Every Journey to the West Adaptation, Ranked for Faithfulness

There is no shortage of Journey to the West on screen. There is a shortage of Journey to the West on screen in English, which is why most Western viewers can name a video game, a Japanese cartoon that is not really an adaptation at all, and possibly one Netflix film. The version that actually holds the title is a Chinese television serial older than most of the people looking for it, and it is the one to start with.

• ✅The 1986 CCTV serial is the reference version. It is the performance Chinese viewers picture when they picture these characters.
• ✅The best-looking one is animated and covers seven chapters. Havoc in Heaven, from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.
• ✅The one Britain grew up on is Japanese. Monkey, made for Japanese television in 1978 and rewritten wholesale for the BBC dub.
• ✅Nobody has filmed the whole book, and the reason is in the structure rather than the budget.

One word needs defining first, because faithfulness means something unusual for this book. A hundred chapters, most of them self-contained, means no adaptation can be judged on whether it keeps the plot: there is barely a plot to keep. What can be judged is coverage, order and temperament. How much of the road does it walk, does it walk it in the order the novel walks it, and does it treat the party as four squabbling colleagues or as a hero and three assistants. Every ranking below is decided on those three, and they are the reason the prettiest version is not first.

The ranking below is by faithfulness to the novel rather than by quality, and the two do not line up. If you would rather play the scene every one of these versions has staged, the playable Journey to the West includes the peach banquet the monkey was not invited to.

🏆 The ranking, shortest version

Ranked on how much of the novel survives contact: the 1986 serial first, Havoc in Heaven second, Monkey third, the 2023 Netflix film fourth, and Black Myth: Wukong outside the list entirely because it is a sequel rather than a version of the book. Each of those placings is explained below, and the reasoning is about coverage and order rather than about how good the thing is to watch.

A note on what is not here, because the omissions are deliberate rather than accidental. This list covers the versions an English-speaking reader can actually find and follow, which leaves out a very large Chinese-language field: Stephen Chow's 1990s films, the Hong Kong television serials, the Japanese animated series, and the Lego line aimed at children. Several of those are loved, and one of them is probably the funniest thing anyone has ever done with this material, but they are adaptations of a mood rather than of a text, and ranking them for faithfulness would be a category error. They deserve their own piece.

Every adaptation on this list stages the banquet and none of them lets you be at it: in the playable version you can arrive as the uninvited guest, as the official who had to write the guest list, or as the peach-garden staff. Role-play Journey to the West →

📺 Journey to the West (1986, CCTV)

This is the one people mean by the definitive version, and it earns the title on coverage. It was made for China Central Television, the first season went out in November 1986, and by 1988 twenty-five episodes had aired, working through the pilgrimage in the order the novel tells it. No other production has attempted that scale with that fidelity to sequence.

Its real achievement is casting, and it is the reason later versions have such trouble. Liu Xiao Ling Tong played Sun Wukong and Ma Dehua played Zhu Bajie, and both became the reference performances rather than merely good ones. The World of Chinese, writing about the pig thirty-five years later, still calls Ma Dehua's the standard portrayal of the character. When a Chinese reader pictures these pilgrims, this is usually what they are picturing, in the way a British reader of a certain age pictures one specific television detective.

On coverage it is doing something no film can. Twenty-five episodes against a hundred chapters is roughly four chapters an hour, which is about the rate at which the novel actually reads, and it means the serial can afford to let a demon episode be a demon episode rather than compressing three of them into a montage. That is the whole reason it feels like the book: the pacing is the adaptation.

It is worth knowing what you are getting into. The effects are 1980s state-television effects, the wire work is visible, and the demons are made of foam. None of that is the point. The serial is faithful in the way a good stage production is faithful: it trusts the material, keeps the episodes in order, plays the comedy as comedy, and lets the actors carry four characters across twenty-five hours without ever making them cool.

🎨 Havoc in Heaven (1961 and 1964)

The most beautiful thing ever made from this novel, and the shortest answer to why it is not first on the list is arithmetic. It adapts the opening chapters, the monkey's rise and his war with Heaven, and stops. Everything it covers, it covers almost exactly.

It came out of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in two parts, 1961 and 1964, directed by Wan Laiming with all four Wan brothers producing, and the two halves were finally screened together from 1965 as a single film of a hundred and fourteen minutes. It travelled: it took the outstanding film award at the London International Film Festival in 1978, and it is distributed internationally under the title The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven.

The style is the argument. The film is drawn out of Chinese opera and traditional painting rather than out of anything American, and it commits to that completely, from the face-painting conventions to the way a fight is choreographed as a stage routine. It is also the only adaptation on this list whose visual language a reader of the novel would recognise as belonging to the same culture as the text.

🇯🇵 Monkey (1978, and the BBC dub that followed)

The version that introduced English-speaking audiences to the story, and it is Japanese. It ran on NTV in Japan from 2 October 1978 to 4 May 1980, fifty-two episodes across two seasons, with Masaaki Sakai as the monkey and Masako Natsume as the monk. The BBC began broadcasting an English-dubbed version in 1979, and it is that dub that a generation of British viewers remembers.

One correction is worth making, because it circulates constantly. The series is often credited to Arthur Waley, whose 1942 abridgement gave the English-speaking world the title Monkey. The connection is the title and nothing else that any source consulted here supports. The English dialogue was written by David Weir, and it is a free rewrite: aphoristic, deadpan, and only loosely attached to what the Japanese script was saying.

On faithfulness it does better than its reputation. It keeps all four pilgrims and the dragon horse, it keeps the demon-per-episode structure the novel actually has, and it keeps the monk as the weak link. What it changes is register: the novel is funny, and this is broad. It also cast the monk as a woman, which no Chinese version of the period would have done and which turns out to suit the character rather well. The dub was left unfinished for twenty-five years, with only thirty-nine of the fifty-two episodes done until Fabulous Films completed the remaining thirteen in 2004.

🎬 The Monkey King (2023, Netflix)

The most recent English-language attempt, and the least faithful of the screen versions here, by design rather than by accident. It premiered on Netflix on 18 August 2023, directed by Anthony Stacchi for Netflix Animation and Pearl Studio, with Jimmy O. Yang voicing the lead, and it takes its story from the first seven chapters of the novel.

Two of its inventions are worth naming, because they are the ones book readers notice. The staff becomes a character, a talking companion with opinions, where the novel treats it as an object with a weight stamped on it. And a human girl, Lin, is invented as a co-lead and given the emotional argument of the film, which the novel gives to nobody, because in the novel the monkey's only real relationship in these chapters is with his own ambition.

Reception matched the compromise: it holds a 56% score from forty-five reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with audiences a little warmer at 63%. It is a perfectly serviceable children's film that ends by setting up the story the novel spends ninety-three chapters telling, and a viewer who watches it will know the monkey and none of the pilgrimage.

🧱 Why has nobody filmed the whole book?

Because the shape that makes the novel pleasant to read makes it very hard to sell. A hundred chapters, most of the middle built as self-contained demon episodes with no carried plot, and a party whose relationships are essentially fixed from the moment it assembles. That is a serial. It is not a film, and it is barely a season of prestige television.

Every adaptation on this list solves the problem the same way, by taking a slice. The animated film takes the rebellion. The Netflix film takes the rebellion again, which is why the two overlap so heavily. Monkey takes the road and drops the destination. Only the 1986 serial takes the pilgrimage as a pilgrimage, and it needed television and twenty-five episodes to do it, which is why it remains the answer to this question nearly forty years later.

The newest solution to the same problem is to stop adapting altogether. Black Myth: Wukong, released in 2024, sets its story after the novel has finished, which sidesteps the coverage problem completely and creates a different one, since a sequel has to assume the book. That is a reasonable trade for a game and a poor one for anyone hoping to meet these characters for the first time.

The hundred-chapter Chinese text these versions are all cutting down is free at Project Gutenberg. If you would rather read it than watch it, the four English translations are compared here, and the monk all of these productions treat as the weak link turns out to have been the most formidable person in the story.