The enduring popularity of the Monkey King
How Journey to the West influenced 400 years of culture and entertainment.
by Cassandra Khaw - Apr 18, 2016 2:20am PDT
A painted mural depicting Sun Wukong and other characters from the novel.
Wikipedia / shizhao
It’s been a watershed year for Chinese blockbuster movies. 2016 saw the release of The Monkey King 2, a fantastical adventure that has the eponymous primate meeting a monk and then clashing with the White Bone Demon. The film netted about £135 million at the box office worldwide, almost three times the amount of its £42-ish million production budget.
But these numbers, while large for the local box office, are hardly unprecedented. The Monkey King, though not terribly well regarded by critics, broke several domestic records in 2014, including highest-grossing opening day in China. Similarly, Stephen Chow’s comedic adaptation Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons took the box office by surprise, becoming the highest-grossing Chinese language film ever before it was eventually overtaken by Monster Hunt.
It might seem that a well-performing sequel would be an outlier, but even if local audiences have demonstrated fatigue with Western imports, there are plenty of domestic offerings that succeed magnificently as franchises and follow-ups. But none, perhaps, as well as those that draw from the Journey to the West.
The Monkey King 2 is the latest in a long line of such adaptations, one that spans every imaginable entertainment media, all drawing from a 400-year-old novel. What’s fascinating is how much of the original story, the seminal Journey to the West, is retained in these modern retellings, a stark contrast to the gleeful butchering of Greek, Egyptian, and Judeo-Christian mythology in American movies. (Let’s not even pretend Exodus was anything but a farce.)
Part of it might have something to do with the fact that the Journey to the West is venerated as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of ancient China, which are not only largely recognised as the best novels of their eras, but also as influential cultural forces. It’s not just a thing, collated and curated by generations of opposing ideologies. It’s a literary institution.
Of course, Journey to the West has suffered subtractions in its translated forms, but is generally adapted more or less intact. For those less familiar with the book, Journey to the West is an epic fantasy that draws from local folk tales, history, and possibly even, according to certain scholars, elements from the Ramayana. (Hanuman from Hindu mythology is believed to have been one of the inspirations for Sun Wukong.) It was anonymously published in the 16th century but widely believed to have been written by Wu Cheng’en.
"If you understand the Monkey King, you understand China."
The plot is loosely inspired by the life of a Buddhist monk named Xuanzang, whose travels to South Asia were recorded in the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. Journey to the West introduces a host of fantastical characters to the pilgrimage, notably a coterie of supernatural disciples: Zhu Bajie, Sha Wujing, and the inimitable Sun Wukong.
Easily the most recognisable figure from the 16th-century novel is Sun Wukong, or Monkey as he’s known in many Western translations. He’s an archetypal folk hero, a commoner who rises above his station with a spectacular outburst of bad behaviour. He shares the same cultural appeal as characters like Coyote, Loki, and Odysseus. They’re mischievous rebels, unwilling to submit to the status quo, openly defiant despite the threat of divine retribution.
But the Monkey King, being the narcissist that he is, takes it a step further than most. Not only does he scrub his name out of the Book of Life and Death, effectively rendering himself immortal, the Monkey King even, in some varieties of the tale, pees on Buddha’s hand. It’s an unparalleled act of blasphemy, made all the worse by the fact that it follows a whirlwind of other misdemeanours, all precipitated by his own sense of indignity, rather than any actual wrong.
And that is an incredibly powerful image, especially in Chinese culture, which traditionally espouses family over individuality, duty over personal desire. What makes Sun Wukong so enduring though, perhaps, is the paradoxical nature of his existence. On one hand, he contradicts everything that Confucianism and Taoism represent, being neither humble nor diligent, a hedonistic creature of instinct. On the other, he eventually redeems himself through service, transcending into Buddhahood. He’s the personification of the idea of having your cake and eating it too.
With that in mind, China’s continued fascination with Sun Wukong makes a lot of sense, as does his popularity in Western media, although the latter seems more inclined towards borrowing the concept of the Monkey King, as opposed to lifting him wholesale from legend. Namco Bandai’s action-adventure game Enslaved is the first example to leap to mind. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, it reimagines the monk Xuanzang as a woman named Trip (short for Tripitaka), and Sun Wukong as a man named Monkey, who ends up conscripted into Trip’s service.
Enslaved deviates heavily from Journey to the West in that it is only concerned with the journey, as opposed to matters of enlightenment and the retrieval of sacred scriptures. But it maintains the symbiosis between the monk and the Monkey King along with the general narrative structure. The '70s television series Monkey Magic (also known as simply Monkey) might be more familiar to those in the UK, a cult favourite that featured a strangely beguiling triptych of Chinese fable, Japanese programming, and somewhat suspect dubbing. Regardless of its problems, the show was a hit, introducing young British children to kung-fu and the nature of Chinese mythology, where gods and demons are fallible entities as opposed to amorphous manifestations of good and evil.
References to Journey to the West can be found virtually everywhere. There's Monkey: Journey to the West, a stage adaptation helmed by Chinese opera director Chen Shi-Zeng, British artist Jamie Hewlett, and Blur's Damon Albarn. Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, a graphic novel, draws parallels between the Monkey King’s journey and diaspora. Dragonball Z is also a nod to the novel, though it diverged quite quickly into its own thing. Even AMC’s new series Into the Badlands has an ambiguous link to the centuries-old classic. Over and over, Journey to the West has been modified, retold, and reimagined, tethering the present to the distant past.
That said, China and Hong Kong remain at the forefront in this tireless fascination with the novel. The Monkey King 2 had the largest-ever opening-day gross for a local-language film in IMAX, and it looks like there won’t be any stopping the simian juggernaut. The next two years will see a succession of movies inspired by the Journey to the West, likely propelled by the success of The Monkey King 2 and Monkey King: Hero is Back, which was previously the highest-grossing Chinese animated film.
It’s worth noting that cultural sensitivity seems to be integral in determining how well a film performs in China. Tong Gang, deputy director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and TV, described Monkey King: Hero is Back, for example, as respectful of the original work. And if that is correct, perhaps that is also how Journey to the West has stayed so cohesive across the centuries, with the love of a people enforcing the need to maintain the story as it is. As actor Zhang Jinlai, who might have played the most popular depiction of Sun Wukong ever, said: “If you understand the Monkey King, you understand China.”
Or maybe, people just love a rascal.
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Originally Posted by GeneChing
The Trailer for the sequel looks awesome ! Can't wait to see it. I've become such a monkey fan since first watching Stephen Chow's "Journey to the West". I like the looks of the sequel actors than the Donnie Yen movie, less refined.
