Bringing the vfx to life in Forbidden Kingdom required a lot of work in a very short timetable. Hong Kong-style martial arts is mixed with the original Monkey King myth. All images © Lionsgate Ent.

The tale of the Monkey King is as much a part of Chinese culture as Mickey Mouse is to American life, and the chance both to tell this story and have martial arts superstars Jackie Chan and Jet Li appear together in the same film for the first time was just too good an opportunity for director Rob Minkoff to pass up.

"The chance to interpret the character in this film, get Jet Li to play it and then kind of present this character to the West, it's almost like the story of the movie," says Minkoff, who directed both Stuart Little movies and co-directed The Lion King.

The Forbidden Kingdom (opening April 18 from Lionsgate) begins with American teen Jason Tripitikas (Michael Angarano), a martial-arts movie geek who is beaten up by local bullies and wakes up in mythical China. Tasked with returning a mystic weapon to the Monkey King, who's been imprisoned by the Jade War Lord (Collin Chou) for more than 500 years, Jason is aided in his quest by kung fu master Lu Yan (Chan), the Silent Monk (Li) and the beautiful Golden Sparrow (Liu Yifei).

But bringing to life Forbidden Kingdom required a lot of work in a very short timetable, especially when it came to using visual effects to mix the film's Hong Kong-style martial arts action with the storybook fantasy of the original myth.

Minkoff says he wanted the visual effects to evoke the feel of classic Hong Kong films. It also needed to balance the story's sense of storybook fantasy and realism. "The audience is a little more sophisticated, so some of the fog-machine effects with the dry ice obviously weren't going to cut it with us," he adds. "We obviously wanted something that was slightly more contemporary."

Minkoff says the effects work ended up staying largely in Asia, thanks to Exec Producer Rafaella DeLaurentiis, who was impressed by the high quality and low cost of some work done by a Korean house. "She thought that would be an interesting option for us," continues Minkoff. "It's a Chinese story, Asian-themed, and would require a sensitivity that might be a natural fit with Korea."

Work ended up being spread around a number of vfx studios, with a trio of South Korean houses leading the charge: Macrograph, DTI and Footage.

But first, the film had to go through a short prep of eight weeks and then into a tight, 101-day shooting schedule in China. Ron Simonson came onto the project about a month into shooting as the senior visual effect supervisor, and says the biggest challenge was getting up to speed on what was being shot on a set full of green safety pads and wire rigs, and making sure it would work for the visual effects artists later on.