Conflicting artistic agendas swamp the would-be fairy tale “Year of the Fish,” David Kaplan’s confused and ultimately irksome Cinderella concoction that seems promising before becoming weighed down by stilted characterizations and disastrous editing.

The film adapts Tuan Ch’eng-Shih’s Chinese version of the Cinderella fable from 860 C.E., in which the young heroine befriends a fish that becomes the catalyst for her redemption. The story line shares the basic elements of the degradation-reward template, but those expecting some approximation of the 1950 Disney film, with fairy godmothers and singing mice, should immediately be warned that “Year of the Fish,” which opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center, is absolutely not for the children.

Mr. Kaplan has set the film in modern-day New York (Mott Street, to be exact), reimagining Cinderella as a 17-year-old caught in the web of human trafficking and indentured servitude. Her evil stepsisters are sex workers in a Chinatown massage parlor. The concepts of shame and vindictiveness are held over from the original tale, but Mr. Kaplan’s film is a neorealist nightmare, not a buoyant celebration of eternal love.

Mr. Kaplan, who has made his career out of adapting fairy tales into modern parables, possesses a visual flair to match his material. But his decision, in “Year of the Fish,” to rotoscope the entire story, pouring digital paint over even the most mundane of sequences, is inescapably jarring. This reality-as-animation effect has been put to compelling use, notably in Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly,” but “Year of the Fish” may be the most powerful proof yet of how the process can be misused.

During early screenings of the film, Mr. Kaplan told audiences that a side benefit of rotoscoping is that it allows independent filmmakers to produce high-definition masters without necessarily filming a work on high-definition equipment. Maybe so, but there’s no getting around the fact that the technique, as employed here, looks less polished and imaginative than other examples we’ve seen. Mr. Linklater uses the animation technique as a story element, playing with notions of perspective and depth, and adding symbolic imagery to heady tales of drug abuse and fleeting identity. By contrast, “Year of the Fish” films ordinary scenes and grimy locales with basic digital equipment before dumping color on top of it, adding nothing to the tempo or texture of the moment.

Once we dismiss this animation scheme, there’s not much left to distinguish Mr. Kaplan’s project. Ye Xian (An Nguyen) is the Cinderella stand-in. She arrives in New York eager to pay off debts owed to her smugglers and to make money she can in turn send home to her father. But the evil Mrs. Su (Tsai Chin) makes it clear that Ye Xian’s debt is larger than she imagined, and that she will have to provide “massages” to Mrs. Su’s New York City clientele until the balance is paid in full. Outraged and indignant, Ye Xian refuses, and Mrs. Su, equally offended, sets the young girl to work scrubbing the floors and cleaning the toilets.

As Ye Xian wanders the streets of Chinatown, meeting various creepy Chinese characters along the way, she is given a fish by a woman known as Auntie Yaga (Randall Duk Kim). The creature helps Ye Xian gain access to the big party where she’ll finally fall in love with her Prince Charming, Johnny (Ken Leung).

We don’t have much reason to be excited for either of the two archetypes, and the lack of sparks in the film’s final moments testifies to Mr. Kaplan’s failure to appeal to our basic human nature. The director allows the massage-parlor employees to dominate the scene — indeed, Mrs. Su is the most vocal and complex character in “Year of the Fish,” offering a disturbing retort to Ye Xian’s longing for love that hints at an ocean of repressed pain and cynicism percolating beneath the story. Consequently, Mr. Leung and Ms. Nguyen don’t have time to develop their characters, or their romance. Similarly, the film’s lazy editing style leaves the story feeling stagnant, as scenes drag on while denying us crucial reaction shots.

“Year of the Fish” wants to inject a major dose of realism to the Cinderella magic. But its gritty underside clashes both with the fanciful veneer of digital animation and the unassailable innocence of the “love at first sight” meet-cute. Perhaps Mr. Kaplan sought to experiment by testing the bounds of hyperrealism against the digital sparkle of rotoscoping. If so, then consider the experiment a failure.

ssnyder@nysun.com