Kid-friendly adaptations of Journey to the West?

[wshaffer]

So, I was wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon drawing of Sun Wukong on it yesterday, and The Nephews were quite intrigued. Who'd have thought that a talking monkey with martial arts skills and an a knack for thwarting authority would hold any appeal to 4-6 year old boys?

Which got me wondering if there are any kid-friendly adaptations of Journey to the West out there, in either TV, movie, or book form? The late 70s/early 80s live-action TV series Monkey (which used to be available in its entirety on Youtube, but, alas, seems to have been taken down) might entertain them and is scripted in such a way that the references to Adult Concepts would probably go over their heads, but it wasn't really a kids' show.

Oh - I wonder if anyone ever did a manga adaptation. Older nephew has become enamored lately of a series of comic book adaptations of stories from Greek mythology, and will happily pore over the pictures even when there isn't an adult handy
to read the text. I'll have to look in to that.

Comments

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

There are lots of manga adaptations, but they all take liberties. (Example: The original Dragon Ball series is a loose adaptation of Journey to the West. So is Sayuki.)

There are probably more faithful Chinese animated versions, but I don't know of any that have been translated into English.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the boys would probably love Dragon Ball, but I was hoping for something a little more faithful. I'm not familiar with Saiyuki.

An Amazon search turned up a set of illustrated kids books by Debby Chen and Wenhai Ma, which looks promising, although the watercolor illustrations are pretty sedate compared to what you'd get in manga or comics.