Monkey King gets moving on paper

Havoc in Heaven, a pop-up book about the Monkey King. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The book was published after Xi'an-based Lelequ, a pop-up book brand under the Ronshin Group, won the adaptation rights in 2014.

The publisher spent two years working with a team of 10 to turn more than 70,000 paintings and pictures into the 300 components that the book comprises.

"We did more than 2,000 revisions to create the beautiful and intricate pop-ups. Sometimes we were so exhausted that we wanted to drop the project, but we persisted," says Sun Zhaozhi, the book designer and deputy general manager of the group. Sun also says the scene which shows a battle with an army from heaven took the team half a year to complete.

Yan Dingxian, the brain behind the image of the Monkey King in the cartoon film, said at an event in Shanghai in November that he had gone to the Peking Opera for inspiration to create it.

Speaking about Lelequ's effort to pay tribute to tradition and carry it forward in a form that is both innovative and appealing to readers, Yan Hongbing, 49, the paper-art designer of many of Lelequ's books over the past decade, says he had always wanted to make an original version of the Monkey King－a character he has loved since childhood－after he saw a pop-up version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 2003.

"Then (in 2003), I was amazed by the way the content became vivid with the characters bouncing around, but I soon realized that in our literary tradition there are many stories that are suitable to be turned into such books－with strong characters, grand scenes and dramatic conflicts," says Yan.

In the book, there is a scene where the Monkey King retrieves his legendary weapon－the golden cudgel－from the East Sea Dragon King's palace.

As the story unfolds over the pages, the cudgel bounces up to a height of around 40 centimeters.