Tag Archives: film

Capitalist lobsters!

Lobsters 龙虾 is a 1959 stop-motion short directed by Jin Xi 靳夕, adapted from a play by Lu Dan 芦丹. A restaurant proprietor attempts to dispose of his stock of spoiled lobsters by placing an ad for a dinner conference on Marxism.

I first saw this aired on TV back in 2002 or 2003, and have been trying to locate a copy ever since. Now thanks to the CCTV6/SAPPRFT venture M1905, it’s available online at last.[1] It’s a short and hilarious satire, so I won’t spoil it with a plot summary — just watch it:

The action takes place in an unidentified country sometime in the 1950s, with advertisements and newspapers that contribute an international flavor. On closer inspection the text is Romanized Chinese.

"Foreign" newspaper from "Lobsters"

“Foreign” newspaper from Lobsters

  1. [1]Note: I started this post in May 2014. This blog’s been dormant for a while.

Search the Hong Kong Film Archive

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The Hong Kong Film Archive’s search tool is an invaluable resource when you’re faced with the task of translating movie titles that may not be well-known enough (or involve enough Internet-savvy westerners) to be listed in the Internet Movie Database. It’s also great for finding out the standard English names of tiny production companies and major production staff, as well as Chinese translations of foreign movie titles.

After spending hours combing the Internet for obscure movie titles and common transliterations of the names of particular crew members for use in director bios and other festival materials, this will be the first place I’ll look from now on. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great starting place.