total despair, Ye Xian sees a ghostly image of her father). He crafts this Cinderella story with stinging humor in the scabrous environment of the massage parlor—jokes involving sexual acts are mostly avoided in lieu of snippy dialog from Ye Xian's fellow workers. And there’s even a slightly touching love story involving the lost souls Ye Xian and Johnny, placed in a Chinatown setting that contains bits of wonderment and mythology that show not only the filmmaker’s talents but those of the mostly unknown cast. As a little indie fable, it’s watchable and even entertaining. As an experiment in animation, it’s a waste of resources. Jack Gattanella
August 29, 2008