Sun Lifang had never touched a 3D animation program. Not even one. But her son Xin Yumeng dreamed of making a film, and she decided to sit down and learn from scratch alongside him, using secondhand equipment.
It took them five years. Xin Yumeng directed, animated, and voiced ten different characters. Sun Lifang wrote the script, voiced all the women in the story, and even sang the final song.
The film is called Niu Lai. It premiered on August 5 in 245 cinemas across China, with no trailer, no advertising, and a budget that barely reached a few hundred dollars.
The animation looked crude. The internet showed no mercy: people called it a disaster, made memes comparing it to Titanic, and called for it to be pulled from theaters. In its first few days, the total box office did not exceed a thousand dollars.
And then curiosity did what no advertising campaign could. People started going to the cinema just to see how bad it was. Many came out defending it: they saw it as a handcrafted breath of fresh air in a world full of machine-generated animation.
The box office rose from a thousand dollars to more than two million. Niu Lai ended up competing at the Chinese box office against Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and behind only Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
A mother who knew nothing about animation made her son’s dream come true. The whole world ended up watching it.
