FIlm: “Good Hunting” from the Love, Death, & Robots Netflix series

beautiful 2D animation - I found it for free here.

Story Analysis:

• Inciting Incident: What sets the character off on their journey
  • Industrialization and Colonization in China:
    • The film starts off with Liang, the son of a spirit hunter, and his father hunting a “hulijing,” a fox spirit who can morph into a beautiful woman, because the village believed that she had bewitched the merchant’s son. Liang, however, freezes during the hunt, enthralled and enchanted by the hulijing’s ethereal majestic-ness. At the fox spirit lair, as his father hunts the mom, Liang comes upon her pup, Yan, who exposes the truth: it was the merchant’s son that wouldn’t leave her mom alone, not the other way around. But in true sexist fashion, the village blamed the hulijing and opted to behead her. After Liang’s father kills the mom, Liang protects Yan by saying that he saw no pups. After a timeskip to his father’s death five years later, Liang and Yan are now friends, with Liang bringing Yan food because she is losing her ability to shift and hunt due to the rise of industrialization. The sprawl of industrialization is making magical creatures like her weaker.
    • Sensing the times, Liang decides to leave the village to move to the city (the movie’s version of Hong Kong), leaving Yan behind.
• Progressive Complications: Which reveal what the protagonist wants/cares about
  • Liang and Yan have their agency deprived in numerous ways in the city under colonization:
    • Liang is suppressed by racism despite being brilliant at his trade:
      • Liang gets a livelihood as an industrial engineer running the train systems in Hong Kong, learning the ins and outs of machinery. He’s brilliant at it, but through a short interaction with his British supervisor (”Ah, very clever Liang! For a China man.”), we see that Liang, no matter how capable, will never receive true dignity and recognition here.
      • Personally, he is very curious and capable in the realm of machinery, exploring the city to inspect how different automatons are made in his free time, but he remarks on his sense of purposeless / unfulfillment when Yan asks whether he is happy in his life here: “I don’t know if I’m happy, but I’m good at it.”
    • Yan loses her magic and is preyed upon by British men in the city:
      • Yan becomes a consort in Hong Kong (very dangerous): One day after getting off work, Liang spots Yan for the first time in five years, this time in her beautiful human female form, dressed as a consort and being coerced / ganged up on by several British men. He swoops in and saves her. They get to catch up, where Yan reveals that she’s now permanently unable to shift to her true fox spirit form. She admits she feels defenseless and weak: “I can’t hunt anymore, and I can’t even run very fast.” Forced to survive on her only attribute left (her beauty), she enters the dangerous escort / prostitution business in Hong Kong where it is common for British men to prey on and rape Asian prostitutes. She feels a deep sense of feeling powerless, trapped, and shameful: “I am now living by very thing you and your father accused my mother of: I bewitch men for money.” She dreams of jumping from building to building in her new city (i.e. cage), just like she used to as a fox spirit in their village home.
• Climax: the point of absolute, irreversible change
  • Yan is forcibly turned into a machine to satisfy the Governor’s sick desires:
    • One day, Yan shows up at Liang’s home and reveals a horrifying event: opening her jacket, Liang sees that her organic human body has been replaced entirely by machine parts. Yan details the story: the Governor, a client of hers who she’s been seeing for months who’s always acted like a gentleman, one day rigs her drink and she wakes up strapped onto an operating table. Her body is sliced off into pieces as surgeons operate on her, turning her into the first female cyborg to satisfy the Governor’s sick fetish for machines. They gawk at their creation.
    • One night with the Governor, Yan has had enough (she is REPULSED) and, with her new machine-given strength, overtakes and kills him brutally. “A terrible thing has been done to me. But I can also be terrible.”
    • This is literally the moment of irreversible change, captured in the film’s dialogue: Liang, after hearing this, whispers: “We can find a way to reverse this, Yan.” Yan turns away, replying: “It’s too late. But I need your help.”
      • The dehumanization and exploitation of Asian people by the British colonizers has gotten so out of hand that they literally forcibly took away and manipulated Yan’s body, enslaving her for their own agenda to the EXTREME. The traumatic, mortifying gravity of this moment (the filmmakers held nothing back) portrayed the extent of loss of dignity, humanity of the exploited. This is how far they’ll go. This is what they took from us.
• Crisis: When the character must make a key decision (the quiet moment)
  • Liang decides to help Yan “get her body back” and exact revenge: Yan asks Liang to draw from his expertise to build her a “new” body, one where she can morph again to her true fox spirit form and exact revenge on those who “think they can own us.” Liang agrees in his unconditionally gentle way, halting his other duties to focus on helping Yan. A time lapse occurs as Liang takes on this miraculous feat, and he eventually succeeds. Yan’s bronze, “sex machine” female human body as crafted by her oppressors gives way to a sleek, silver form. After she whispers “I’m ready,” she drinks a bowl of coal powder (rather than the tea she drank as a human), activates the spirit power within her, and her new silver machine body shrinks and morphs into a fox again—this time by means of machinery. But her original nine tails are organic and intact, showing that Yan has successfully reativated her magic and spiritual source with the aid of technology (fox spirits in Chinese mythology have nine tails).
• Resolution
  • Yan gets her “true form” back through technology (the very thing that took away her spirit, magic, body, and agency in the first place). Now able to morph into her true fox form again, she leaps building to building just like she envisioned, helping other coerced young Asian women by brutally ripping to shreds the men who prey upon them.
    • By the end, Liang also finds his own dignity—he achieves his true brilliance and potential through helping his dear friend rather than rotting invisible in his workplace (this is symbolized by his long hair fully whipping in the breeze, free, rather than in his usual braid).
    • Also throughout, Liang and Yan’s friendship/love remain so unconditional and pure in a world of sexual exploitation—so precious and refreshing.

Controlling Idea / maʿnā:

Ultimately, Good Hunting is about how to build up our own dignity in a world of oppression. Even when our agency, power, freedom, identity, home, pride, even BODY is stripped away from us, we can still embody our true nature, authenticity, and dignity through mastering the machinery that trapped us in the first place. We can adapt, harmonize, and turn things around to serve us.

Never forget the essence of who we are. Even if our form changes—chopped up, distorted, exploited—that original nature still burns unwaveringly within us.

Growing up as an Asian-American woman in this matrix, I’ve always felt like Yan: out of my element, powerless, fetishized, distorted to the point where I forgot who I really am. But this part of my journey is about returning to my authentic self, how I can harmonize with my reality to reach a new, integrated truth—a new type of magic.