“No. 7 Cherry Lane” is the kind of animated movie that may utterly knock you for a loop if you happen to don’t know what’s coming, and director Yonfan is completely high quality with that. The movie sports activities a pair of erotic fantasy sequences that obtained walkouts at some press screenings on the Venice Film Festival, however Yonfan instructed TheWrap that he had a blast making these scenes as a result of…it was simply enjoyable!
“Art should not be so serious. You should have fun and have a wild imagination and sometimes let it run away a little bit to get yourself loose,” Yonfan stated in an interview for TheWrap’s Awards Screening Series. “A lot of people have called my movie ‘kitsch’ and I don’t mind it because ‘kitsch’ is only a word.”
Yonfan has directed 14 movies over his decades-long profession, however “No. 7 Cherry Lane” is his first enterprise into animation. The film tells the story of Fan Ziming, a good-looking younger tutor who will get a job instructing English to an 18-year-old named Meiling. But earlier than their classes may even start, he kinds an surprising bond with Meiling’s mom over their shared love of literature and traditional cinema, resulting in a love triangle amidst the backdrop of anti-colonial protests in 1967 Hong Kong.
While the kinky fantasies of Meiling’s mom could also be what some viewers will probably be speaking about probably the most — “I’ve never seen someone show a cat doing that!” Yonfan recollects a good friend telling him on the premiere — the remainder of the movie is crammed with surreal portrayals of a modernizing Hong Kong and tributes to the movies which might be dearest to Yonfan’s coronary heart, significantly Simone Signoret’s “Room at the Top” and “Ship of Fools.” In many respects, it’s Yonfan’s most private movie but; a tribute to an essential time and place within the filmmaker’s life in a lot the identical method “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” was Quentin Tarantino’s ode to 1969 Los Angeles.
“In my childhood, we had nothing else to play with. We could only go to the cinema,” he stated. “So I would go to the cinema in Hong Kong and in the darkness I absorbed all the energies from Hitchcock, from Kurosawa, and they became my friends.”
But no director has had an even bigger influence on Yonfan than Francis Ford Coppola, significantly his 1983 coming-of-age movie “Outsiders.” His nod to that movie in “No. 7 Cherry Lane” just isn’t as apparent as his reimagining of assorted Signoret movies, however it’s the homage that’s most expensive to him.
“At the beginning of the film, there is only one sentence: ‘He stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house,’” he stated. “He didn’t make that shot, but this line, I dedicated one shot where Meiling, where she sees her mother kissing the man she loved, and she walks out of the theater into the bright sunshine…that is my tribute to Francis Coppola.”
While he loved the brand new challenges that got here with animation, Yonfan thinks there received’t be one other animated movie from him sooner or later. “I’m proud of this film, but I never repeat myself in my work, so treasure it!” he says.
Watch the total interview with Yonfan within the clip above.
