The Fantasy of Deer Warrior is like a live-action Bambi, featuring actors in animal costumes (proto-fursuits?) frolicking through the forest, singing songs, and fighting one another. This bizarre curio from the early sixties in Taiwan is certainly unique. It's billed online as a family movie, but there's a character named Erotic Fox, who in one scene, performs a suggestive dance set to jazzy bossa nova. The soundtrack is a mix of Holst's Planets suite, jingle bells, classical Chinese songs, and generic stock music. The plot is rather straightforward; the lives of the peaceful forest animals are disrupted the evil wolves who want to eat them. Occasionally the film detours into small parables like the Tortoise and the Hare, or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. It's rather an odd mishmash of various elements. Despite having a substantial amount of dialogue, The Fantasy of Deer Warrior has the feel of a silent film, and one can almost imagine disposing with sound altogether, and allowing the simplistic, but magical, and occasionally trippy images tell the story on their own. One can only imagine what the production of this movie was like, or what the inspiration behind its existence was. What is certain, though, is that this is a very special little diddy.
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