Havoc in Heaven
Based on Wikipedia: Havoc in Heaven
Imagine spending twenty-three years trying to make a single movie. Not because you lacked talent or vision, but because history itself kept intervening—a world war, a civil war, and finally, just as you finished your masterpiece, a cultural revolution that would shut down your entire industry for a decade. This is the story of Havoc in Heaven, a 1961 Chinese animated film that became both a triumph of artistic perseverance and an accidental political metaphor that audiences whispered about in coded conversations.
A Monkey King Is Born
The film tells the story of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, one of the most beloved figures in Chinese literature. If you've never encountered him before, think of him as a kind of divine trickster—a being of immense power who refuses to bow to authority, whether that authority sits on a throne in heaven or commands armies of celestial soldiers. He's mischievous, prideful, and utterly indestructible. He's also, as it turns out, the perfect hero for a China experiencing its own tumultuous relationship with power and rebellion.
Sun Wukong comes from Journey to the West, a sixteenth-century novel written during the Ming Dynasty. The novel belongs to a genre called shenmo, which roughly translates to "gods and demons" fiction—sprawling adventures mixing Buddhist philosophy with supernatural action. Journey to the West follows a monk traveling to India to retrieve sacred scriptures, protected by a motley crew of reformed demons, but everyone agrees the real star is the Monkey King, whose early escapades before joining the pilgrimage make up the source material for this film.
In Havoc in Heaven, we meet Wukong at his most gloriously rebellious. Born from a stone on the magical Flower and Fruit Mountain, he rules over a kingdom of monkeys with benevolent authority. But he has a problem: during a military parade, he accidentally snaps his royal sword while showing off. A monkey king needs a proper weapon.
The Dragon's Gift He Didn't Mean to Give
An old monkey suggests Wukong visit the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. This seems reasonable enough—the Dragon King is a neighbor, after all, and neighbors lend each other things. What the Dragon King doesn't anticipate is that his guest will be entirely unimpressed by conventional weapons.
The Dragon King, amused by this small, furry visitor's audacity, orders his soldiers to bring increasingly heavy weapons. Wukong dismisses each one. Too light. Too flimsy. Finally, the Dragon King takes him to see a great pillar—a massive iron staff that the gods themselves used to pin down the sea during ancient floods. It weighs eight tons. It can change size at will. It's called the As-you-will Cudgel, and it's clearly not meant to be borrowed by anyone.
Wukong takes it anyway.
The Dragon King, horrified that his guest could actually lift the thing, demands its return. Wukong delivers a reply that captures his entire philosophy: if you didn't want it taken, you shouldn't have offered it. He returns home with his new weapon, leaving the Dragon King to do what aggrieved parties have done throughout history—file a formal complaint with upper management.
Heaven's Bureaucracy
The Dragon King travels to the celestial court and petitions the Jade Emperor—the supreme deity of the heavenly realm—for justice. The Emperor's court operates like any government bureaucracy, complete with generals eager to solve problems with force and advisors who prefer subtler approaches.
General Li immediately offers to send an army. But the God of the North Star has a different idea: give the monkey a minor position in heaven's vast bureaucracy, something that sounds impressive but carries no real authority. Keep him close. Keep him supervised. Keep him distracted with paperwork and meaningless titles.
The Emperor agrees. It's a plan that has been tried by powerful institutions throughout human history—co-opt potential troublemakers by giving them just enough status to feel important while ensuring they have no actual power. Sometimes it works. With Sun Wukong, it works exactly as well as you'd expect.
The Head of the Imperial Stables
The God of the North Star descends to Flower and Fruit Mountain with an offer Wukong can't refuse: a prestigious title and a position in heaven itself. Wukong, flattered, agrees to leave his kingdom for the celestial realm. He's given the grand-sounding post of Head of the Imperial Stables.
What no one tells him is that this is essentially the divine equivalent of being assigned to shovel manure.
Still, Wukong throws himself into the work. He notices the horses are miserable, cooped up and neglected. Being a king himself, he understands something about the wellbeing of subjects, so he sets the horses free to roam. They become healthier and happier. Wukong receives compliments on his excellent management.
Then the General of the Imperial Cavalry arrives for an inspection and finds the stables empty, the horses wandering wherever they please. The confrontation that follows reveals the truth: Wukong has been given a servant's job dressed up with fancy language. He's been tricked.
Wukong defeats the General easily—physical confrontation is never the problem for someone who can lift an eight-ton magical staff—and returns to Flower and Fruit Mountain. But now he's angry, and anger combined with power makes for a dangerous combination.
The Great Sage Equal of Heaven
Back home, Wukong declares himself the Great Sage Equal of Heaven. Not subservient to heaven. Not a minor functionary. Equal. The title itself is an act of rebellion, a direct challenge to the celestial hierarchy.
The Jade Emperor, predictably, is furious. General Li sends his best warriors, including Nezha, a powerful deity in his own right who rides on flaming wheels and wields divine weapons. The result is the same as before. Wukong defeats them easily. When General Li threatens to return with more troops, Wukong shouts back that he and his monkeys will be waiting.
This is the pattern that defines the film: heaven keeps underestimating the monkey, keeps trying to solve the problem with either trickery or force, and keeps failing. There's something deeply satisfying about watching a character who simply refuses to be diminished by those who consider themselves his superiors.
The Heavenly Garden Trap
The God of the North Star tries subterfuge again. He approaches Wukong with a new offer: guardian of the Heavenly Garden. He describes its wonders—the scents, the beauty, the divine fruit far superior to anything on Flower and Fruit Mountain. Wukong is wary this time, but his curiosity wins out.
The Heavenly Garden contains the peaches of immortality, fruit so precious that the Empress herself cultivates them. They're served only at the most important celestial banquets. Leaving Wukong in charge of them is like asking a child to guard a candy store and expecting perfect restraint.
Wukong eats the peaches.
When fairies arrive to collect fruit for an upcoming imperial banquet, Wukong asks who's invited. The guest list includes the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea—the same Dragon King who reported him to the Emperor. But the Great Sage Equal of Heaven? Not invited.
Wukong realizes he's been played again. He flies into a rage, freezes the fairies with his magic, and crashes the banquet itself. He puts all the attendants to sleep, samples the food and wine, and in his drunken state decides to steal the entire feast. He stuffs it into a magical bag for his subjects back home.
Drunk and Lost in Heaven
What follows is one of the film's most charming sequences. The intoxicated Monkey King, trying to find his way home, stumbles into the workshop of Lao Tzu—the legendary sage who founded Taoism, here depicted as a kind of celestial alchemist. On the workbench sit the Pills of Immortality, prepared for the Emperor himself.
Wukong eats them too.
The pills have the useful side effect of sobering him up, and he finally makes it home to Flower and Fruit Mountain. His subjects greet him with joy. He opens the magical bag and shares the stolen banquet. It's a moment of pure communal celebration—the monkey king providing for his people with goods appropriated from the wealthy and powerful.
Meanwhile, in heaven, the cascading discoveries create something approaching panic. The Empress finds her banquet ruined. The fairies report the stolen peaches. Lao Tzu announces that his irreplaceable pills are gone. For the first time, both General Li and the God of the North Star agree: military action is the only remaining option.
War on Flower and Fruit Mountain
The battle sequences in Havoc in Heaven represent some of the finest work in the history of Chinese animation. The film's visual style draws heavily from Peking opera, a traditional art form that combines music, vocal performance, mime, dance, and acrobatics. The drums and percussion that drive the film's soundtrack come directly from opera traditions, creating a rhythmic urgency that makes every confrontation feel like a theatrical performance.
The heavenly army descends on Flower and Fruit Mountain. Wukong's monkeys are waiting, trained and ready. The fighting is fierce. One by one, Wukong faces the Four Heavenly Kings, each wielding exotic weapons—one carries a lute whose music induces sleep, another commands a magical snake. Wukong defeats them all.
Then comes Erlang Shen, a three-eyed warrior god who is, for once, a genuine match for the Monkey King. Their duel includes a shapeshifting sequence that would influence animation for decades—both combatants transform into different creatures, trying to gain advantage. At one point, Wukong attempts to escape by transforming himself into a small temple. The joke is that his tail, which he can never quite control, sticks out as a flagpole.
The battle between equals might have continued indefinitely, but Lao Tzu intervenes, knocking Wukong unconscious with a sneak attack. The Monkey King is captured and brought before the celestial court for execution.
The Indestructible Rebel
Here the film becomes almost gleefully absurd. Heaven attempts to execute Wukong through every means at its disposal, and every attempt fails.
The guillotine blade shatters against his neck.
A fire-breathing executioner tries to burn him alive. Wukong inhales the flames and exhales them back, sending the executioner running away on fire.
A shower of golden arrows merely puts him to sleep from boredom.
Lao Tzu suggests using his eight-way trigram furnace—a cosmic forge capable of creating the Pills of Immortality. Perhaps the same fire that creates divine elixirs can destroy the creature who consumed them. They throw Wukong in and seal the furnace.
Days pass. Lao Tzu opens the furnace expecting to find nothing but ash. Instead, he sees two glowing lights. Thinking they're Pills of Immortality somehow created by the process, he reaches in—and discovers they're Wukong's eyes, now hardened and refined by the cosmic flames rather than destroyed by them.
The time in the furnace has given Wukong something new: eyes that can see through any illusion. In some versions of the story, this is how he gains his famous ability to perceive the true nature of demons disguised as humans. But in this moment, what matters is simpler. He breaks free, destroys the furnace, rampages through the imperial palace, routs the guards, and sends the Jade Emperor himself fleeing in disarray.
The final image shows Wukong returning to Flower and Fruit Mountain, greeted by the cheers of his subjects. Heaven lies in ruins. The rebel has won.
Twenty-Three Years in the Making
The film you see when you watch Havoc in Heaven represents the culmination of more than two decades of effort by the Wan brothers—four siblings who essentially invented Chinese animation.
Wan Guchan began planning this adaptation immediately after completing Princess Iron Fan in 1941, the first Chinese animated feature film. But then the Japanese captured Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the project became impossible. After Japan's defeat came the Chinese Civil War, another impossible time for artistic endeavors. It wasn't until 1954, when Wan Laiming became director of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, that production could finally resume.
The first part of the film was completed in 1961 by Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan. The second part, completed with the assistance of Wan Chaochen and Wan Dihuan, came in 1964. All four brothers contributed to the final product. Both parts were shown together for the first time in 1965.
This timing matters enormously. Havoc in Heaven became the last major animated film of what's called the Second Golden Era of Chinese cinema. Just one year after its complete release, the Cultural Revolution began, and the entire animation industry was effectively shut down. Artists were sent to labor camps. Studios were closed. The Wan brothers' careers were over.
The film survived as a kind of artifact from a vanished world—proof of what Chinese animation could achieve when given resources and freedom.
The Metaphor Everyone Noticed
Art created under authoritarian systems often carries meanings that exist parallel to the official interpretation. Around the time of its release, many viewers understood Havoc in Heaven as a metaphor for contemporary politics. The monkey causing havoc in heaven was Mao Zedong. Heaven was China. The rigid celestial bureaucracy, with its emphasis on proper titles and absolute hierarchy, was the system Mao was upending.
This reading was dangerous to articulate openly, which made it perfect for whispered conversations. The film could be enjoyed as pure entertainment—a visually stunning adaptation of a beloved classic—while simultaneously serving as commentary on the revolutionary chaos transforming Chinese society. The Monkey King's refusal to accept his assigned place in the celestial hierarchy could be read as celebration of revolutionary spirit or warning about its consequences, depending on who was watching.
The film's title itself entered the Chinese language as a colloquialism. To this day, "making a havoc in heaven"—da nao tian gong—means to create a tremendous mess, to turn everything upside down. The phrase carries a certain admiration for the chaos-maker even as it acknowledges the destruction left behind.
Technical Artistry
The animation in Havoc in Heaven represents a fusion of Western techniques with distinctly Chinese artistic traditions. The character designs draw from Peking opera, with its stylized costumes, exaggerated movements, and symbolic color coding. The backgrounds incorporate elements of traditional Chinese painting—mountains emerging from mist, palaces rendered with careful attention to architectural detail.
The fight choreography deserves special mention. Each confrontation is staged like an opera performance, with specific movements and poses drawn from martial arts and theatrical traditions. The drums and percussion that accompany these scenes aren't just background music—they're integral to the pacing, providing the same rhythmic structure that guides live opera performances.
When the film was restored and converted to 3D in 2012, the restorers faced an interesting challenge. The original aspect ratio was 1.33—nearly square, as was standard for films of that era. The restoration changed this to 1.78, a widescreen format, which required adding additional artwork to the backgrounds and sometimes repositioning characters within frames. Some action scenes were sped up to reduce the runtime from 106 minutes to 90 minutes. Whether these changes improved or diminished the original is a matter of ongoing debate among fans.
Global Journey
Although Havoc in Heaven was never widely released in Western theaters, it found audiences through television broadcasts. Swedish viewers saw it in the mid-1980s with scene-by-scene narration by Hans Alfredson. It aired multiple times in the Soviet Union during the same period and became enormously popular among young viewers there—a generation of Soviet children grew up with the Monkey King as a formative influence.
The BBC broadcast the film in 1980, 1981, and 1983. Danish television showed it with voiceover by Povl Dissing. German audiences saw it in 1980. Each of these versions was slightly different—some longer, some shorter, some with different edits.
A fan restoration project eventually spliced together multiple sources—commercial releases and VHS recordings of original broadcasts—to reconstruct the complete original version. This kind of dedication speaks to the film's enduring impact. People who saw it as children in countries as different as Sweden and the Soviet Union remembered it vividly enough to seek it out decades later.
Legacy
Countless adaptations of Journey to the West have followed, in animation and live action, in China and internationally. Many Chinese viewers still consider this 1964 version the definitive screen portrayal of Sun Wukong's heavenly rebellion. There's something about the combination of traditional artistic techniques, political timing, and sheer craftsmanship that has proven difficult to replicate.
At least two sequels were produced in the 1980s, continuing to adapt different sections of the original novel. Ren Shen Guo in 1981 told the story of the ginseng fruit. Jinhou jiang yao in 1985—most commonly translated as The Monkey King Conquers the Demon—adapted the Baigujing story arc, in which Wukong battles a shapeshifting skeleton demoness.
The film won the outstanding film award at the 1978 London Film Festival, suggesting that its eventual international recognition matched its domestic success. It also won prizes at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia and the Chinese film Hundred Flowers festival, where it received awards for both best art and children's literature.
But perhaps the most significant legacy is harder to measure. For a generation of Chinese animators, Havoc in Heaven represented a peak of possibility—proof of what could be achieved before political upheaval made such achievement impossible. When the animation industry eventually revived, this film remained a touchstone, a reminder of heights once reached and worth aspiring to again.
And for viewers everywhere who encountered it—whether in its original release, on Soviet television, through BBC broadcasts, or via fan restorations decades later—it offered something universal: the spectacle of a small, fierce creature refusing to accept the place that the powerful had assigned him, fighting his way to freedom with nothing but wit, magic, and an eight-ton staff that could grow to any size he desired.