MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Great Conquest’ Audience Will Get Lost in Confusion

Watching “Great Conquest: The Romance of Three Kingdoms,” a Japanese animated feature playing through Tuesday at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theatre in West Hollywood, is like going on a badly guided tour of a labyrinth. This sprawling period epic will leave all but the most hard-core Japanese animation fans lost in a maze of war and intrigue.

“Conquest” is based on the 14th-Century Chinese novel “The Romance of Three Kingdoms” by Luo Guan-Zhong, a 1,200-page evocation of the civil wars that ravaged China in the 3rd Century. The book is extremely popular in Japan, and audiences familiar with it might be able to follow the film’s endless marches, battles, intrigues and natural disasters. Kazuo Kasahara’s muddled screenplay will quickly lose American viewers, despite the characters’ endless speechifying and a narration read by Pat Morita.

At the heart of the story are the exploits of three heroic friends sworn to fight for peace and justice. The trio recalls the Three Musketeers, with coolly intelligent Kuan Yu as Aramis, boisterous Chang Fei as Porthos, and noble young Liu Pei as a cross between D’Artagnan and Athos.

The myriad supporting characters range from the cruel Gen. Ts’ao Ts’ao to the beautiful and virtuous Li Wah.

Director Tomohara Katsuma uses all the cinematic tricks of the genre: rapid cutting, panning shots, dream sequences, flashbacks, but the material overwhelms him. The limited animation is eclipsed by the handsome backgrounds, which evoke the look of Chinese paintings.

However, it’s more fun to thumb through a book on Chinese art than to sit in a theater seat while “Conquest” grinds on for two unremitting hours.