Animation / Green Snake (2021)

The Tribulation of the Green Snake

Green Snake — also known as White Snake 2: The Tribulation of the Green Snake — is an Urban Fantasy Chinese All CGI Animated Film released on July 23rd, 2021. Directed by Amp Wong and with animation by Light Chaser Animation, Alibaba Pictures, Tianjin Maoyan Weiying Culture Media and Bilibili; it serves as a sequel to White Snake.

Some time after the events of the first movie, Blanca marries Xu Xian, the reincarnation of Ah Xuan, and has a child with him. When Xian leaves her to join a Buddhist temple led by the great sage Fahai, Blanca assails it with Verta's help in order to get her husband back. In retribution, Fahai seals Blanca inside Leifang Pagoda, and when Verta vengefully attacks him she is cast down a mountain and awakens in the seemingly modern-day metropolis of Asuraville. Confused and angry, Verta sets out to rescue her sister no matter the cost, aided by a mysterious mask-wearing grey-haired young man.

See also Green Snake, a live-action take from the 90s.

Trailer, Trailer 2, Trailer 3, Trailer 4, Final Trailer, Easter Egg 1, Easter Egg 2, Special Video 1, Special Video 2, Special Video 3

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Tropes in this film include

• Actionized Sequel: With romance no longer being the primary focus, there's a greater emphasis on supernatural combat and chases in this second film.

• Ambiguous Situation: The film's opening doesn't clarify whether Xu Xian joined Fahai's Buddhist temple of his own free will or not, just that Blanca's pissed about it and wants him back. Xian begs Fahai to spare her, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Xian not being there by choice would be in-line with the basic original legend, where Fahai's role in the story is to repeatedly try to separate Blanca and Xian out of his animosity towards her, including imprisoning Xian in a Buddhist temple and the sisters trying and failing to rescue him.
• Anyone Can Die: The film opens with Blanca — the protagonist of the previous movie — being killed by Fahai, with her soul being imprisoned underneath Leifang Pagoda. Verta is mortally-wounded trying to avenge her and ends up in the purgatory of Asuraville due to her relentless determination and obsession with saving her sister. Following this, almost all of the film's supporting characters except Verta, Baoqing, and her two minions perish. Sun is killed by one of the Ox-Heads, the Raksha Clan are slaughtered by the Ox-Heads and Horse-Faces, Simon is killed by Mr. Ox, the Ox-Heads and Horse-Faces are killed by Baoqing, Mr. Ox is bitten by an evil spirit and beheaded by the Masked Man, and the Masked Man is bitten by Mr. Ox and sacrifices himself to carry Verta through the portal to be resurrected.
• Animal Battle Aura: When fighting Fahai, Verta shapes her chi into a massive green serpent that she sics on him.
• Asian Fox Spirit: The enigmatic Two-Faced huli jing owner of the Precious Jade Workshop — Baoqing, previously known only as the Foxy Boss — pops up in Asuraville sporting modern attire, and at one point transforms into her true form — a colossal eight-tailed fox-demon. In the mid-credits scene, she reclaims her ninth tail and declares it's time for her to get revenge.
• Badass Biker: Many of the demons and humans trapped in Asuraville have organized into biker gangs, with the Ox-Heads and Horse-Heads — a gang mostly comprised of ox-headed and horse-headed demons, the Raksha Clan — mostly comprised of Raksha, and the Octopus Gang being some examples. Verta quickly becomes one herself, mastering how to ride a motorcycle and becoming highly skilled at fighting atop it.
• Bait-and-Switch: When Verta talks to the Masked Man about his past, all he can remember is that he is looking for someone, a face he can just barely remember, given the way it is ambiguously worded and Blanca's previous displays of devotion toward Xuan, it seems even over several reincarnation she cannot forget her love, and even in a new life the desperate need to see him again led her to Asuraville. It's not until the very end that we are shown, that no, it isn't Xuan Blanca was so desperate to meet again, it was Verta.
• Bare Midriffs Are Feminine: Sun and Verta are one of the few women in Asuraville, and are notably one of the few who wear outfits that bare their midriffs.
• Big Bad: Fahai is a Buddhist sage and master of Jinshan Temple, and the one who captures Blanca and banishes Verta to Asuraville when she attacks him.
• Bird People: The Raksha Clan compromise of avian humanoids, often overlapping with Winged Humanoid. They're one of the biggest gangs in Asuraville, though they have let several humans join their ranks after Simon (a human) was made the leader.
• Bittersweet Ending: Verta manages to defeat Fahai, topple his pagoda and escape from Asuraville, but the Masked Man has to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to earn her escape and she's now stuck in modern times and still hasn't reunited with Blanca or her reincarnations.
• Brought Down to Badass: After being trapped in Asuraville, Verta is stripped of the supernatural powers she'd cultivated — meaning no flight, no chi blasts, no nature manipulation, and no shapeshifting. However, she's still a capable warrior and readily adapts to her new limitations.
• Chase Fight: Many of the Chase Scenes involve Verta and her allies fending off some of their pursuers, often by throwing them off their vehicles or stopping to fight in order to buy someone time to run.
• Chase Scene: The film features several, since Verta has been Brought Down to Badass, she can't properly deal with many of the dangers in Asuraville, and often has to run from the Ox-Heads and Horse-Heads or the Kalpa spirits.
• Clothing Damage: Verta's green robe is riddled with cuts and burned holes after she gets defeated by Fahai, and soon after one of her sleeves is torn off when she barely dodges an attack by the giant Ox-Head she encounters. She ends up discarding the whole thing during the Time-Passes Montage with Sun, and just opts to wear a makeshift Sarashi for the rest of her stay in Asuraville.
• Co-Dragons: The Raksha Clan has three lieutenants who assist Simon in leading the gang. Notably, they're all Raksha, in contrast to their leader Simon who is a human.
• Creative Closing Credits: Made to resemble the wood reliefs◊ in the actual Leifeng Pagoda in Hangzhou but depicting the events of the film.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: When Blanca and Verta interrupt his meditation and try to destroy his temple, Fahai nonchalantly blocks their attack with a sutra, shatters the Jade Hairpin when Blanca tries to use it to drain his power, and then seals Blanca away and imprisons her under the Leifang Pagoda until the end of days. When Verta vengefully attacks him, he summons Zhūquè the Vermilion Bird, who easily trounces her and sends her plunging into Asuraville.
• Death of Personality: One can escape Asuraville by throwing themselves into the water of release, but the process takes away the person's "obsessions", meaning they'll forget all that they value and care about. Most people in Asuraville don't care to use the waters, since they see it as another form of dying.
• Doomed Moral Victor: When Mr. Ox assaults All-Good Market, Simon decides to go down fighting him, and to the surprise of all he actually manages to deal a lethal blow by stabbing Mr. Ox in the neck. But due to Mr. Ox's being blessed with Fahai's aura, this doesn't kill it, but it still humiliates him in front of everyone, causing Simon to feel like the winner despite Mr. Ox killing him shortly after.
• The Dreaded: The Kalpa demons are feared by all inhabitants of Asuraville, due to their raw powers, vast numbers and the fact anyone bitten by them turns into a kapa demon themselves not long after.
• Dub Name Change: The title White Snake 2: The Tribulation of the Green Snake is shortened to simply Green Snake in English.
• Fantastic Racism: Humans in Asuraville tend to be persecuted by the Beast Man and demons who inhabit the place, due to being seen as weaker. The lieutenants of the Raksha Clan even consider kicking out all the humans from their gang, seeing them as dead weight.
• The Four Gods: The Fire Kalpa manifests as Zhūquè the Vermilion Bird, while the Flood Kalpa manifests as Xuánwǔ the Black Tortoise; both laying waste to Asuraville.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: For just a second after the Masked Man reveals his face to Verta, you can see small wisps of purple smoke. The same smoke that appears when characters use the face altering masks the Mr. Ox gives his followers.
• Genius Loci: According to Sun, Asuraville is alive — periodically unleashing cataclysmic kalpas cycles that devastate the city at night, only for new buildings to sprout up out of the ground in the morning.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: The Ox-Heads are armed with spiked maces that can extend into flails, the Horse-Faces are armed with crescent-shaped sickles, Mr. Ox wields a massive battle-axe, and Simon wields a sword. Sun wields a shotgun that Verta later takes up, Verta wields a makeshift rope-dart, and the female Raksha Clan members mainly fight by firing blades from their wings.
• Happy Ending Override: Very little of the last film's positive conclusion carries over into the first few minutes of this one, with Blanca and her husband being torn apart by a scheming Knight Templar monk, and both sisters seemingly killed.
• Healing Spring: Played With. The water of release can "cure" anyone in Asuraville and send them back to the real world, but the process erases their memories and identity, meaning it's not that much different from being killed anyway.
• Island Base:
  • In the opening, Blanca and Verta attack Jinshan Temple — a fortified Buddhist temple built on an island and serving as Fahai's base of operations — in Zhenjiang.
  • Baoqing also operates her Asuraville shop out of one.
• Love Triangle: Verta comes to be torn between her attraction to the charismatic and ruggedly handsome Simon and a mysterious mask-wearing grey-haired young man. Simon breaks it by leaving Verta and the grey-haired man to drown in a flooding subway and locking the door so they can't escape. In the very next scene, the masked man — who Verta believed to be Blanca's reincarnation after seeing his face — is revealed to be a mole for Mr. Ox, causing her to lament having been fooled and that she should've known that men are useless and she can't rely on anyone but herself. Both Simon and the masked man end up sacrificing themselves to help her escape Asuraville, with Verta forgiving and genuinely falling for the latter.
• Magic Bus: The Spider Goblin drives a double-decker bus with spider legs, which seems to run on a mix of technology and demon magic.
• Neat Freak: The Third Lieutenant loses against Verta when she becomes more worried about getting muddy than fighting, and Verta takes advantage by chucking mud at her.
• The Neutral Zone: Given she is the only way anyone can easily get supplies they would need for survival, Asuraville's various gangs treat the docks and land around the Baoqing All-Good market as neutral ground. This makes it the very last place Mr. Ox decides to attack as part of his conquest of Asuraville.
• No Ontological Inertia: In the film's final act, Verta spends twenty years fighting Fahai in a dreamscape-esque realm, eventually succeeding in mortally-wounding him and destroying Jinshan Temple. While this is implied to be a Battle in the Center of the Mind to cleanse herself of her negative karma, Fahai reveals to Verta that he was behind Mr. Ox's invulnerability and after he dies the wards he placed on Mr. Ox vanish.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: One of the primary factions in Asuraville are the aptly-named Ox-Heads, derived from one of the two guardians of the gates of the Underworld in Chinese mythology. The leader of the Ox-Heads and Horse-Faces — who are derived from the other guardian of the gates of the Underworld in Chinese mythology — is Mr. Ox, a humanoid bull-demon who somehow retains the ability to use his powers in Asuraville, and who serves as the primary antagonist for much of the film.
• The Phoenix: The fire Kalpa takes the form of the Vermilion Bird Zhūquè, a massive bird made of flames that devastates Asuraville in an enormous firestorm.
• Place Beyond Time: Asuraville exists outside of time, resulting in people from all periods of Chinese history rubbing elbows in an Eldritch Location resembling a modern metropolis. Furthermore, decades -- even centuries -- can pass on the outside, but only a few days pass on the inside.
• Purgatory and Limbo: While on the surface Asuraville is a seemingly mundane modern metropolis, it's actually an Eldritch Location outside the boundaries of the Celestial Realm, the Mortal World, and the Demon Realm. Humans, immortals, gods, and demons from every dynasty of Chinese history have ended up trapped there due to strong emotional attachments or obsessions, unable to reincarnate and stripped of most of their supernatural powers — though the Raksha clan and demons like the Octopus Boss and Mr. Ox still possess immense physical strength and any other innate abilities they may have possessed. Furthermore, the city is routinely destroyed in Kalpa Cycles before rebuilding itself the following morning.
• Pushed at the Monster:
  • When Masked Man and a nobleman are being chased by a Kalpa on the All-Good Market, the nobleman pushes Masked Man so the Kalpa can get catch him. This is particularly vile since the Masked Man had just saved his life. Verta ends up saving Nasked Man while another Kalpa ends up catching the nobleman and pushing him into the Release waters.
  • During the final Chase Scene for the Wish Bridge, Mr. Ox tries to sabotage Verta and Masked Man's path, so the Kalpas can get them while he runs away. It doesn't work, and he ends up getting caught by the Kalpas anyway.
• Reincarnation Romance: The grey-haired young man who Verta falls in love with is revealed to be Blanca's reincarnation.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue:
  • At the beginning of the movie, Blanca attacks Fahai's temple to rescue Xu Xian — her husband and Ah Xuan's reincarnation.
  • Verta is hellbent on getting rescuing Blanca after Fahai imprisons her in Leifang Pagoda, attacking him head-on despite knowing how much stronger he is.
  • When Sun is murdered in cold blood by the Giant Ox-Head, Verta furiously attempts to beat him to death and then shoots him in the face with Sun's shotgun when he tries to crush her.
• Sarashi: As part of her modern ensemble, Verta wears black chest-wraps... and nothing else on top.
• Sequel Hook:
  • In the first mid-credits scene, Baoqing the huli jing reclaims her ninth tail from the box she left with the river monster at the end of the previous movie, ominously saying the time has finally come for her to take revenge.
  • In the finale, Verta reassembles the Jade Hairpin — which Fahai had shattered — and releases Blanca's soul from inside it, enabling her to reincarnate again, with the promise that they'll find each other once more.
• Shadow Discretion Shot:
  • When Mr. Ox kills the Second Lieutenant, we only see their shadows and he brings his giant ax down on her.
  • When Mr. Ox kills Simon, we only see their shadow as he breaks his neck, and then Simon's body tumbles to the ground.
• Shoulders-Up Nudity: Verta is naked during her Shower of Angst, but the camera always remains above her shoulders (save for a brief shot where the scenery conceals her body) so as to not show any nudity.
• Shower of Angst: After fighting Third Lieutenant, Verta takes a makeshift shower when finally given a moment of reprieve to process Sun's death. Simon spoils the moment by walking in on her, though she doesn't really care.
• Spell Blade: In the film's opening, Blanca and Verta wreathe their swords in chi when attacking Jinshan Temple, using them to summon a series of tsunami to crush the island.
• Stable Time Loop: Asuraville existing outside of time, thereby bringing together people who die but refuse to accept their fate regardless of which time period they died in, results in a time-loop developing. With the Masked Man's help, Verta is able to defeat Fahai and destroy Leifang Pagoda, freeing Blanca's trapped soul. Blanca's soul then enters the cycle of reincarnation and is eventually reborn as the Masked Man, who is sent to Asuraville upon dying. Due to Asuraville's nature, the Masked Man is eventually reunited with Verta and helps her destroy the pagoda, thereby completing the time-loop.
• Time-Passes Montage: There's a montage of Verta and Sun getting used to living in Asuraville, training to fight, ride motorcycles, and becoming better acquainted with the locals. It also doubles as a Training Montage.
• Time Skip: Enough time has passed between the ending of White Snake and Tribulation of the Green Snake for Blanca to have married and had a child with Ah Xuan's reincarnation — Xu Xian... and for him to have left her to join Fahai's Buddhist temple. The movie opens with Blanca attacking Fahai's temple looking to get her husband back, only for Fahai to seal her away.
• Took a Level in Badass: At the beginning of the movie, Blanca and Verta have cultivated enough spiritual power to fly, conjure storms, and create a series of layered massive tsunami to obliterate Fahai's temple. Unfortunately for them, Fahai is even more powerful and casually disperses their attack before capturing Blanca, and Verta is unable to use her supernatural powers in Asuraville.
• Tragic Keepsake: Following Blanca being captured by Fahai, Verta keeps a shard of the Jade Hairpin and one of her white hair ribbons wrapped around her arm as a keepsake — serving as a symbol of her obsession to rescue Blanca, which lands her in Asuraville.
• Traitor Shot: Simon shots the Masked Man a Death Glare while he and Verta are speaking before they depart from All-Good Market, hinting at his jealousy and dislike of their bond and how he will betray them both later.
• Trapped in Another World: According to Simon, those who find themselves in fatal situations but refuse to accept their fate end up trapped in Asuraville instead of reincarnating after death. Verta was blasted by Fahai's summoned phoenix while trying to save Blanca, while Sun fell off a cliff while mountain-climbing.
• Ungrateful Bastard: During the Kalpa's attack on All-Good Market, The Masked Man saves a pompous noble from being taken by them, but when they're both being chased later, the noble tries pushing the Masked Man so the karpas will take him while he runs off.
• Urban Fantasy: As opposed to the Wuxia setting of the first White Snake, White Snake 2 is set in the seemingly modern Asuraville, where demons and monsters live alongside humans.
• Urban Ruins: Asuraville looks like a modern city that's been ruined, with most of the buildings being vacant and in various states of decay due to the gang violence and the kalpa attacks.
• Viral Transformation: The bat-winged evil spirits that hunt through Asura City during the Kalpas Cycles are former denizens, and those bitten by them will transform after a brief period. Mr. Ox gets bitten while trying to prevent Verta and the Masked Man from escaping, and then bites the Masked Man — who uses his newfound wings to help Verta escape Asuraville.
• Year Outside, Hour Inside: When Verta goes to cleanse herself of her negative karma, she passes through a portal that pits her against Fahai, only to be ejected out seconds later and inform the Masked Man that two hours had passed inside it. On the whole, Verta spends twenty years fighting Fahai, but only a day passes in Asuraville.
• Zombie Infectee: Anyone who gets bitten by a Kalpa demon is quickly turned into one themselves. One can resist the process temporarily with enough willpower, but it doesn't last more than a few minutes.

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