ANIMATION & COMICS
7 Years, 50,000 Sheets of Rice Paper Hand-Drawn, This "Atavistic" Chinese Animation Left Me Gasping
This article is reprinted with permission from "Animation Academic Pa".
Author / Qingzhou
Layout / Rinz
The animated feature film Ranbiwa, directed by Li Wenyu and produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio, was released on April 28. The film is adapted from the Qiang ethnic folk legend "Ranbiwa Steals Fire": In ancient times, humanity had no fire and endured cold and hunger. The son of the chieftainess Awubaji, Ranbiwa, traveled to the sacred mountain, endured great dangers to obtain fire, bringing warmth and light to the world, and himself underwent the ordeal of flames, shedding his monkey fur and tail, evolving from a monkey into a human.
Unlike the mainstream 3D or 2D animation on the market, Ranbiwa employs the extremely vintage rice paper animation technique. The entire film consists of over 50,000 hand-drawn frames and took more than seven years to produce. In the film, ink textures, line draft strokes, and even the creases of the rice paper are clearly visible, evoking a nostalgic feeling of childhood days spent watching Shanghai Animation Film Studio cartoons on TV.
In addition, the film showcases diverse animation forms such as Qiang embroidery stop-motion, stone stop-motion, and paper-cut animation, with a highly distinctive artistic style. The film's score was produced by the Wild Children Band, using ethnic instruments like the mouth harp and Qiang flute. The promotional song, The Absurd Ballad, was performed by the DOUDOU duo, creating a vintage, rustic yet novel audiovisual experience.
Although Ranbiwa shares the ink-wash animation pedigree of previous Shanghai Animation Film Studio works like The Cowherd's Flute and Feelings of Mountains and Waters, it exhibits a unique character distinct from the past, incorporating the author's observations and reflections on contemporary times.
Academic Pa specially invited the film's director Li Wenyu and producer Wang Anyi for an interview, to discuss the behind-the-scenes production journey and screenplay conception of Ranbiwa over its seven-year journey, as well as their views on the future of animation.
01
"I want to explore the stories behind myths that might belong to ordinary people."
Academic Pa: The story of Ranbiwa is based on the Qiang myth "Menggexi Sends Fire." May I ask why the director chose this topic initially?
Li Wenyu: I live in Chengdu year-round and have some Qiang friends or friends from the Aba region. Through them, I learned about the legend of Ranbiwa. There are versions called "Menggexi Sends Fire" and "Ranbiwa Steals Fire," with many variations. One thing they are very proud of in this legend is that it reflects the process of evolution from ape to human, which predates Darwin's theory of evolution by hundreds or even thousands of years.
This story also sparked my curiosity and amazed me with their imagination. So far, no animated film has been based on Qiang cultural legends, so I thought I could try doing it.
I asked some Qiang friends, cultural tourism officials, and cultural experts, expressing my creative intention: I wanted to take the core of "evolution" that they take pride in and that interested me — along with "striking stones to create fire" — and reinterpret it in animated form. During field research, I saw many houses with white stones placed on rooftops or above doors — some many stones, some a single large stone. The tradition of "white stone worship" is still preserved in Qiang areas today. I believe it also originated from striking stones for fire.
They expressed support for my idea, and so the creation of Ranbiwa began.
Academic Pa: The film makes some adaptations to the myth, such as downplaying the presence of Ranbiwa's father, Menggexi, and changing Ranbiwa's motivation. What was the consideration behind this?
Li Wenyu: I wanted to present a legend from a different perspective. In the original legend, Menggexi is the fire god and Ranbiwa is his son, so Ranbiwa inherently has an extraordinary identity. But I think myths and legends always depict the protagonist as someone with divine power or help from gods. Could it be that this was just an ordinary person who achieved something through their own efforts, and after being passed down orally, it acquired a mythical aura? I wanted to explore the "truth" behind that.
The Qiang are a very ancient ethnic group with a long history. In ancient tribes, there was a figure similar to a clan leader called "Shibi", who would chant scriptures to bless the tribe, perform sacrifices, spread stories, and teach knowledge. At the beginning of Ranbiwa, I conceived the scene where Ranbiwa, after becoming a Shibi, tells his tribe the story of his youth. But this telling might also contain some fantastical imagination and fabrication.
Throughout the film, some things are real and some are imaginary. I laid some groundwork and distinctions during creation. Every myth or legend has a prototype that gradually evolved into the contemporary version through oral transmission. Perhaps it originally stemmed from the experience of an insignificant person, without any miraculous events. I want to dig out the story behind myths and legends that might belong to ordinary people.
Academic Pa: The film also introduces new characters, such as the little wolf "Doggy" and the girl Ranbiwa saves. Could you tell us about the design ideas behind these new characters?
Li Wenyu: "Doggy" was something I wanted to include from the beginning. Ranbiwa itself is a story about evolution — whether it's evolving from monkey to human, or humans discovering and using fire, it's all about evolution. In a sense, dogs also evolved from wolves. The relationship between "Doggy" and Ranbiwa experiencing evolution together is a parallel, and I think it can also be translated into mutual growth.
However, I was worried that this setting might conflict with Qiang customs. So I specifically consulted Qiang cultural experts. They told me that ancient Qiang were mainly nomadic and had a very close relationship with dogs. Dogs were like family members, playing an important role in production and daily life. In their culture, there are also folk songs and tunes about people and dogs hunting together.
Regarding "Doggy," I also had a personal motive. I once had a dog that passed away from illness while I was working on the film's script. This affected me greatly, and I began to think about the meaning and regrets this life brought me. In the film, "Doggy" has a very large wound on its chest, exactly where my dog had a tumor. So "Doggy" also serves as my commemoration of it.
Although the film is set against a mythological background, its core is about the process of life's growth. The characters also experience three types of companionship during their growth.
The first type is represented by "Doggy," who accompanies Ranbiwa and the audience throughout its life. The second type is represented by the little girl — a brief yet unforgettable beautiful experience that everyone might encounter. The third type accompanies us throughout our entire lives: companionship with the unknown and fear.
On a higher level, I think human civilization has also experienced these three types of companionship. Many creatures have accompanied humanity for a period, and when humans no longer needed them, they exited the stage of history. But we should remember these lives that once accompanied us. Even in modern times, humans face various fears and unknowns. I believe that if people can bravely explore the unknown and overcome fear, even if they don't achieve any particular goal, it is still a remarkable form of growth.
02
Using the Language of Animation to Make a Film
**Academic Pa: The production adopts a relatively traditional and now rare hand-drawn rice paper animation technique. Could you introduce the production process for this kind of animation?**Li Wenyu: I've used many forms in my past short films. This time, using rice paper hand-drawing was decided after experimenting with various methods. Because of the need for a hazy texture that suits the visuals, I chose to draw on rice paper to achieve the breathing feel of water and ink on paper. The production process first uses a computer graphics tablet to sketch the rough animation, which makes it easier to check the motion rhythm. After laying down the rough draft on the computer, I transfer it to paper. The specific transfer process went through repeated exploration.I ultimately adopted two methods. The first is to use an older LCD monitor as a light box. Monitors have a wide thick bezel that can hold the paper in place. Then I adjust the software window to the right position, place the rice paper over the window, and draw on it. This solution addresses both positioning and tracing issues, while also making the final drawing on rice paper more accurate.The second method is to print the electronic rough animation draft with very light ink, then overlay rice paper on the printout and continue drawing. Adapting to the conditions, I ended up using a combination of these two methods.**Academic Pa: Besides rice paper animation, Ranbiwa also presents rich forms of animation such as stone stop-motion, Qiang embroidery stop-motion, paper-cut animation, oil painting on glass plate animation, and sand animation. Each form is quite difficult to produce. Could you introduce how these animations were planned and created?**Li Wenyu: I wanted to convey a rough and rustic feel. Take stone stop-motion animation as an example. I wanted to make it look like children playing with stones. Additionally, stones are a running thread throughout the film. "Doggy" likes to play with stones, the white stone that plays a key role is also a stone, and I thought: since the little monkey and the wolf don't share a language, couldn't their communication be achieved through arranging stones? So I chose stone stop-motion animation to show their communication.
The Qiang embroidery part was indeed very difficult to produce. The approximately 40-second Qiang embroidery animation you see might be the 40 seconds with the longest production cycle in the entire film.During the planning stage, we considered that since the film is ultimately a Qiang story, it would be best to incorporate some Qiang-unique art or craft. After investigation, we found Qiang embroidery very representative, but I wasn't sure how to present it in the film. It wasn't until July, when I went on a field trip to the Ruoergai Grassland in Aba Prefecture. It was the flowering season, and the endless sea of flowers gave me a strong visual shock. It's different from the undulating grasslands of Hongyuan in the Aba region — very vast and boundless. I thought, if we used Qiang embroidery, could we convey to the audience the shocking feeling Ranbiwa experienced when he first saw the flower sea? The audience would also feel that visual charm.In the end, the Qiang embroidery animation in the film doesn't follow a narrative logic but adopts a visual logic, showing various transformations — from seeds falling to flowers blooming — conveying a lively scene. But its production process was indeed difficult. First, I designed a four-way continuous pattern, which itself took a lot of work. After designing, I had Qiang embroidery inheritors produce it, resulting in about 270+ embroidered pieces. After embroidering, I had to iron them flat and scan them. Because the embroidered works have a certain thickness and may distort, some of the four-way continuous sections didn't align properly. I had to constantly adjust details in the software until it finally became a complete animation.
**Academic Pa: Besides the variety of animation forms, the film's artistic style is also very distinctive. The use of positive-negative shapes nesting into each other, outlining each other, and transforming into each other appears multiple times, creating a strong dreamlike feel. How did you design these visuals? Is this technique a consistent preference in your work?**Li Wenyu: Yes, I quite like positive-negative shapes. I've used positive-negative shape visual forms in many short films before. Specifically for Ranbiwa, one of my creative intentions was to tell an animated story using the language of animation.**In fact, the language of animation is very rich. It's used more in some short films, but it basically disappears in commercial theatrical films. I wanted to try bringing the language of animation into a theatrical film. The various materials and forms of animation I mentioned earlier are all attempts at the language of animation that we considered and adopted.For example, before the title "Ranbiwa" appears at the beginning of the film, there is also a segment of positive-negative shape animation. The main subject of the frame changes from a mouse to a fox, then to a wolf, and then to a bear. It shows the food chain in a dangerous jungle. But when I first wrote the script and the first version of the storyboard, the expression was more concrete. After finishing it, I looked back and found it a bit dull and also somewhat heavy on workload.Was there another way? I thought of using positive-negative shape transformation. It could both show all the dangers of the jungle food chain — the law of the jungle — and express this information in a very short time.
Of course, this attempt also has risks. We've become accustomed to film language. Things like animation's metamorphosis and cycles might not be straightforward enough for everyone, easily causing confusion about what's going on. But we still hoped to let everyone understand that animation has various possibilities, that animation is diverse and full of imagination. So we insisted on this expressive method.**Academic Pa: There is a segment in the film where well-known paintings from ancient and modern times, both Chinese and foreign, flash by quickly. How should we interpret this?**Li Wenyu: In terms of the story, this is the turning point where Ranbiwa begins to walk upright, also symbolizing a great leap in human evolution. The animation shows the many days and nights Ranbiwa experienced. Corresponding to all humanity, this is a very long stretch of history.The Qiang myth of Ranbiwa not only reflects Qiang and Chinese history but also corresponds to the evolutionary history of all human civilization. So I selected representative paintings from art history, both Chinese and foreign, across ancient and modern times — from primitive cave paintings to ancient Greece, the Renaissance, Chinese traditional painting, and then to modern computer painting. They are combined to symbolize the long river of human evolutionary history. Through this rapid flash, I condensed the evolutionary process of human civilization into a microcosm.
03
**The Soil of the Nation Nurtures Catchy Music
**Academic Pa: Apart from the visuals, the film's music is also impressive. The film score was primarily completed by the Wild Children Band. How did you originally think of collaborating with them?**Li Wenyu: The collaboration with the Wild Children Band came about through an opportunity. Ranbiwa was shortlisted for the FIRST International Film Festival in its early stages, and the Wild Children Band were the performing guests that year. Our producer felt that the Wild Children's music style naturally aligned with our film — both rough, close to the earth, and with ethnic characteristics.I listened to the Wild Children's anthem "Wild Child" and thought it perfectly matched Ranbiwa, because in the story, Ranbiwa is also a wild child who is not well received, homeless, and wandering in search. So our producer approached the Wild Children Band and expressed the idea of collaboration.The Wild Children Band's biggest concern was that they had never done film scoring before; they had always been making original songs. The creative process indeed encountered some bumps. When I heard the first version of the score, each track sounded great on its own, but it was hard to use an entire track directly in the film, since film scoring differs from independent music. Later, we went through many collisions and invited composer Huang Lei to assist. With meticulous design in music editing, we finally achieved the effect presented in the film, and I was very satisfied.
**Academic Pa: The film's orchestration uses many ethnic instruments, such as the mouth harp and the Qiang flute, which are uncommon in film scores. What was the consideration behind this?**Li Wenyu: During the film scoring period, we went on a field trip with the Wild Children Band to the local area. We went deep into the Qiang stockaded villages in the mountains to communicate with the Shibi, deeply understanding the local culture, listening to the melodies of the Shibi's chanting and different versions of the Ranbiwa story being sung.We also listened to many local folk songs that have been passed down for a long time, drawing a lot of inspiration from them. Not just instrumental sampling and variation, several songs in the film use Qiang folk songs as melodic motifs. For example, "The Hunting Song" is a song that Qiang people used to hum while hunting, describing a person's life from age three onwards, including the process of going hunting in the mountains accompanied by a dog.**Academic Pa: DOUDOU's promotional song "The Absurd Ballad" for Ranbiwa also attracted many audiences. Could you talk about how this song was created?**Wang Anyi: Ranbiwa strives to follow the heritage spirit of the Chinese Animation School. We hoped to make breakthroughs in theme selection, audiovisual comprehensiveness, and innovative expression. Therefore, sound design, especially music, consumed a lot of effort and time and received much acclaim. Many audiences report that the music and sound effects blend perfectly with the visual temperament of the film — it has style and character. The online platform cooperation for the film's original soundtrack album quickly reached an agreement with NetEase Cloud Music.NetEase's Cloud Studio is dedicated to promoting the artistic fusion of music and film, and it's also an original content initiative from NetEase. We jointly discussed the candidates for the film's promotional song. When drafting the list, we immediately thought of the singer-songwriter duo DOUDOU. Their musical style and atmosphere creation were very compatible with the film, and they also have strong influence in terms of promotion.
After watching the film, they were moved by the little monkey Ranbiwa's perseverance and bravery, and they also had some empathetic experiences. They quickly produced a demo. The lyrics from the very first version were like that; words such as white stone, dream within a dream, moonlight, road to the sacred mountain all come from the film's imagery. "The night is long and slow, but I insist on chasing the sun in the sky" — as soon as the song starts, it opens the prelude to this adventure. The common point between the song and the film is that in the journey of life, everyone has their own "wilderness" and "sacred mountain," and even more so, they have the "fire" that they know is "absurd" but still pursue with all their might.
04
**Tradition and Innovation
**Academic Pa: Currently, various new technologies are driving innovation in the animation industry and among animators. However, Director Li chose the very traditional rice paper hand-drawn animation. Why is that?**Li Wenyu: I didn't initially decide to definitely use rice paper for the animation. I had never done a complete rice paper animation before. When I started shot tests, I tried various methods, from computer brushes to hand drawing, but wasn't satisfied with the effect. For example, I wanted to draw a snowy landscape, but I didn't want to paint it too solid; I wanted to leave blank spaces while also achieving a sense of vastness.
Then one day I thought: could I try rice paper? Although I wasn't using traditional Chinese painting techniques or very refined brushwork, I could use the texture of ink and paper to create the feeling I wanted. After trying, I found that rice paper was perfect for the effect I wanted to achieve.**I also tried many other materials, even celuloid, but found that rice paper produced the best results. It has an irreplaceable texture. In the end, I decided to use rice paper for the entire film.****Academic Pa: In your daily creation and in the creation of Ranbiwa, do you use any new technologies for assistance?**Li Wenyu: The development of computer technology is very helpful for our generation of animators. I use many software programs daily — graphic drawing, animation software, editing, effects, compositing — all done on the computer. Some effects in the film are achieved through rigging in AE. The entire rough animation for the film is laid out on a graphics tablet. I think as long as new technology can match the overall style of the film, there's no need to exclude it. Some segments with poor effects were removed during review.New technology can help us improve efficiency. When I first wanted to make a feature film, I considered asking friends for help, but I soon found that with rice paper, everyone draws very differently. The overall art style of Ranbiwa is relatively rough, some lines look very "casual," but even when casually splashing ink, everyone's "casual" point is different. So in the end, all the visuals still needed me to draw or at least finalize and add details. With the assistance of computer technology, we can reduce the workload to some extent and improve efficiency.
**Academic Pa: Rice paper animation or ink-wash animation is rarely seen on the market now. In your view, what is the future path for ink-wash animation? Based on your observations, how much do the new generation of animators or animation students know about rice paper animation?**Li Wenyu: I always believe that the diversity of animation is what makes it interesting: 2D, 3D, stop-motion... Even within a major category, there are branches of various styles. Ink-wash animation is one of them. Art should have a hundred flowers blooming; animation should be diverse. If everything ends up looking the same, that would be quite sad, wouldn't it?Among young students, there are also those interested in ink-wash animation. During roadshows, I encountered animation students who came to talk to me, saying that their graduation project wants to use an ink-wash form. I think contemporary ink-wash animation is a style. If you think your content suits this style, then go ahead and do it boldly.
Contemporary ink-wash animation is also different from the past. For example, in the era of Feelings of Mountains and Waters, animation pursued more stable frames. But now, with changes in viewing habits, audiences can also accept frame jitter. The frames in Ranbiwa are also jittery, but still within a certain range. The stability of the past also partly depended on the technology at the time: using ink to paint backgrounds, drawing characters on celuloid, and then compositing through multiple exposures to achieve stable animation. But now we can make animation using various materials and mediums — even an iPad can produce great works. The style of animation has been broadened.Personally, in recent years I still mainly draw on paper, but I'm also trying new software, like Procreate, which has basically replaced my sketchbook; Procreate Dreams can produce very nice animation. These new technologies and mediums make creation more convenient and also give animation more possibilities.
Academi Pa: Thank you both for the interview! Ranbiwa was released on April 28. If you're interested, please go to theaters and support it. Feel free to share your viewing thoughts in the comments!