It hits you at the pace of a Tsui Hark wire-fu setpiece, except nobody has to obey gravity because it's all ink. Ning is a debt collector drowning his heartbreak in other people's overdue accounts, and the only thing keeping him honest is Solid Gold, a dog with better instincts and better comic timing than most human sidekicks in the genre. Then he wanders into the ghost town and the movie turns into a full supernatural society with its own factions, its own politics, its own monsters holding the leash. The 1997 Hong Kong and Japan co-production shows in every frame: Cantonese slapstick energy running on Japanese animation muscle, early digital effects swirling under hand-drawn chaos. And under the gags, it's a love story about a man who already lost one girl and falls for a woman who technically cannot stay. You laugh for an hour, then it takes the ground out from under you.

Ning has lost his girlfriend, and he takes up work as a debt collector in the hope of forgetting his troubles. The job soon brings him far more than he bargained for. With his constant companion Solid Gold at his side, he finds himself in a ghost town, and that is where his adventure begins. The film draws on Chinese myth and fantasy, and it mixes drama, romance and action in a story of good battling evil.