'The Monkey King' review: A royal charmer

WHAT IT'S ABOUT "The Monkey King" tells the origin story of a central figure in the 16th century Chinese epic novel "Journey to the West" through the prism of an imaginatively animated family movie for Netflix.

The Monkey King (Jimmy O. Yang), with eyes that can produce laser beams and the promise of a special fate from Buddha, grows up as an outsider. As a young adult, he strives for immortality by conquering 100 demons, with the help of a local village girl named Lin (Jolie Haong-Rappaport). A magical stick accompanies them on the journey, while the Dragon King (Bowen Yang), who rules the undersea world, stands in their way.

The picture is directed by animation veteran Anthony Stacchi ("The Boxtrolls"), while the voice talent also includes Stephanie Hsu, an Oscar nominee for "Everything Everywhere All at Once."

MY SAY Spanning from below the sea to the stars, "The Monkey King" offers a richly textured landscape. It reflects the best of what the tools of animation can achieve in realizing a mythological universe, with images that stand out for their beauty while reflecting the eternal nature of this story of a young person finding his purpose.

From the first frame to the last, it's consistently enrapturing, a consequential visual achievement that seems to have arrived from a place that's somehow beyond space and time.

That stands as a welcome surprise amid the glut of mediocre family movie content clogging up streaming services these days. When it comes to the need to provide queue fodder, the art can seem beside the point.

"The Monkey King" is not entirely immune to this phenomenon: the epic scope of the world constructed by Stacchi and his team conflicts with a general busyness in the development of the characters and the plot.

The characterizations are familiar: the depiction of the Monkey King as a run-of-the-mill, cocky Americanized youngster; the scenery-chewing villain with his meek sidekicks; and the earnest and well-meaning Lin all seem more at home in a work of cheap children's entertainment or perhaps a second-rate Disney production than a movie of such visual splendor.

The plot developments also have a tendency to undercut the broader picture: the quest to achieve immortality includes a multitude of fight scenes and other sequences that seem designed to make this material more accessible to general audiences.

There are a few forgettable musical numbers, too.

To some extent, of course, all of this constitutes a sound business practice. The picture's executive producer Stephen Chow ("Kung Fu Hustle") has a decades-long history as a director and an actor of making movies in Hong Kong that translate globally, because they're rooted in fundamentals that work well in any context.

A little bit of ordinariness is a small price to pay for a movie with the ambition of "The Monkey King," for taking in the scale of its vision in which palaces on clouds, sea-glass draped underwater lairs, the fires of hell and beyond amass into a singular experience.

BOTTOM LINE The imaginative visuals make "The Monkey King" well worth the time.