Interesting comment and lore from hengcs.

Whether you understand the conventions of a culture or not doesn't always matter; you just have to accept them, especially when the culture is a remote one from yours. As we've been saying in this discussion, the western and esp. US audiences have become more and more conditioned to understand and appreciate martial arts movies of the most elaborate and flowery kind. Like Crouching Tiger, Hero is not unusual in its content for the genre, but it's presented in a particularly beautiful and palatable form suitable for the western audience. I don't think it has to be translated into or reduced to an animation. You could not capture the magic of Maggie Cheung with little digital drawings. Beautiful flesh and blood, real flowing diaphonous robes, thousands of tiny leaves floating in the air--these are things the most advanced animation techniques will never really duplicate, though to be sure, digitalization plays a role in all this stuff now, for better or for worse.

Magic has to look real or it isn't magic.