History WesternAnimation / TheMonkeyKing

* TailSlap: Monkey King uses his tail to smack Red Girl's face while on mid-air riding Stick. [[spoiler:During the final battle, the giant-sized Dragon King is forced to rely on his tail in order to attack Monkey King after stick twists up both of his arms, though this does little to help him.]]

* MetaphoricMetamorphosis: During the climax of the movie, [[spoiler: the Dragon King becomes a giant, bloated version of himself by gorging with sea-water until he has the ToonPhysics of a water balloon. This symbolizes his own inflated, bloated, excessive ego and self-image, that Monkey ends up literaly bursting. And in return, the fact that the Monkey King gains the same glowing eye and an even bigger size than the Dragon King reveals that he is even more dangerous and destructive than him.]]

* TailSlap: Monkey King uses his tail to smack Red Girl's face while on mid-air riding Stick.

* AnAesop: Sometimes even the smallest of pebbles can make the biggest of differences.

* AvoidTheDreadedGRating: The word "{{Hell}}" is used in this film to refer to Diyu, which is basically Chinese myth's equivalent to Christian Purgatory, and is frequently referred to as such on English translations.

* AvoidTheDreadedGRating: The word "Hell" is used in this film to refer to Diyu, which is basically Chinese myth's equivalent to Christian Purgatory, and is frequently referred to as such on English translations.

* OnPatrolMontage: Once the elder of the monkeys tells him he has to defeat 100 demons to be noticed by the gods, and defeat he does with a ArtShifted scene.

* Butt-Monkey: Poor Jade Emperor, always getting struck by the Monkey King’s antics.

* HatesbeingAlone: Monkey King's motivation to be immortal, defeating demons, and moving in with the gods was all so that he wouldn’t be alone, as he was born this way from the stone egg he hatched from with no one like him around.

[[quoteright:1000:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/20230820_173857.jpg]]

*** Subverted however, as it isn't the first time in media that Ao Guang/the Dragon King was depicted as a flood-inducing wicked antagonist. For example, Ao Guang was depicted, similarly to this movie, as a storm-causing, human-hating agent of chaos in the 1979 animated Chinese movie ''Nezha Conquers the Dragon King''. He was even depicted in this movie eating children - just like this movie's Dragon King threatens several times to do.

* NeverMessWithGranny: Wangmu might look like an old lady, but she is still the only one of Monkey King's many ennemies [[spoiler: that almost manages to kill him for good.]]

* CrapsackWorld: How Ancient China is depicted in this movie. The Immortals in Heaven are unconcerned with anything that happens on Earth, only focused on hosting lavish parties. The Dragon King who rules the seas is an OmnicidalManiac who wishes to destroy all "dry-landers" and drown the world in the biggest storm ever seen. Humanity suffers from both demons and natural disasters (such as the drought in Lin's village) - and whenever they are "saved" or "helped", it is either by manipulative lying beings such as the Dragon King, or by a would-be-hero that causes much more damage than anything such as Monkey King.

* GeniusBonus: During the 2D timelapse sequence showing the Monkey King defeating various demons, viewers can spot several demons from the original ''Journey to the West'' novel. There are visual references to the White Bone Demon, the Bull Demon King, the Spider Demons, the One Hundred Eye Demon Lord, the Scorpion Demoness and more.

* BodyMotifs: Hands. The motif of the "pebble in one's hand" is a recurring metaphor both the elderly monkey and Monkey King use to disdain respectively Monkey King as a kid and Lin. Of course, [[spoiler: It is all {{Foreshadowing}} the ending, with Buddha's test and defeat of Monkey King.]] But even beyond that, hand motifs can be found everywhere in the movie. The mountain Monkey Kid is born on looks like it has five fingers, the crossroad the protagonists reach when looking for a graveyard is shaped like a hand, and whenever we see outer space, the stars and constellations are ''also'' forming hands.

* FireIceLighting: Rather Fire, Water, Lightning. The supernatural forces of this movie seem to be divided between fire-oriented beings (Red Girl, Yama), water-manipulating entities (the Dragon King) and celestial beings using lightning as their weapons (Wangmu).

* AvoidTheDreadedGRating: The word "Hell" is used in this film to refer to the Buddhist Naraka, which is frequently referred to as such on English translations.

* AdaptationalVillainy: The Dragon King is based on Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, from the original ''Journey to the West'' novel. In the original story, the Ao Guang is not an outright enemy of Sun Wukong, though he is deeply annoyed by him - rather, Sun Wukong keeps forcing him and bullying him into giving him gifts and helping him, even when it breaks the rules of the CelestialBureaucracy he obeys to. Here, the Dragon King is hellbent on getting back Monkey King's magical staff and killing him for the personal insult of being somehow better than him. Similarly, in the original novel Ao Guang was not an OmnicidalManiac like in the movie, where he wishes to flood the entire dry world and kill all "air-breathers". Rather, he was part of the bureaucracy of the Jade Emperor to the point he feared punishment each time Sun Wukong asked him to cause rain when he didn't receive any imperial order to do so.
** Subverted however, as it isn't the first time in media that Ao Guang/the Dragon King was depicted as a flood-inducing wicked antagonist. For example, Ao Guang was depicted, similarly to this movie, as a storm-causing, human-hating agent of chaos in the 1979 animated Chinese movie ''Nezha Conquers the Dragon King''. He was even depicted in this movie eating children - just like this movie's Dragon King threatens several times to do.
* Wangmu in this movie is depicted as a hateful, sadistic antagonist with a visceral hatred for Monkey. A far cry from the more peaceful and benevolent Queen Mother of the West of Chinese mythology.