The homegrown movie that has conquered the Chinese box office
Made by a young man and his mother, with no film-making experience, ‘Niu Lai’ has become a phenomenon this summer in the Asian giant
In the country that made the dazzling animated film Ne Zha 2 a source of national pride and where artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the microseries market, the big-screen phenomenon of the summer has been a calf that moves tentatively through a landscape that looks like something out of the video games of the early 2000s.
The little animal is called Niu Lai — literally “the cow is coming” — who stars in the film of the same name. It is a fable about friendship and family created by Xin Yumeng, a 34-year-old designer with no film-making training, and his mother, Sun Lifang, a former employee of a state-owned company. It took them five years, during which time they learned as they went along and divided the tasks, including dubbing.
The homegrown project, made without a professional team or plentiful means, landed in Chinese cinemas on August 5. In the first nine days, it barely grossed 7,169 yuan (about $990) and attracted 236 spectators. The reviews were devastating and it was about to disappear without trace. Then social networks worked their magic.
When a social media user noted the poor ticket sales on the platform Maoyan, they started to post about them; the sales figures were so low, it seemed as though at least four zeros were missing. Fragments of the film were uploaded to illustrate why that might be the case.
Niu Lai’s characters are built using very basic three-dimensional models. They move with rigid movements and their voices are not always synchronized. The transitions are tortuous, the protagonists speak slowly and the plot is difficult to follow at times. But these flaws have been exploited and turned into material for an attention-grabbing advertising campaign.
Within 48 hours, hundreds of people were calling movie theaters for tickets. Young people turned up to see it in droves. They would record the laughter and reactions of the audience and upload them to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. No one wanted to be left out of the summer joke and so Niu Lai found an army of fans who promoted it spontaneously and for free.
The film’s outlandish popularity was so unexpected that many cinemas were not prepared to meet the moment with promotional material. But that’s where Chinese pragmatism prevailed: movie theater employees used markers and drew their own posters, freehand, and each in their own way. Of course, this became a new source of memes. The calves drawn with more enthusiasm than skill on simple white backgrounds have coexisted alongside polished images of the season’s main releases such as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey; the latest installment of Spider-Man and the Chinese film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East. “If you go to see it, you’ll regret doing so for 86 minutes, but if you don’t see it, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life,” warned one of Niu Lai’s improvised promotional slogans.
Now, however, all the mockery has been turned into a defense of craftsmanship and hard work at a time when AI-generated videos are running rampant. It is also a way of questioning the expensive blockbusters used to promote the Communist line and the restrictions on dissent or criticism of the regime.
On Douban, the nationwide film consultation platform where Niu Lai scores six out of 10, one user called Zhaomuxue says that the public is “fed up” with “bad, polished films” featuring big names, “but with scripts that have nothing to say.” Now, after more than a month in cinemas, Niu Lai’s ticket sales have soared to 62.5 million yuan — around $9.3 million.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition