Cyberpunk Meets Chinese Mythology

The Chinese animated fantasy film White Snake 2: Green Snake (Amp Wong, 2021) fuses cyberpunk visual aesthetics with traditional Chinese mythology and folklore. It explores the subtext of the household legend “The White Snake” and transposes its scenario into the setting of a postapocalyptic modern metropolis. Such a rewriting taps into past cultural memories and gives voices to contemporary experiences. The film’s generic hybridity, epitomized in its “Shura City” imaginary, goes beyond stylistic experimentation for the visual and narrative pleasure. It also mirrors the Chinese cultural landscape of rapid urbanization, population flow, and the digitization of life. Further, its reconfiguration of Oriental elements and cyberpunk visual tropes expresses a gesture of cultural reappropriation. The film thus constitutes a dynamic site of cultural negotiation between tradition and modernity, Chinese indigenous identity and globalizing forces, individual agency and systematic control.