Movie Review: Eternal Spring

 

Michael's Movie Grade: B+

An excellent animated documentary. 

This film is about a group of people in China from the Falun Gong spiritual movement. This movement has been outlawed in China and to stand up against this and for their faith they take over a Chinese TV station to talk about their faith.

This film is an example of a type of documentary that is becoming more popular and that I simply love. This is the animated documentary. This movie has the real-life people tell their stories, while these stories are accompanied by live action. This works perfectly and I am glad to see more movies in recent years embrace this idea. Documentaries that consist heavily of interviews and talking can have a way of feeling uncinematic and visually bland. However, documentaries that feature live action reenactments of events have a way of feeling phony. Yet with animation, there can be visually accompaniment to the dialogue while feeling like an illustration rather than a reenactment. This especially works well here as the animation brings a sense of excitement and suspense to the film. In fact, this movie can feel like a really good action and suspense film at times. The scenes with them trying to take over the TV station feel like they could have been from a fun heist movie. This is helped by the fact that we actually get an idea of who the people involved were (and are). We don't just get a rundown of a historical event but a deeply human movie. However, this film has much more to say than a simple suspense movie. This movie shows how the Chinese government oppresses people from many different religions and the extreme cruelty they use to implement the banning of various religions. This gives us a dark and disturbing look at how a government can oppress a people. Many of the scenes are hard to look at or see because of the cruelty involved. Yet it is important to know that such things happen in our world. 

This movie does have one major fault that really hurts it. That is the film's description of Falun Gong is incredibly vague. Little is said about it that can't apply to other spiritual movements. Those who know nothing about this movement will leave the theater knowing not much more. This is a problem as our main characters are being tortured and risking (or even losing) their lives over it. With that in mind, I think it would be important to know what they believe and why it is so important to them.

A very involving and well-made film.