Xiao Ban Jie

Written and directed by Yaonan Liu, this is his first length feature that follows fourteen-year-old teenager Li Xing discovering an underground shelter where he can escape his teenage life and where strange things start to happen.

A coming-of-age that sometimes captures teenage difficulties and that special way to see the world. There are nice scenes of the protagonist with his friends going through the streets of South China at night, naming cars by their resemblance to people they know, or having a haircut heavily charged with in-jokes. The film successfully conveys and transmits the feeling of being an adolescent in a world that most of the time doesn't understand you. Animation is used in many scenes intersected with live-action takes, and, though surprising at first, it is not clear if it's in the movie's best interest. It could be argued that the dream sequences enhance the character's dimensionality as the outer manifestation of desires, etc., but their use ends being aesthetically unnecessary because, while not terrible and somewhat interesting, they are far from being outstanding.

Xiao Ban Jie suffers from an uneven execution with an underdeveloped beginning, a decent middle act, and an unsatisfying epilogue. There's also the problem of an ineffective storytelling since it is not clear what the movie wants to say. This is not a case of overuse of symbolism or intertextuality, it is simply a story not successfully told. Another case of vibes over substance.

It's truly a unique and wonderful film, offering a rich and multidimensional landscape, in the literal sense, of a specific place undergoing rapid and sometimes violent change, and of an emotional landscape of youth's dreams, and desire, which much like the city that they inhabit, is shaped by forces beyond their control, but within which they develop their own strength, and forge their own path. The elegant and beautiful use of the animation sequences further adds to this complexity with offering a glimpse of things unseen. The coming of age of Yaonan Liu as one of the next director to follow.