Sun Xun's 'Magic Atlas': A Decade of Ink, Paint and Controlled Chaos

Sun Xun spent ten years making "Magic Atlas," and the film wears every year of it. The Chinese animator's hand-crafted feature, produced in Singapore by Pi Animation Studio, uses paint, pen and ink on paper, canvas, newspapers and woodcut — essentially anything that leaves a mark.

That material variety is the point. As animation discourse drowns in AI anxiety, the review's occasion notes a growing hunger for tactility: materials imprinted with genuine human feeling. "Magic Atlas" is that hunger made visible.

What is the film actually about?

Plot is, generously, secondary. The story concerns a coal empire called Luocha, ruled by fascist industrialist despots and seen through Xiao Zhi, an orphan boy granted access to its secrets by an imprisoned magician. The magician's crime: returning to people the memories the government took from them.

The film takes its time, and Xiao Zhi often vanishes from it — not long after he begins questioning the state of the world as taught to him. The narration, voiced by Sun himself, opens with the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Buddhist scripture about "the past, the present, the future lying in the present." A narrator claiming to be "everywhere, with no beginning and no end" ponders his place in the universe.

How does the style shapeshift?

Constantly. Painted creatures tussle in waves. Aged pages and black-ink backgrounds arrive. Surreal hybrid animals — including a horse with a camera for a head — prance across the frame, drawn impossibly in white lines on black. Then blue water, a black whale, and kaleidoscopic paintings flying through what read as homages to Pieter Bruegel.

The palette mostly orbits heavy, inky black shading with white outlines and dense line detail, punctuated by broad, impressionistic brushstrokes for landscape. Then the next scene detonates that palette with colour or shifts into pen and pencil on paper. A factory juts aggressively from a gently painted mountain landscape — the regime's intrusiveness rendered as composition. Abstract electronic tones in the score deepen the dissonance.

What does the political allegory say?

Little is ambiguous. A mass surveillance system of giant mosquitoes ranks among the film's stranger inventions. The generals declare, "You have practiced criminally outmoded thinking" — to a child charged with "possession of false memories." That is, the memories the government permits. Blunt truth-suppression, easily related to the present moment.

The film's keenest ideas pit its malleable style against pacification through co-opted art and entertainment. During the big festival, a man in a mouse costume bears a silhouette resembling Mickey Mouse — possibly confirmation bias, the review concedes.

A closing message from Sun explains that one standout sequence responded to the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, made through an international collaboration of artists.

Does the experiment cohere?

Emotional connection is difficult — less because of the symbolism than the fragmented structure, which grows more metaphysical and eventually pokes fun at its own artifice. Sun has said before he isn't particularly concerned whether everyone understands everything, a stance that is more than fair.

The verdict: "Magic Atlas" is more compelling for how it looks than for how that look pairs with its story. Its technical merits prevent total alienation, and at times the film approaches the divine. As a counter-statement to machine-made animation, a decade of ink and woodcut makes its argument rather well — whatever else it withholds.