Chang'an Dreams: A Thousand Years Awakened
"Very good screenwriting; very bad directing; quite ordinary animation—but by Chinese animation standards, acceptable."
My assessment of Chang’an, 30,000 Li (2023): the screenwriting is very good; the direction is very bad; the animation is quite ordinary by world standards, though acceptable by Chinese animation standards.
The film tells the friendship of Gao Shi and Li Bai through Gao Shi’s retrospective narration, framed by the An Lushan Rebellion. It is structured around a central irony: Gao Shi had his ideal of public service and the discipline to pursue it relentlessly; Li Bai had transcendent genius and no discipline at all. Gao Shi ultimately achieved everything he set out to achieve. Li Bai ultimately achieved everything that cannot be set out to achieve.
The Confucian career path (shijin) is the film’s dominant ideology, expressed through Gao Shi’s example: you persist, you serve, you are loyal, and eventually you are rewarded. The film does not interrogate this ideology; it endorses it. This is a choice, and not necessarily the wrong one for a popular animated film, but it means the film is less interested in the tension between the two men’s worldviews than in celebrating both as complementary paths to glory.
A historical note: the film sets most of the Gao-Li friendship in Chang’an, but the historical record places it mainly in Luoyang and the surrounding area. Li Bai wrote “Ascending the Phoenix Terrace in Jinling” about Nanjing, not Chang’an. These relocations are small but symptomatic of a broader tendency to collapse the Tang’s complex geography into a single symbol.
The An Lushan Rebellion is the film’s organizing trauma. Before the rebellion: Tang culture at its apex, the most cosmopolitan civilization on earth, the Kaiyuan era as a golden memory that would sustain Chinese cultural longing for a thousand years after. After the rebellion: the empire did not fall, but the spirit changed. The trajectory from ascent to endurance is the true subject of the film, and the screenplay captures it.
The fantasy sequence set to Jiang Jin Jiu—Li Bai’s drinking poem—is the film’s visual peak. The images loosen from realism; calligraphy dissolves into landscape; the Golden Bird returns. This is the film at its most purely cinematic, and it works.
Wang Xizhi’s Orchid Pavilion Preface says:
Every age has its reasons; for customs to change is not the same as declining. Yet looking at those who moved us, we are moved still. What’s more: lifespans are long or short as fate decrees; in the end, all return to nothingness. As the ancients said: death and life are themselves the great affair. How can we not feel the grief of it?
This is what the film is ultimately about. Not triumph; not legacy; but the feeling—shared across a thousand years—of having cared about something so much it hurt.