Review: Bold 2002 Takeover Of Chinese State TV Plays Out In Hybrid Documentary ‘Eternal Spring

As recently demonstrated by Denmark's Oscar-nominated film The Escape, animation can serve as a living portal to events that have no visual traces other than the memories of those who experienced them. This formal choice emerges in Eternal Spring, a hybrid film about the Falun Gong religion, whose followers have been brutally persecuted since the Chinese government outlawed the spiritual practice in 1999.

Canadian director Jason Loftus works closely with Daxiong, a famous Toronto cartoonist and believer in the belief system who fled China in fear of his life at a train station. Signs in a city in northeastern China on March 5, 2002. The daring and dangerous campaign led to even greater brutality in retaliation against his comrades.

Although the documentary, which was nominated for this year's Canadian Academy Award for International Feature Film, uses 3-DCG animation techniques, the human character's focus on linework, shading and story stylistically brings the animated segments closer to the environment. Cartoon industry in Daxiong. like surrealism. Unlike the supernaturally powerful depicted elsewhere in Daxiong, the men and women deserve heroic portrayals, especially the loyal leader Liang Zhenxing.

To implement the program, Dexiong traveled to Seoul and New York to meet with exiled survivors who were actively involved in organizing a kidnapping to briefly oppose the communist regime's promotion of the teachings of Falun Gong. There was a plan to broadcast a video explaining their peaceful nature. In this encounter, Daxiong sketches his memories and inevitably evokes strong emotions.

Among the many animated flashbacks, the most moving is the one that brings to life Dexun's childhood memories in his hometown of Changchun, where Falun Gong was born and became the epicenter of oppression. For a moment, we are invited to witness a time when the horrors of torture and imprisonment distorted the memory of his home. Loftu's foresight to include the behind-the-scenes process as part of the story - we see Daxiong joining the animation team and engaging in informal chats, among other things - also reinforces the direct connection between creator and creation.

Even when animation is used as an infinite tool, Eternal Spring largely follows a conventional story arc that focuses on telling what happened and how it happened for the sake of whimsical embellishments. However, Loftus maintains a measured approach without focusing on the Falun Gong worldview, making the work an ideological endorsement. Rather, it marks the unchecked dimension of China's repressive tactics against any group perceived as a threat to its sanctioned ideological ideology.

The film is incredibly moving on an emotional level, celebrating the courage of the participants, who experienced terrible trauma and created a lasting testimony of what they experienced.

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