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0Why a crude, cheap animated Chinese film is a success at the box office
Host: A crudely animated homemade film about a baby cow has become an unlikely success at the box office in China. Niu Lai was made on a low budget by a mother and son over five years. As of today, Thursday, it's grossed the equivalent of more than $4 million. This 25-year-old American musician working in Beijing summed up why he liked the film.
Musician: It was like so bad and so good. And AI could definitely make this in like 10 seconds, maybe even faster. It's because it's not perfect, it's good. It shows how human it is. It's not serious, but I feel like life has become so serious. So to see some things like this that we can just laugh at, it's beautiful.
Host: Mengchen Zhang from the BBC World Service's Global China Unit told us more about the film.
Zhang: The film is something you would never expect to be seen on a big screen in a theatre. It's very cool. It's like a 2D animation almost you can make from a Flash. It's nothing like Spider-Man or any other fancy film I have seen.
Host: And tell me about the mother and the son who teamed up to make this film.
Meng: Yeah, that's one really interesting thing. People want to know who are the people behind the film. So the director, Xie Yu-Meng, he's someone in his 30s, and his mother, who was born in the 60s, they are the main crew and the cast behind the whole film. And the mother even sings the final song in the movie, and she's also dubbing a lot of the characters.
And what's most interesting about this mother's sound dual is they are having zero background and professional training in animation or filmmaking. The sound from what we've seen in Chinese reporting that he studied garden design and architecture design. So that has nothing to do with actual filming and animation. And the mother, we haven't seen much reporting about her, but she's not from a professional background either.
Host: I love the fact that they worked on this together and it took them five years to make it. How do you explain the popularity of this film? Is it a rejection of things looking too polished these days and AI being used too much, do you think?
Meng: I think that's definitely a very important factor why people are getting this surprise, like you have seen a lot of AI animated film on your phone, that's even better than what we see on the big screen. So that's a very big surprise element there.
And the other thing is, while AI is developing so fast, like Chinese AI software, Seedance, they can make almost like real people. And when you see such simple animation that's purely made by human, you can see there's a very different contrast there. You can actually feel the human story.
词汇表
crudely [ˈkruːdli] adv. 粗糙地，简陋地
animated [ˈænɪmeɪtɪd] adj. 动画的，有动画效果的
homemade [ˌhəʊmˈmeɪd] adj. 自制的，家庭制作的
box office 票房
low budget [ˈbʌdʒɪt] 低预算，低成本
gross [ɡrəʊs] vt. 总收入达到，总共赚得
big screen 大银幕，电影院
2D animation [ˌænɪˈmeɪʃn] n. 二维动画
fancy [ˈfænsi] adj. 花哨的，华丽的，精致的
crew [kruː] n. 剧组人员，工作人员
cast [kɑːst] n. 演员阵容，全体演员
dub [dʌb] vt. 为……配音
dual [ˈdjuːəl] n. 组合，搭档
filmmaking [ˈfɪlmˌmeɪkɪŋ] n. 电影制作，影片拍摄
polished [ˈpɒlɪʃt] adj. 精致的，完美的，打磨过的
Seedance [ˈsiːdɑːns] n. 可灵（中国AI视频生成软件）
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