Chickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog review – time-travel fun for plucky hybrid critters

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A half-chicken half-hare, a skunk and a tortoise go in search of a 3,000-year-old groundhog in this wholesome animation with a surprisingly complex plot Although this animated feature doesn’t have a title as utterly awesome as its predecessor, Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness , it’s still a perfectly adequate 90-ish minutes of creamy pastel-coloured picaresque entertainment. It feels like it’s skewed in the direction of younger viewers given the simple character designs, general wholesomeness and easy-on-the-jokes tone, but the plot is surprisingly complicated. The lead character is named Chickenhare because of course he is half-chicken half-hare, although in practice he looks more like a hare than a chicken other than a tuft of feathers on the crown of his head. He is best friends with a skunk named Meg, equipped with the awesome power of stink and who is very butch-coded with her waistcoat, faux-hawk and tomboy characteristics; there is also a tortoise named Abe, who as you mi...
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The Narrow Road review – tough times for the downtrodden in pandemic Hong Kong

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After deciding it’s time to seek help with his cleaning business, despairing Chak meets the zanily upbeat Candy

Set in Hong Kong during the early days of the pandemic, Lam Sum’s tender drama pictures a city haunted by economic and political uncertainty. Storefronts are plastered with foreclosure and bankruptcy notices, while talk of moving abroad hovers amid everyday conversations. Plagued by faulty equipment, the one-man sanitary service operated by world-weary Chak (played by Cantopop star Louis Cheung) is on the verge of breaking down. When asked by his ailing mother if God is telling him to give up the business, Chak self-deprecatingly describes himself as a speck of dust, so tiny that even the deities would not take notice.

Reluctantly hired as an extra pair of helping hands on his cleaning rounds, single-mom Candy (Angela Yuen) enters Chak’s life like a whirlwind of chaos. With her impossibly sunny attitude and colourful fashion sense, Candy could have come off as a manic pixie archetype; Yuen instead manages to lend an emotional weight to the character’s capricious quirkiness. A particularly devastating sequence finds the pair scrubbing the human-shaped stain left by a nameless soul who has died alone in squalor, another speck of dust forgotten by the outside world.

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