Sun Lifang knew nothing about 3D animation. But her son Xin Yumeng wanted to make a film, so she sat down to learn from scratch.
Five years later, they released ‘Niu Lai’ in Chinese theaters on August 5, without a trailer or promotion, and with animation so crude that the internet dubbed it “disaster level”.
There were days when the total box office barely reached 25 dollars. Memes proliferated: fake posters comparing it to ‘Titanic,’ mockery of the dubbing, and requests for theaters to pull it from their schedules.
And then what no one had anticipated happened: curiosity won out. People began going to the cinema just to see how bad it really was, and many came out defending it as a handcrafted breath of fresh air amid so much AI-polished animation.
The revenue rose from around 1,300 dollars to more than 2 million in a few days, and ‘Niu Lai’ ended up seriously competing against Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey.’ The power of a mother and her son with an animated cow.