#busifan

[ca-tsuka]

Posters of "The Storm" animated movie directed by Busifan (Dahufa), now in chinese theaters.

[canmom]

the new movie The Storm by Busifan (the guy of Dahufa, Valley of White Birds, Mee's Forest) just came out over in China. i neeeed it

[ca-tsuka]

16 new posters of "The Storm" animated movie directed by Busifan (Dahufa), now in chinese theaters.

[canmom]

Animation Night 141: short film night (donghua edition)

Hi everyone! Welcome to Animation Night, the night where we watch animation. We’re running mega late due to insomnia + travelling, so I will be brief.

Tonight the plan is to watch some exciting short animated films from China. First up we have the return of the mighty Shanghai Animation Film Studio.

You may remember from Animation Nights past that for a long time through the 50s and 60s, Shanghai Animation Film Studio was Chinese animation (donghua). They created many beautiful and experimental works, such as the astonishing ‘ink wash’ films of Te Wei, accomplished through an ingenious process of stacking up layers of cels to create the subtle gradients.

SAFS was squashed during the Cultural Revolution, its animators sent to the countryside, and animation was instead turned to heavy-handed propaganda films. Under Deng, the Shanghai animators returned for a brief last hurrah... but the chain of reproduction had been broken, and donghua went through a period where few films were being made, and only cheaply, with Chinese animators mostly working on outsourcing for other countries.

That’s changed in a huge way recently with the rise of what is now termed guómàn (国漫), referring to Chinese domestic animation and comics. Despite a hard-to-please audience at home, Chinese studios have been absolutely killing it lately... but Shanghai Animation Film Studio hasn’t really been a player. That’s changing now, AniObsessive reports, with the release of a series of four ~20 minute short films titled  中国奇谭 (Yao - Chinese Folktales) on Bilibili. A decidedly non-commercial project, with four teams and directors spending about two years on each film, it’s unexpectedly become an enormous hit in China:

Yao’s numbers have climbed dramatically since that report. After 15 days, with four episodes online, the series has topped 99 million views on its Bilibili page — and they’re rising fast. Users of the movie site Douban are often harsh critics of Chinese animation, and yet Yao currently scores 9.4 there, based on more than 132,000 reviews.

(...)

Zhang Shengyan, the Bilibili VP, feels that Yao owes its popularity to its ties to China. Not just in the stories and art, but in the Shanghai Animation name — most people in China, Zhang says, have fond memories of the studio’s classics. Yao channels this tradition of artistry for the 2020s, and it may be the start of a new era for the company. There’s already talk of a second season.

So that’s exciting! The four episodes are titled Nobody, Goose Mountain, She-Wolf, and... I don’t have a translation available for the fourth one but in Chinese it’s 乡村巴士带走了王孩儿和神仙, which machine translation renders The Country Bus Took Away Wang Haier and Shenxian. They use a variety of styles from CG to traditional animation.

Our second item is also courtesy of AniObsessive, who have gone to the impressive effort of translating and subtitling a series called Mee’s Forest on their new Chinese Flash YT channel. The series is directed by Busifan, known for the incredible film Dahufa (The Guardian) which we watched back on Animation Night 46 and again on Animation Night 104. (Incidentally, AniObsessive also wrote a wonderful article about the creation of Dahufa, finding all sorts of obscure sources, which is how I know anything at all about Busifan.)

Mee’s Forest is an earlier work, beginning in 2009 about six years before Dahufa’s completion, but after Busifan had made a name for himself with The Black Bird series in 2004. At this time, Busifan had quit his telecoms job, and was working at small animation studios in Hangzhou, chafing against the limits of the industry. This series centers on a young monk who, left alone by his master, is embroiled in some kind of supernatural forest shenanigans. The animation has sparks of what we’d see in Dahufa, notably the abrupt, vicious fight scenes.

I love everything I’ve seen from the Chinese Flash scene and I’m sure this will be no exception. At the time of writing, we’re jumping the gun a bit, with only 15 of 16 episodes translated... but this concords perfectly with Yao so we’ll wrap it up later.

So, with apologies for the incredibly late start - please make your way to twitch.tv/canmom and we’ll be starting on the hour in about ten minutes! (23:00 UK time, 15:00 California time)

[oneofusnet]

Infestation: Annecy Animation Fest 2024 - The Storm THE STORM MOVIE REVIEW Our man in Poland, Maciej Kur, gets to go to the Annecy Animation Festival every year (lucky bastard) and bring us back news of what’s good. This year, he again teams up with Spidermike to lay out what’s coming soon in the world of animation for the rest of us non-festival attendees to look forward to. This round, they take on The Storm, the second animated feature from Chinese phenom Busifan (The Guardian). The story follows a father and son investigating a dark legendary ship that may hold untold treasure but a dangerous storm stands between… Read More »Infestation: Annecy Animation Fest 2024 – The Storm read more on One of Us

[gebo4482]

The Storm (大雨) Trailer 2 (directed by Busifan)

Dir: Busifan