With anime enjoying an explosive surge of popularity in China over the past decade, it’s a bit of a surprise as to why higher budget, domestically produced works tailored to an older audience have taken so long to appear. Nevertheless, donghua has finally begun to make its mark on the wider anime community, most notably with The King’s Avatar in 2017 and Mo Dao Zu Shi in 2018.
Tian Guan Ci Fu is the first donghua that I’ve watched in its entirety - like many others, I was intrigued by its placement in the top airing list, alongside the eager recommendations of novel readers. Unfortunately, thanks to a horrifically executed second arc, almost non-existent character development, and some of the worst editing I’ve ever seen, Tian Guan Ci Fu is a resounding disappointment.
Two major arcs occur throughout the course of this series. The first, taking place over the course of a brisk three episodes, is the better of the two. In order to pay off a massive debt caused by his third ascension to Heaven, our main character Xie Lien travels to the mortal world as a Heavenly Official to solve the mystery of the ghost groom at Mount Yujun, accompanied by the hot-headed Nan Feng and Fu Yao. On most accounts, Tian Guan Ci Fu actually does really well with this first arc. The mystery is well crafted – the suspense is built just right, and with some nice action sequences sprinkled into the mix, it does a good job with drawing in the viewer.
Much of this introductory arc’s success hinges on a couple of key points. Hardly any of the world’s mechanics are explained: the ascension/banishment process, magic formations, and what actually goes on in Heaven are some of the many details that are barely elaborated on. Character development takes place - mostly on Xie Lien - but is minimal, although this is pretty forgivable since most of the focus is on the mystery. And the resolution of the mystery itself is lacklustre – the rationale behind the apparition’s actions had more or less been deduced by Xie Lien, but for some reason the writers decided it was necessary to have a convoluted flashback backstory written out, something that added little to the overall experience for the amount of screen time it took (kind of difficult to make a character morally ambiguous after they’ve murdered seventeen innocent brides). Addressing these issues was key if any initial momentum was to be kept.
Tian Guan Ci Fu doesn’t just ignore the issues, but flat out magnifies them to the point where later episodes are legitimately painful to go through. Recurring characters get ZERO development, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this. Apart from basic character traits established by superficial interactions, we really don’t learn anything about the personalities of any of the characters. The biggest offenders of this would be Nan Feng and Fu Yao. Their sole defining traits are that they have temper problems and that they dislike each other. As a result, they’re also the main source of comic relief, but their antics get old very quickly, and the constant yelling does not help. The world building is awful, with constantly shifting, unconnected settings that largely remain unexplored – a real shame, because the world itself is really intriguing. There’s a critical lack of cohesion here, and everything feels more like an arbitrary chain of incidents stringed together than a natural progression of events.
A major reason for all of these problems stems from Tian Guan Ci Fu’s boring and flat-out wasteful dialogue. The second arc is extremely heavy on dialogue, but it’s dialogue of the worst kind: sloppy exposition dumping. So much of the show is spent on a character explaining really minor plot points in intricate detail, usually accompanied by a flashback of some sort. Any time there’s a “twist” or a character feels the need to explain their actions? Flashback. Not only does this feel clunky and unsubtle at times, but it also eats up runtime that would have benefited way more on character or setting development, and it’s also just a mind-numbingly tedious thing to go through. So it’s a double blow of sorts: lazy, boring exposition that has no right to take as much time as it does. The second arc in general is a bizarre change in direction and I’m struggling to understand why this decision was made.
Because there’s so much exposition, not much actually takes place over the course of the second arc, and everything moves at a snail’s pace. The majority of the exposition is delivered by San Lang, a mysterious young man who seemingly knows about everything. Well-written dialogue can convey both information and the personality of whoever’s delivering it in a concise manner, but the laziness of the script means that San Lang joins the list of flavourless characters. Apparently there’s supposed to be some romance going on between San Lang and Xie Lien, but when characters with the personalities of wet flannels flirt with each other for no clearly established reason, it’s hard to get invested.
Good editing can often save scenes that would otherwise be a slog to get through. But Tian Guan Ci Fu’s editing is just horrible. The editor has this really weird obsession with fade to black transitions when switching between scenes. Due to taking significantly longer than something like a cut, fade transitions have a major slowing effect on pacing. This isn’t the greatest choice, because if an episode spends half of its runtime on information dumping, the last thing you need is something that makes things even more slow paced than they already are. Some conversations and interactions awkward too, with characters regularly reacting in unnatural time intervals.
Then there’s the completely inexplicable errors: in episode 6, there’s a shot involving a botched looped animation of Xie Lien walking that has a frame with his mouth open, which cycles for about ten whole seconds. In the same shot, Xie Lien’s mouth movements stop prematurely, and then San Lang’s mouth starts moving while the audio of Xie Lien talking still plays! Speaking of which, the show has a consistent issue in lip flap and audio sync problems, but this segment is the worst offender by far. I also need to mention how this shot happens to involve one of San Lang’s many exposition dumps, so the fact that the shot lasts over ten seconds in the first place is another big no-no. In episode 10, there’s a shot involving a girl dancing to the beat of Xie Lien’s clapping and a person playing the tambourine… except that Xie Lien's clapping very clearly does not match up with the tambourine player. And in certain episodes, the VAs for Nan Feng and Fu Yao stand way too close to the mic, because whenever they yell (which happens a lot), you can hear this annoying distortion effect on their voices. These are really basic errors and the fact that all of them went unnoticed by the editor is mind-boggling. At times the result can be funny, but more crucially it's distracting to a fault. I honestly don’t remember the last time I got this distracted by bad editing. I raise these examples at the risk of coming off as nitpicky, but these are just the ones I can think of from the top of my head. I don’t mind the occasional mistake, but when it happens consistently like this, it just completely takes you out of it.
That being said, it’s not like Tian Guan Ci Fu does everything wrong. It has a decent, well-produced soundtrack. The voice actors do a serviceable performance. And, as mentioned earlier, the first arc was great. In fact, earlier episodes in general were fairly enjoyable, benefiting greatly from gorgeous backdrops, fluid animation and well-choreographed fight scenes – qualities that degraded as the episodes progressed but nonetheless remained at a reasonable level. It’s clear that some serious time, money and effort was put into producing this, which makes it all the more confusing why they couldn’t hire a better editor, or director for that matter.
Tian Guan Ci Fu’s novel is widely lauded by readers for its masterful storytelling. This quality does not seem to have translated to its donghua adaptation. It really is quite frustrating because it had all of the tools needed for something special: a possible fate hinted by an encouraging introductory arc. Unfortunately, the show fails to maintain its initial high and spirals lower and lower into the abyss as the episodes go on, before crashing in a heap by the end. Because of how uninteresting I found the second arc to be, I have to say that Tian Guan Ci Fu has overall been an unenjoyable experience. Unless watching beautiful men flirt with each other is your thing, stay clear from this one.
