Big Fish & Begonia

The daughters of a people living beneath the sea are sent to the surface at sixteen to see the human world. There a boy saves the girl and drowns doing it. To repay him she decides to raise his soul as a fish. The film does not present the decision as a kindness; the narrative keeps showing what it costs her own people and makes her pay for the choice. Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun directed. Hand drawing and computer animation are used together; production ran more than a decade and part of the funding was raised from the public. Who it's for: those who like visually loaded animation drawn from Chinese mythology. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a family film; the narrative is dark and there are enough characters to make it hard to follow.