Deaf Crocodile is releasing Demigod: The Legend Begins on Blu-ray in late August 2026, bringing director Chris Huang’s Taiwanese puppetry epic to English-language audiences on disc. The film is a wuxia fantasy performed entirely by glove puppets, rooted in Taiwan’s budaixi tradition and the long-running PILI television franchise.
Demigod: The Legend Begins follows the white-maned hero Su Huan-Jen through palace betrayals, occult manuscripts, kaiju-scaled Qilin monsters, and spectacular sword battles as he seeks control of the Five Mountains and possession of the Limitless Celestial Book. All voice performances are delivered in Taiwanese Hokkien, with English subtitles, by puppeteer Vincent Huang. The film, produced by Pili International Multimedia, runs 103 minutes.
Huang directed Demigod twenty years after his previous feature, Legend of the Sacred Stone, which Deaf Crocodile also released on disc. Both films draw on budaixi glove puppetry, a Taiwanese performance tradition, and on the PILI show that has built a devoted following in Taiwan across decades. Demigod fuses that tradition with wuxia martial arts storytelling and large-scale fantasy sequences, presenting puppetry as a cinematic form capable of the same scope as live-action filmmaking.
The standard edition disc includes part two of a new video interview with Huang, conducted in Taiwanese Hokkien with English subtitles. It also includes a new audio commentary by puppeteer and filmmaker Ben Wolf Page, Associate Editor of The Puppetry Journal for the Puppeteers of America, and a 17-minute visual essay by film historian Evan Chester titled “Innovation Within Tradition: How Pili and Demigod Synthesize Millenia of History.” The original trailer and six making-of featurettes round out the supplemental package, alongside trailers for PILI FANTASY: War of Dragons (2019) and PILI FANTASY: Doom of Dragons II (2022). New disc art is by Beth Morris, with Blu-ray authoring by Vital Passenger.
The Deluxe Edition, limited to 1,750 units, adds a slipcase with new artwork by Richard Cox, created specifically to complement Deaf Crocodile’s previous release of Legend of the Sacred Stone. Both sets use the same packaging format, so they match on the shelf. A 60-page illustrated booklet holds new essays by Fantasia Festival programmer Rupert Bottenberg and film critic Walter Chaw.
Demigod: The Legend Begins arrives on Blu-ray from Deaf Crocodile in late August 2026.
