The Tiger's Apprentice

“In The Tiger’s Apprentice, no female characters have their own story arcs, or even dimensionality.”

Title: The Tiger’s Apprentice (2024)
Directors: Raman Hui 👨🏻🇭🇰, Yong Duk Jhun 👨🏻🇰🇷, and Paul Watling 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Screenplay by David Magee 👨🏼🇺🇸 and Christopher L. Yost 👨🏼🇺🇸 based on the book by Laurence Yep 👨🏻🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 3.5/5

With flat scenery and rote character designs, Paramount+’s The Tiger’s Apprentice lacks the craft of animation gold standard, Pixar. Narratively, the plot is as standard as it comes, and it can’t help recalling another San Francisco Chinatown-based story, Disney+ series American Born Chinese, which released less than a year ago. Both follow Asian American boys who have trouble fitting into high school before they’re quickly plunged into a world of Taoist mythology. (American Born Chinese tackles the adventures of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, while The Tiger’s Apprentice riffs on the Chinese zodiac.)

But directors Raman Hui, Yong Duk Jhun, and Paul Watling—whose combined resumes include the impressive likes of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Monster Hunt, and Kung Fu Panda—deliver exciting action sequences, as glowing neons and illustrative brushstrokes spin, twirl, and explode into an engaging watch.

The Tiger’s Apprentice really comes into its own by emphasizing teamwork and group strength over Western-style exceptionalism, found in other Asian American works like American Born Chinese or Mulan (2020). Main character Tom Lee (voiced by Brandon Soo Hoo) builds a relationship with mentor and “tiger guardian” Mr. Hu (Henry Golding), as well as 11 other zodiac animals—quite a crowd to stuff into an 84-minute movie, to be sure, and it results in shallow characterizations across the board. But Laurence Yep’s original novel (upon which the film is based) makes a clever workaround by tucking most of the guardians away, hidden in the villain’s offscreen clutches for the majority of the movie. This strategy works well enough, but there’s no squaring the fact that 12 superpowered heroes are a lot to introduce in one kids’ movie. In the end, The Tiger’s Apprentice does land some effective laughs and tender moments, but they’re trapped within mediocre storytelling.

Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Women have important supporting roles, including Tom’s phoenix guardian grandmother (Kheng Hua Tan), the villain Loo (Michelle Yeoh), plus helpers in smaller roles like dragon Mistral (Lucy Liu) and classmate Rav (Leah Lewis). However, its most important female characters—Tom’s grandmother and Loo—both perish as plot points. Meanwhile, the film’s emotional core revolves around Tom and his mentor, Mr. Hu. With an all-male group of writers and directors behind the film, it’s perhaps unsurprising that onscreen, no female characters have their own story arcs, or even dimensionality, for that matter.

Race: 4.5/5

It’s always wonderful to see an Asian American project come together in an authentic and collaborative way. With Chinese American author Yep and Asian directors like Hong Konger Hui and LA-based, Korean-born Jhun at the helm, The Tiger’s Apprentice’s portrayals of Asian American life come from informed perspectives. Furthermore, inclusive casting means that Asian and diasporic actors are getting paid opportunities for their work, which is always positive.

But when we’re looking at onscreen representation, none of the characters are complex or even specific to Chinese American culture, at least not beyond surface-level nods that have become tropes by now—boba, dim sum, and Chinatown settings simply don’t feel as impactful as they did, say, ten years ago. Progress is good! But it does mean newer films need to build on the shoulders of their forebears, not simply rehash and expect the same delight from their viewers.

Furthermore, characters like Tom, his grandmother, and the zodiac guardians in their human forms lack visible diversity. Sure, Mr. Hu has some scruff and is built like a muscled athlete, and Rav has a slightly more square jaw than the rest of the cast’s demurely pointed chins. Only restaurant owner Cynthia (Lucy Liu) has a significantly different body shape, and even that falls into the long meme-ified silhouette of a short and stout East Asian woman in her 60s or older. Though this is more a lack of imagination than anything malicious, The Tiger’s Apprentice’s characters look like cardboard cutouts of each other: light-skinned, thin- or average-sized, with similar face shapes and button noses, differentiated mainly by their outfits and personalities.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.25

Out actor Bowen Yang plays the rat guardian Sidney in a role that leverages the SNL comedian’s humor without turning him into a campy stereotype. Not to belittle camp—Yang’s sketches as the Iceberg from the Titanic or Proud Gay Oompa Loompa are some of SNL’s greatest moments, but in this particular case, it’s also nice to see the comedian given the space to flex his range with a still-silly, but more balanced character.

Mediaversity Grade: B 3.92/5

The Tiger’s Apprentice is enjoyable to watch and has a few lines that skirt oh-so-close to cultural resonance, such as Tom’s brief mention about how he doesn’t know who he really is, or Cynthia’s aggressive urging for Tom to eat up, saying he’s too thin. But these moments are few and far in between the wider gulfs of safe, expected children’s action animation.

Like The Tiger’s Apprentice? Try these other kids’ movies featuring Chinese culture.

Grade: BLiJanuary 31, 2024