Tsui Hark was developing an animated A CHINESE GHOST STORY tv series after producing the animated movie in 1997. However, the project was shelved. Eric Chu, an ex-storyboard artist of Film Workshop, clues us in with a generous dosage of visuals by him (and Tsui Hark!) and shares an honest opinion about what it's like to work with the wizard:

"Just ran across your website and thought I'd give you what little experience
I had at FW. I worked at Film Workshop for a couple of months several years
ago some time after the CHINESE GHOST STORY animated movie. At that time
they were producing a CHINESE GHOST STORY animated TV series. I was one of
three people doing storyboards for the production. We would get scripts for
the episodes which had little sketches by Tsui Hark illustrating the story
points. The stories followed the same storylines as the animated movie, and
had very little to do with the original movie. The plan was to do the
animation in Korea or China (they had a bad experience with the Japanese
animators during the production of the animated movie) and the backgrounds
were to be done in cgi. Probably a first for a TV production at the time.

In the end, because of the Asian economic crisis, the Korean backers pulled
out of the project and it died with only a couple of episodes produced.

At the time, there were a few other animated projects in the pipeline, Lou
Fu Ji (which has been completed as a live-action/cgi film), a Chinese
fantasy sword and sorcery animated film and a sci-fi animated film with the
same basic premise as Osmosis Jones (although it was in pre-production long
before OJ was).

Hope this was useful."

Eric Chu

In the following pages, you'll first have a look at sketches done by Tsui Hark, illustrating the story points. After that, see how Eric interprets them into a series of storyboards for an action sequence.