The Most Popular Cockroach of This Summer Was Born in This Student Animation with Over a Million Views

“I want to make sure that I, and my team members, have fun making it first — and then serve it up to the audience.”

The eighth edition of Bilibili Xunguang Little Universe has come to a close, and this edition once again produced plenty of distinctive, stylistically bold animation gems. Among them, the manzai-style comedy animated short Boys, Cross Over the Cockroach and Become Men! (hereafter Roach Boys), directed by Jinxingshi (Bilibili: Da Bu Zheng Jie-), drew a lot of attention.

Its plot is extremely simple and brisk: five high school students are hanging out over the holidays when a giant flying cockroach suddenly bursts in, and the five of them engage in a frantic, tragic(?) life-or-death battle with it. Just as they're about to be wiped out, unexpected reinforcements descend from the sky……

The creators used their imagination and technical skill to blow a trivial everyday incident out of proportion and expand it into a 7-minute animated short. With its wacky plot, fluid animation, and addictive voice acting, Roach Boys quickly surpassed one million views, and fan artists have even begun creating fan works on their own initiative.

In this issue, we invited the Roach Boys production team for an interview to talk about the fun stories behind the scenes.

Interviewees

Jinxingshi: Director

Weiguang: Art

Maoxingxing: Key Animation

01 How the Mega-Popular Roach Lord Was Born​

Jinxingshi: It actually came from my childhood experience of being scared half to death by cockroaches every day…… Many people assume the director is from Guangdong, but I'm actually from Fujian — though the cockroaches back home are just as plump as Guangdong's, and they buzz around with tremendous force when they fly, like a jet engine.

Even now, I still don't dare to hit a cockroach. They burst into goo, you know? Even if you squash it flat, bag it up, and toss it in the toilet, it'll still crawl back up from the drain in the middle of the night…… In the viewers' eyes, the cockroach in this film comes with a built-in memetic-contamination filter — it's just too cute. Everyone should keep in mind that what Lu Ren and the others are seeing is a glossy, gigantic twin-tailed horror.

And from the very start I had decided that for the collab project I wanted to make a relatively manzai-style comedy short, but not too large in scale. Starting from a small incident like this meant the scenes could be confined to a single room, the overall runtime wouldn't be too long, and there could be both conflict and peaceful resolution — it felt just perfect.

Jinxingshi: Our producer said we could cut a trailer, and I felt that just cutting a trailer would be too boring. Even if it's just a trailer, I wanted people to find it hilarious and fun. The collab only comes around once, so we might as well do something explosive, and then Weiguang suggested, how about a Kukuri-san to Kieta Morii spinoff vibe……

Weiguang: Since this teaser wasn't made when the main film was half done, but rather made after everything was finished, looking back it feels a bit like reversed cause and effect. Making a teaser like this, on one hand, sparks interest in people who hadn't encountered the work; on the other hand, people who've seen the main film can get the in-jokes when they watch it — it can count as an after-sales mini-theater. That's the feeling.

Maoxingxing: The director had a brainwave, we all had brainwaves, exchanged evil grins, each claimed the part we wanted to draw, and then ran toward each other ()

Jinxingshi: In my first year of college, I made a comedy short called To Hell with Five-Star Cuisine! at Hanabi (I feel like a lot of people misunderstand — I was only the animation director on that one; the director was Diandian!). At the time, Hanabi assigned us the Yuan Dongli Cantonese Dubbing Studio, and I found their Cantonese-accented Mandarin so much fun — very natural, not stiff, and the non-standard Mandarin came with a built-in sense of everyday life…… I'd been keeping it in mind ever since, and I felt Cantonese-accented Mandarin could leverage more of its natural advantages in comedy works, so for the collab we went back to them again.

As for specific requests, what I asked for most was probably just "keep it natural"? I wanted the voice actors to sound more like people actually chatting in daily life. I don't like stiff, formal delivery, and in some places I let the voice actors freely improvise in Cantonese. Xi Shouye's English lines were basically all added at the voice actors' own suggestion — it was genuinely so much fun.

The recording went line by line. I would give feedback based on their first takes, then we'd re-record and adjust over and over. The voice actors worked incredibly hard and were amazing, and I'm super satisfied with the final result — I couldn't stop laughing while listening to it myself ww

Maoxingxing: It really has that everyday feel — close your eyes and it's like eavesdropping on people chatting in the school cafeteria. Also, fighting a cockroach as an everyday subject is just perfect for Cantonese-accented Mandarin, and the actors' performances were unexpectedly great. Thanks again to all the voice actors (bowing)

Jinxingshi: Rather than calling it a style, it was more like "I think this is fun, so I'll do it this way." This was my first time directing an animation. Because I was set on "making a comedy," I wanted everything to prioritize fun and humor. My original intention was simply "to have fun with the collab," and I want to make sure I, and my team members, have fun making it first — and then serve it up to the audience.

Honestly, before hearing the audience laugh at the school screening, I had no idea whether the film was actually funny…… After all, it really was my first time directing a short film, and from script to storyboard I pushed through with an uncertain mindset. After watching it dozens, even a hundred times over with our producer during editing, I'd basically gone numb to it. But thankfully the result was satisfying — everyone enjoying it is the best outcome.

Fast-paced comedy is just one of the styles I like; I actually spend most of my time drawing illustrations, and my art style is hard to associate with comedy at all…… Roach Boys was just a shallow first attempt at expressing my own understanding of animation — I hope animation can bring people joy.

Jinxingshi: Most of the memes came from internet memes or jokes, and the timing of adding them in was mostly just by feel! It roughly split into "I want a punchline here, let's find something to cram in" and "There was no punchline here originally, but I found that cramming this meme in is hilarious!" In short, it's just a film full of spur-of-the-moment ideas ww.

As for related works, Gintama, The Disastrous Life of Saiki K., and Daily Lives of High School Boys — these three works laid the cornerstone of "so THIS is what comedy anime is!" in my heart. The best anime……

Maoxingxing: A lot of the memes slowly took shape through communication among team members from all over the country. Since the animation backgrounds are very regionally distinctive, everyone added elements they were each familiar with (I only found out from the director that those exercise-book sheets are a Fujian specialty). Still, props to the director and the art lead! The way they blended the memes and DnD elements from the first draft of the script together is super good?!

02 The Bonds of the Production Team​

Jinxingshi: Most of it is just the team members' favorite works and little trinkets. We wanted the ED to be fun, and also to immortalize the things everyone loves (?). Also, CSP and AE's massive crashes and freezes really set us back a lot. And I want to say: please go watch Heavenly Delusion!

Maoxingxing: Everyone's pets at home, (including the green banana roach — no way we dared keep one; if it escaped, the whole building would be finished), the IPs they usually love, some anime and manga works they referenced, even the meals everyone ate in Guangdong and the relief rations from Guangdong friends…… and so on. Without these as spiritual support during production, it probably would have been hard to hold out until now.

Jinxingshi: The most challenging part was probably the mid-production key animation…… Almost everyone was a student making a complete short film for the first time, so many processes required trial and adjustment, and part of the later compositing was even hand-crafted the old-fashioned way in CSP……

We had relatively few key animators but a lot of key animation cuts, so during the two months of mid-production I was on a daily loop of drawing cuts — fixing cuts — drawing cuts. Even so, we alone really couldn't finish, so we could only go around recruiting junior students and key animator friends to help. I'm truly grateful to all the friends who helped us — without you, this genuinely could not have been made!

We didn't really run into bottlenecks — if anything, things went quite smoothly. Once the storyboard and basic art style were set, the rest was just filling in the film bit by bit. The process was tough, but watching the progress bars for key animation, backgrounds, and post-production in the Feishu spreadsheet inch toward 100% felt truly rewarding.

Weiguang: Making a collaborative animated film is a long process, during which many unpredictable things happen — you end up with segments that differ from initial expectations but turn out great too! The difference from solo creation is that when you create alone it's easy to fall into inbreeding, whereas working with everyone teaches you a lot.

Jinxingshi: As mentioned before, the film has many parts added on spur-of-the-moment inspiration. What I remember clearly is the cut where Zhuang Dayun slaps Ma Linshu, where a 🗿 falls to the floor — you can probably tell it was dragged out with the selection tool.

Originally that cut was just a still frame. On the last day before the screening, while Shanqiao (producer, compositing) and I were frantically rushing the post-production, we got to that cut, and Shanqiao asked what kind of effect I wanted. Inspiration suddenly struck me: "I feel like recording the interface of dragging the texture around with the mouse would be hilarious." So right then, I used screen recording software in CSP with a green screen open, dragged the 🗿 around and recorded a segment, then put it into CapCut and roughly keyed it out. Shanqiao cut it in, and when the whole segment played it really was pretty funny……

Maoxingxing: There are lots of gains you don't get when you make a film single-handedly — you get everyone communicating and collaborating, a result greater than the sum of its parts. Also, does everyone remember that cat meow when the cockroach makes its first appearance? It was picked out from among many takes, after numerous team members personally (?) tried it along with several voice actors — truly a masterpiece selection.

Jinxingshi: Honestly, the teachers probably haven't watched many films like ours. You could feel they were trying very hard to give us feedback, but they perhaps just didn't understand it very well…… And precisely because of that, we got a green light from the teachers from start to finish.

The only piece of advice that persisted from beginning to end was to fix Lu Ren's pants seam in test cut c09. But from March to June, those three months, I never did fix it, because I felt it was quite commemorative. Thank you, Teacher Liu, for continually striving to give revision notes even without really understanding; thank you, Lu Ren's pants seam, for staying in Teacher Liu's memory even after three months.

Maoxingxing: When we first presented the team's own rough temporary dub, the teacher casually floated out a remark that we "seem to have quite a talent for voice acting" — for whatever reason, that encouraged me immensely. Thank you, teacher.

03 The Boys' Future​

Jinxingshi: I'm eating so well, so plump, so happy…… Masters, Dobby no longer wants to be a free elf; Dobby wants to wash your underpants for the rest of its life…… My take: draw boldly, draw freely — I have a huge appetite. The second episode…… depends on all of you…… (expires)

Maoxingxing: Since everyone loves drawing them, of course we support it! After all, fan creation is one of the healthy forms of exchange between audiences and creators!

Jinxingshi: As for what's next, as a short film, Roach Boys has already completed its mission! And honestly, unless some benefactor takes a fancy to us, the only carefree chance left to make animation in this lifetime is next year's graduation project…… But no matter! We'll work hard to bring everyone a new film for the graduation project — please look forward to it!

Maoxingxing: The Roach Boys protagonists are heading off to college after this summer…… From here on, it'll be up to fate!

Maoxingxing: Thank you all for the massive support and the tolerance for the little pets (?)!! We'll work hard on the new film!!

Jinxingshi: Everyone, be happy every day! Don't worry about the future, don't regret the past — live in the present, and give us a smile~