Low-budget art, high-budget virality: How a crude animated film captivated China (VIDEO)

BEIJING, Aug 16 — A tiny Chinese animated film made by just two people — and initially dismissed for its crude visuals — has unexpectedly become one of the country’s most talked?about movies, with commentators now framing its sudden popularity as a form of collective “performance art”. The film, Niu Lai (“Here Comes the Ox”), was released on August 5 in 245 cinemas but earned just 7,169 yuan in its first nine days. Its poster, a delicate ink?wash painting, bore little resemblance to the film’s rough 3D animation, prompting early viewers to call it “disaster?level” and “worse than AI?generated”. But…