Sun Wukong Thrice Subdues the White Bone Demon
A 1960 color opera film produced by Shanghai's Tianma Studio featuring Zhejiang Shaoju and starring Liu Lingtong.
Sun Wukong Three Times Strikes the White Bone Demon is a color opera film produced in 1960 by the Tianma Film Studio, a subsidiary of the Shanghai Film Studio. Co-directed by Yang Xiaozhong and Yu Zhongying, the film has a runtime of approximately 94 minutes. It is an adaptation of the Shaoxing Dabun (Shaoxing Opera) performed by the Zhejiang Shaoxing Opera Troupe. The film stars Liulingtong (Zhang Zongyi), renowned as the "Southern Monkey King," as Sun Wukong, with Xiao Changshun as Tang Sanzang, Qilingtong as Zhu Bajie, and Xiao Yanqiu as the White Bone Demon. The screenplay was compiled by Gu Xidong and Bei Geng, drawing from the twenty-seventh chapter of Journey to the West, "The Corpse Demon Three Times Deceives Tang Sanzang; The Holy Monk Hatefuly Banishes the Handsome Monkey King." It depicts the classic sequence in which Lady White Bone transforms into a village girl, an old woman, and an old man to deceive Tang Sanzang three times, leading Wukong to strike the demon thrice, only to be banished back to Flower-Fruit Mountain. In 1963, the film won the Best Opera Film award at the second Hundred Flowers Awards. Mao Zedong and Guo Moruo both wrote poems in response to the work. Distributed to over seventy countries, it is regarded as a representative masterpiece of New China's opera cinema.