In the spirit of “It’s animated, let’s dub it with English-speaking voices and see if it’ll sell” comes “Goodbye Monster,” a cross-cultural curiosity from China that loses something in translation.

The director and co-writer of “Bobby the Hedgehog,” Huang Jianming, conjures up an animist fantasy about a world of vaguely recognizable creatures obsessed with medicine and health care.

Seems like a natural for the U.S. market, if not the Canadian one, right?

There are these two islands, famed for their hospitals. Their creed is “There is no sickness that cannot be cured.” And in that spirit, “removing” the “Dark Spirit” from those infected by it is an ongoing quest.

The great and cocky Bai Ze (sorry, the studio didn’t provide any English language voice cast names) is sure he’s conjured up a spell that will banish this “dark spirit” from all who suffer from it.

But he’s reckless and loses the chance to demonstrate this in front of the Four Elders. A rival gets his hands on the incantation, and the banished Bai Ze, forced to take on an orphaned unicorn boy Yi whose horn stopped growing, as a sidekick, sets off on a quest to clear his name and find a real cure, dodging an Owl-headed hunter and his fishy-soldier minions along the way.

Perhaps The Heavenly Thunder Mentor will have a clue?

There’s a three-headed god, Ku-Shan, who needs the cure, and bull creatures, gazelle women and others who somehow figure into all this, none of them all that clearly.

The CGI animation is of decent quality, the color palette is impressive and there’s just enough Taoism to at least ground this unfathomably strange concoction in that culture. But I had a very hard time making much sense of any of this, and remember, I watch thousands of movies and I take lots of notes.

The Dark Spirit, mentioned roughly 11,400 times by characters in the screenplay (there’s a stunning amount of repitition), appears to be the curse of self-doubt, manifested in a black, swirling cloud that consumes characters until Bai Ze finds a cure.

And that’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you or your kids decoding this exotic Mystery of the East.

Rating: PG, animated fantasy violence

Credits: Directed by Huang Jianming, scripted by Li Liang, Wu Xiaoyu, Zheng Xuejia and Huang Jianming. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:39