It's a semi-animated modern-day retelling of "Cinderella."
It features a disappearing fortuneteller and her mystical servants. It's
narrated by a giant talking koi. So why isn't Year Of The Fish more magical? To some degree, it's
trying to find the magic in the everyday, but the attempts to ground it are
cringe-inducing and problematic: There's a sizeable conflict between fairy-tale
enchantment and raw exchanges like "Where'd you learn to cook like this?" "My
mother teach me." "She should have taught you how to suck dick. You be better
off."
The story starts in New York's Chinatown, where shy Chinese
expat An Nguyen arrives to earn money for her ailing
widower father. In traditional immigrant-story fashion, she winds up committed
to years of servitude to her financial sponsor, snappish older relative Tsai
Chin. Again per tradition, the work is degrading: As Chin's brashest employee
(Hettienne Park) reveals, Chin is madam over a sexual massage parlor.
Humiliated, Nguyen flees, but she has nowhere to go, and Chin has her passport.
When Nguyen cringes from clients, she's forced to cook, scrub toilets, and
endure Park and Chin's abuse. Her only consolations are the fish a mysterious,
hideous blind hunchback gave her, and her tenuous feelings for an accordion
player (Ken Leung) she glimpsed on her first day in town.
First-time writer-director David
Kaplan cut his teeth on short-film versions of other fables, and with Year
Of The Fish, he tries to mate an
old Chinese take on "Cinderella" with a modern-day story. But his contemporary
updates—a near gang-rape, graphic dialogue about anal play—sour the
drifty magical realism and make the idealized, sentimental romanticism feel
false. The fable's broad character dynamics—evil stepmother, ugly
stepsisters—don't translate well into a real-world setting, where they
just produce shallow, cartoony villains. But mostly, Kaplan just doesn't take
enough advantage of his animation. He shot the film on digital video in a
drearily conventional style, then rotoscoped his images into luminous,
impressionistic pastels, but he mostly uses the technique as a simple process
to soften his shots' raw edges, rather than to play with captivating new
realities that he couldn't have managed in live action. A few Waking Life-esque drawn-in details—a moon
framed in animated swirls, or the throbbing eyes of a supernatural
servant—show the potential of Kaplan's visuals, and a sweet, dreamy coda
highlights a softer tone. But for all his ambition, creativity, and seeming
sincerity, he's wound up with a stylistic mishmash that's stuck midway between
staying grounded and committing to its flights of fantasy.