31 posts tagged with "Donghua"

“People crave new stories, yet they also feel uneasy when traditions are subverted, authority dissolved, and order changed. The contest over the right to interpret characters and stories is an extension of the contest over one’s own power.”

The Eight Immortals!, the animated film released this summer, fought its way through a crowd of blockbusters. After several rounds of fierce competition, its box office kept climbing, surpassing 2 billion yuan in total, and it may well take this year’s animated box office crown.

On China’s all-time animation box office chart, The Eight Immortals! has surpassed Boonie Bears: Time Twist to enter the top three. At this point, the top three spots on China’s animation box office chart are all occupied bymythological retellings, a testament to the enormous market potential of this genre.

Yet from the moment the film premiered, two opposing voices raised their doubts at the same time: “Another mythological story again? Can’t we get something original for once?”

“Another mangled adaptation of tradition? Why not just film the original faithfully?”

Looking back at the mythological retelling animations released in recent years, it seems every one of them cannot escape similar scrutiny.

On one side is audiences’ criticism of mythological retelling animations; on the other, these films keep achieving box office success. Behind this contradictory phenomenon, what audience psychology and market logic are at work? Have our mythological retelling animations really become too many?

01 The Great Sage Returned, and Then Stayed​

When did mythological retellings become the top draw among domestic animated films?

We have to go back to the summer of 2015.

Eleven years ago, in that summer season, Monkey King: Hero Is Back burst onto the scene. The film follows an original adventure centered on Sun Wukong, who has lost his powers, and Jiangliuer, the past life of Tang Sanzang. Apart from the stylized opening animation that recreates the classic “Havoc in Heaven — imprisoned under Five Finger Mountain” sequence, the rest of the plot has nothing to do with Journey to the West — even the big boss Hundun was grabbed from the Classic of Mountains and Seas.

The film’s Sun Wukong looked completely different from before: a long face, dispirited and down on his luck, all his powers gone — less like the Handsome Monkey King and more like a defeated middle-aged man. Only at the end does Sun Wukong regain his powers and don his golden armor again. As the familiar music rises, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven is reborn from adversity and shatters the boss with a single strike, and the story ends to rousing, exhilarating effect.

The film earned a staggering 900 million yuan at the time, sparking the first large-scale “organic fan” phenomenon in Chinese film history. It made audiences and the market realize for the first time that beyond the children’s market, Chinese animated films could use universally known traditional myths to open up a vast all-ages market.

In 2019, another milestone arrived: Ne Zha.

Its reworking of the myth was even more radical than Monkey King: Hero Is Back: blurring the backdrop of the Investiture of the Gods war, overturning Ne Zha’s original identity as the reincarnation of the Spirit Pearl — and in a sense, you could call it a work built entirely on “rebellion.”

Like Monkey King: Hero Is Back, Ne Zha went through word-of-mouth fermentation, the organic-fan effect, and a box office comeback. It not only shattered the domestic animation box office record in one stroke, it even climbed to second place on China’s all-time film box office chart. In the 2025 Spring Festival season, the sequel Ne Zha 2 went straight into the global top 5 at the box office, triggering a long-resonating nationwide celebration.

Over these eleven years, mythological retelling animation gradually became the signature of domestic animated film. The White Snake series, the New Gods series, Jiang Ziya, The Fall of the Mortal World, Nobody in Langlang Mountain, The Eight Immortals! and other mythology-themed animated films were released in turn, reinterpreting characters and stories everyone knows by heart, greatly expanding the imaginative boundaries of myth and legend, and driving the formation of a mature commercial market for domestic animated films.

02 Why Do the Big Hits Keep Being Mythological Retellings?​

Looking across the successful mythological retelling animations of these eleven years, some common traits emerge.

First, the protagonists are all figures the public knows well, doing the work of instant familiarity.

As derivatives of traditional mythology, their story backgrounds may not be deeply familiar to audiences, but at least they won’t be too alien.

As soon as a character appears, viewers can instantly locate the archetype through the character anchor and automatically fill in the background — she is a fairy, he is a god, their boss is the Jade Emperor or a Celestial Venerable, heaven’s rules are strict but the mortal world has true feeling — this kind of off-screen common knowledge lets the film present more content within its limited runtime, sparing the creators a great deal of exposition.

Meanwhile, a new script that is nearly original (even subversive) and a brand-new character design give audiences plenty of freshness. The character anchor can be used to locate a character — or used in reverse, deliberately defying expectations to achieve a surprising twist.

The rich body of traditional mythology offers an inexhaustible material library; even the same character archetype may appear in completely different guises in different works, leaving room for free play in both creation and interpretation.

Among all of them, the character audiences love best is undoubtedly Sun Wukong. Not only does he raise his golden cudgel again and again in his own films, he frequently cameos in others, like a “mythology-animation endorser.” Though every year someone asks “why the monkey again,” every Sun Wukong appearance draws genuine cheers.

Familiar characters and stories give audiences a sense of security. In a period of economic downturn, social attitudes tend conservative and people grow anxious. In this era of eroding certainty, only the past — which has already happened — can be guaranteed; when reality fails to provide security, people retreat into the unchanging “tradition” to look for it.

As for individual characters, because the mythological archetype exists, audiences have already been “promised” that the hero will overcome difficulty, defeat the enemy, and return to a stable mythological order — so they can comfortably enjoy the bumps along the way.

Choosing mythological retelling as material doesn’t guarantee a box office windfall, but it does provide a floor of sorts — at least audiences roughly know what story they’re going to see. Innovation means risk, and risk has its price: “rather than take enormous risks for thankless effort, better to turn to the proven experience of the past for a familiar sense of security.”

And compared with historical themes, which are also traditional material retold, myths and legends carry less gravity and gloom and more miracle and fantasy, making for a lighter viewing experience and giving creators freer rein for imagination.

At the same time, the craving for new content has always existed; the old mythological narratives cannot satisfy the spiritual needs of the contemporary market, which is why straight retellings of traditional stories rarely succeed either.

Mythological retelling animations distill elements from a vast shared cultural memory and blend in new content that better speaks to contemporary people’s pain points, becoming their voice. That is why they display a distinct modernity. Contemporary narrative wrapped in a traditional shell also creates a pleasing illusion of “it has always been so since ancient times,” lending legitimacy to the new narrative.

Mythological retelling animations modernize everything from the theme down to the details, satisfying ordinary people’s longing to see themselves inside grand narratives.

In theme, “resistance” is the universal motif, matching the emotional needs for hype, catharsis, and reversals; in detail, modern memes are woven in, connecting the distant battles of the gods with the ordinary people in front of the screen, drawing knowing smiles.

Technologically, the increasingly mature film industry provides the guarantee that visual spectacles can actually land on screen. Whether it’s the heavenly ladder in Jiang Ziya, the clash of gods and demons in Ne Zha 2, or the Penglai fairyland of The Eight Immortals, those reality-surpassing, imaginatively extravagant sights are often impossible to capture with live-action filming.

Animation, free of location-building costs, the difficulty of blending with live footage, or actors’ safety, and with no need for complex designs and computation in pursuit of hyper-realism, is perfectly suited to the unique advantages of the medium. Thus mythological retelling is one of the few genres where animation enjoys a natural advantage over live-action film.

03 New Wine in Old Bottles — Pleasing No One?​

Success and failure spring from the same source. The strengths of mythological retelling animation are also what draw criticism.

The essence of the mythological retelling is “new wine in old bottles” — most people go to the cinema for that mouthful of new wine. But for audiences hungry for new content, that mouthful of new wine always seems a bit weak: grand and lively, yet unmoored.

Mythological retelling animations set among the ancient celestial beings are distanced from modern people by time itself. No matter how they search for angles of empathy with ordinary people, their protagonists are ultimately transcendent figures beyond the common run. The heroes briefly play the voice of the commoner, but in the end they must return to their own order — to the celestial ranks assigned centuries ago. After a rousing line or two about defying fate, gods return to being gods, demons to being demons, and the background mortals are left standing where they were, dazed.

From story setting to protagonist agency, mythological retelling animation lacks a perspective that writes about the present. Even when it shows concern for contemporary people, a safe layer of ancient-versus-modern separation stands in between. It hardly counts as “coasting on ancestors,” merely innovating cautiously within a sufficiently conservative range. Toward contemporary people’s real anguish it can only offer sympathy and comfort — it cannot truly feel it.

And the narrative ingredients of mythological retellings feel increasingly familiar with each viewing: denying fate, defying authority; sacrificing the self to save the world and the greater good; a vast upper-level conspiracy; the faceless masses in need of rescue; the recurring NPCs of my villainous master / comic-relief clown / dialect character / cute pet;……

Stories born from deconstruction, through deliberate or unwitting repetition and through the market’s filtering, form new formulas.

And for audiences hoping to see old stories restored with new technology, once they discover the story’s core has been wholly reworked, their scrutiny naturally turns stricter.

As noted above, innovation comes with risk — especially for divine figures passed down for generations over millennia. The more famous and beloved a reworked deity is, the harsher the scrutiny of the adaptation, and the work may even be branded with the broad accusation of disrespecting history and traditional culture. The thief version of the Eight Immortals and the villain version of the Old Immortal of the South Pole (Wuliang Tianzun) both drew condemnation from some viewers.

The essence of defending tradition is defending the order one is familiar with. People crave new stories, yet they also feel uneasy when traditions are subverted, authority dissolved, and order changed. The contest over the right to interpret characters and stories is an extension of the contest over one’s own power.

Though much of the so-called “tradition handed down by our ancestors” is itself a construct of the internet era, it is undeniable that mythological retelling animation, sinking into formula, has deconstructed tradition without yet building a new narrative order grounded in the present. It has discarded the outdated content of traditional myths ill-suited to current values, but has failed to give audiences a new sense of stability. Against a backdrop crowded with gods and buddhas, those deities have revealed a detestable face — so where are the mortals, no longer under divine protection, to place themselves?

04 “Respecting the Original” May Be a False Proposition​

Seen this way, it’s hardly surprising that mythological retellings draw two kinds of criticism.

Curiously, though, in every one of these debates, audiences on both sides — those wanting “myth” and those wanting “retelling” — drag out the original texts to duel, claiming the characterization they support has an older, more orthodox, more long-standing source that better fits modern values. “Not respecting the original” is an all-purpose accusation: whether you support adaptation or insist on restoration, you may be scolded with “you don’t understand the original — what you support isn’t the original at all.”

This is easy to understand: everyone’s taste differs, and there is no absolute standard for judging an adaptation good or bad. By comparison, “the original” seems like the only objective yardstick available for public discussion.

However, seeking so-called “respect for the original” in mythological retelling animation may itself be a false proposition.

Unlike historical subjects, myth and legend have no “absolute truth” like a meta-history. They undergo long evolution, converge from multiple origins into one stream, and present different faces in different times and regions.

Myth and legend also differ from classic literature like Dream of the Red Chamber: they are not the creation of one person or a few, but a collective creation completed by generations of literati and common folk over thousands of years.

Moreover, the tradition of mortals being deified after death and the legends of cultivators ascending to immortality made the interaction between the divine world and the human world even closer, and the evolution of myth even more varied. As a result, Chinese myths and legends often present a complex, many-sided, even self-contradictory chaos. Creative retellings built on this naturally have no single right answer.

Take the god Erlang, Yang Jian. Across various animations, this widely known deity has been given different facets, presenting utterly different images. Let’s pick a few classic examples.

In CCTV Animation’s Journey to the West and the film Monkey King: Hero Is Back, Erlang Shen sticks close to the Journey to the West original, appearing as the “Jade Emperor’s nephew,” a flash of a purely functional villain serving to set off Sun Wukong.

In The Legend of Nezha, Yang Jian’s image comes from the Investiture of the Gods, but his origins are simplified to “child attendant of Nüwa,” mainly presenting his upright, kind, warm companion-to-the-hero image to suit the young audience.

In the animated film Lotus Lantern, Yang Jian is arrogant, cold, and inhuman — the embodiment of authoritarian power and oppression. Following heaven’s rules, he presses the Third Holy Mother, who pursues human liberation, under a mountain, enslaves mortals out of selfish desire, and is ultimately defeated by the righteous Chenxiang. The animation never depicts how Yang Jian went from rebel to oppressor, glosses over his past, and molds him into a standard stock villain. (Though it is now fashionable to explain Yang Jian’s behavior as “throwing the match,” from both the writing and the era’s context, Lotus Lantern had no intention of portraying Yang Jian’s supposed tragedy or depth — it is the defiant Chenxiang who carries the film’s core idea)

Also a villain, also based on the legend of two generations — “Yang Jian and Chenxiang” — splitting the mountain to save a mother, The Eight Immortals!’s Yang Jian operates on logic entirely opposite to Lotus Lantern’s. After his transformation from “resister to oppressor,” Yang Jian turns again toward resistance, continuing the righteous motive of “saving his mother” yet adopting illegitimate means. This tug-of-war between good and evil and displaced identity makes the character fuller and more worth discussing. In a sense, this Yang Jian can be seen as Chenxiang’s dark if-line.

New Gods: Yang Jian is the only animation that links the Investiture of the Gods with splitting the mountain to save a mother. But rather than integrating the traditional mythological narrative, it overturns it entirely, explaining the vast story spanning a millennium and three generations — “Investiture of the Gods — Yang Jian’s mother imprisoned under Peach Mountain — Yang Jian splits the mountain to save her — the Third Holy Mother Yang Chan imprisoned under Peach Mountain — Chenxiang splits the mountain to save her” — as a conspiracy, casting Yang Jian as a tragedy-stricken good guy who was deceived.

Its innovative spirit and narrative ambition deserve recognition, but the work completely abandons building logic from within the traditional mythology, simplifying a complex multi-sided struggle into a black pot dumped on Yang Jian’s master Yuding Zhenren. As a result, the retelling lacks organic connection with the old myth and loses the possibility of extending further stories — somewhat a pity.

With so many versions of Yang Jian in animation, who exactly is “mangling” the original, and who is “respecting” it?

To answer that, we must first answer — what exactly is the “original” Yang Jian, the god Erlang?

The author has traced the evolution of the Erlang Shen cult since its birth. In terms of origins, Erlang Shen has at least three archetypes: Li Bing and his son of the Warring States period, Zhao Erlang of the Song dynasty, and Dujian, second son of the Buddhist Vaiśravaṇa. In terms of deeds, there are at least three independent legends — splitting the mountain to save a mother, Journey to the West, and the Investiture of the Gods — each with multiple versions.

For instance, the “splitting the mountain to save a mother” legend, the oldest and with the most versions: its prototype, “the goddess of Mount Hua secretly marries a scholar,” appears as early as the Tang dynasty; by the Song and Yuan, the plot of “Erlang Shen beating the mandarin ducks apart, Chenxiang splitting the mountain to save his mother” was added.

Erlang Shen’s own mother-rescue story emerged in the Ming dynasty: his mother, Yunhua, an attendant fairy of the Bull-Fighting Palace (not the Jade Emperor’s sister in the earliest version), secretly wed Yang Tianyou, was imprisoned under a mountain by Sun Wukong (yes, the Great Sage once played the villain too), and after rescuing his mother, Erlang Shen in turn pressed Sun Wukong under Mount Tai. Only in the Qing dynasty were the two generations’ mountain-splitting legends first linked together.

From the Yuan dynasty onward, the entanglement of Sun Wukong and Erlang Shen was never absent from stage texts. In most versions of either Erlang Shen’s or Chenxiang’s mountain-splitting legend, Sun Wukong plays the villain — either as the Heavenly Court’s lackey suppressing the Third Holy Mother / fairy Yunhua, or drunkenly letting slip the Third Holy Mother’s forbidden love. The Journey to the West story inherited the backdrop of Erlang Shen splitting the mountain to save his mother, his identity as the Jade Emperor’s nephew, and his grudge with Sun Wukong — only with black and white swapped: Sun Wukong raises the banner of defying Heaven while Erlang Shen becomes the voice of the ruling class.

Yang Jian of the Investiture of the Gods is an entirely separate storyline: he bears no Erlang Shen title, no mountain-splitting deed, and never crosses paths with Sun Wukong, who lives a thousand years later. Only because he shares with Yang Erlang the title “Pure Origin Marvelous Way True Sovereign” did folk belief, from the late Ming into the Qing, begin merging the two into one.

New versions of the Erlang Shen legend kept appearing even into the late Qing. In the late-Qing Biography of the Eight Immortals Attaining the Dao, Erlang Shen (the Jade Emperor’s nephew, no surname, no mountain-splitting) has not the Third Holy Mother but Lady Yuanzhen as his sister. The story motif is much the same, but it is He Xiangu who exposes Yuanzhen’s affair. Yuanzhen is then imprisoned under a mountain by Erlang Shen; the Eight Immortals craft a lotus lantern for her and help her son Wang Tai (a Chenxiang variant) battle Erlang Shen and rescue his mother.

Only in the Republican era does a version close to the modern image appear in texts. The Song of the Subtle Essence of the Dao’s Source records: “Wukong returns a second time to the Heavenly Palace; Laozi hurls down the Universe Circle. Yang Jian deploys the Howling Celestial Dog; the Jade Emperor and Guanyin watch intently.” The Yang Jian of the Investiture legend and Yang Erlang of Journey to the West merge completely, and through Journey to the West become linked with splitting the mountain to save his mother. Thus a “collective creation of gods” spanning thousands of years was finally complete.

As shown above, Erlang Shen’s name, origins, title, and deeds have constantly shifted. If contemporary viewers want to trace back an “orthodox, authoritative” original myth and judge retellings right or wrong by it, they easily fall into the predicament of every party claiming reason on their side and granny claiming reason on hers. Erlang Shen is thus; so are the other mythological figures.

Rather than debating whether a mythological retelling is “correct,” perhaps the more worthwhile question is — how far can mythological retelling animation go?

05 Stones from Other Hills: Fairy-Tale Retellings​

Modernizing classic texts to win both acclaim and commercial success — even to become powerful cultural products — is not an idea of recent years, nor unique to Chinese creators. Decades ago, Disney’s fairy-tale retelling animations had already mastered it.

Since the 1937 animated film Snow White, Disney’s fairy-tale and children’s literature animations established its standing in the animation world. But by the 1980s Disney hit a bottleneck, finances ran at a loss, and simply replicating the classics no longer convinced audiences.

In 1989, The Little Mermaid, adapted from Andersen’s fairy tale, was an instant hit that ended Disney’s decade-long financial slump. This now-classic animation was quite rebellious in its day:

It boldly overturned the latter half of the original tale, changing the tragic ending where the mermaid princess dissolves into sea foam into a grand happy-everyone团圆-style finale where the princess and the human prince join forces to defeat the sea witch, in line with market expectations. (Who doesn’t love a dumpling-wrapping happy ending — wrapping burgers works too)

The protagonist Ariel turned away from the frail, quiet, passive princess image, becoming more proactive and courageous, with traits of the modern woman. Correspondingly, human Prince Eric was no longer a background board: he gained a distinct personality and personal aspirations, and the unspeakable one-sided love of the original became a mutual rush of two young hearts.

Visually, Ariel’s head of red hair stood out strikingly against the deep blue underwater world. Before this, blonde was the mainstream image of the mermaid; of the three prior Disney princesses, only Snow White followed her original with black hair — the other two were blonde. When The Little Mermaid first released, toy manufacturers even feared no one would like a red-haired mermaid and made the Ariel dolls blonde. Today, that bold, unconventional red hair has become the classic mermaid image, influencing mermaid designs in many later works.

Similarly, the long-faced Sun Wukong of Monkey King: Hero Is Back and the smoky-eyed Ne Zha of Ne Zha also drew waves of mockery before release. But as the stories unfolded, audiences gradually accepted the new images — and these two images formed a new collective understanding of the mythological figures.

The legitimacy of a classic retelling lies not in 100% restoration, but in being logically self-consistent and internally coherent, and on that basis delivering novelty suited to the needs of the era, so that audiences can believe its narrative.

Whether Disney’s fairy-tale retellings or Chinese animation’s mythological retellings, their scripts all carry a degree of formula. But formula is not all bad — a formula can become a formula precisely because its narrative pattern has been thoroughly validated over thousands of years of human civilization and is beloved by the majority. It may be clichéd, but at least it’s efficient.

The virtue of formula is that it underwrites commercial creation; the vice is that it breeds path dependence — and in an age of ever-rising innovation risk, until a new narrative paradigm appears, following the old rules remains the mutual safety net tacitly agreed by market, creators, and audiences alike.

Some viewers harbor another, more hidden expectation of mythological retelling animation: that it will carry Chinese animation abroad.

Yet mythology-themed works oriented toward the domestic market lower the viewing threshold for Chinese audiences — and do the exact opposite for overseas ones. Unfamiliar cultural backgrounds and character settings assumed known without explanation may leave overseas viewers walking in bewildered and walking out bewildered, unable to absorb anywhere near the information a Chinese audience gets.

By contrast, American animated films are more often decontextualized, family-friendly, all-ages works aimed at a global audience, covering as many viewer groups as possible; Japanese animated films have a mature industrial system, their own specific cultural consumption context, and audiences already habituated to watching animation.

Chinese animated films, though occasionally dazzling, remain fragile as an industry, still dependent on idiosyncratic creators’ occasional flashes of inspiration and lacking stable output capability. At this stage, mythological retelling animation probably cannot yet shoulder such weighty hopes.

At present, the mythological retelling remains a creative magic weapon, a genre the masses love to see and hear. It injects new life into tradition, bringing ancient stories alive to travel toward a more distant future — over the past thousands of years, myth and legend have likewise kept absorbing the content of each new age, constantly renewing themselves, carrying the collective wishes of people across every historical period.

But the mythological retelling is no panacea: nearly every hot release season sees one open, yet only a handful of outstanding works leave an impression.

And audiences’ complaints about mythological retelling animations stem not from their truly overrunning the field, but from the scarcity of animated films of other genres, which forces a single work to shoulder a mission it cannot bear.

In this National Day season, The Eight Immortals!, nearly three months in release, remains the most-watched animated film — proof enough that the audience demand for mythological retelling stories, and for excellent domestic animation, is far from satisfied. Perhaps, rather than grandly debating the fate and meaning of any genre, we should pay more attention to specific works, and to audiences’ specific needs.

We look forward to more attempts at mythological retelling, and to more non-mythological animated films reaching the big screen — so that old legends and new stories together compose a richer panorama of Chinese animation.

“It would be more interesting to let animated characters who are supposed to be ‘made by animators’ experience the pain of making animation themselves.”

On screen, a group of animated characters, in order to help the student who created them graduate, pick up pens and start making animation. Fanqietou, Zhipianfu, Mihuashi, Huzhen, Huawanmeiyou... They divide the work, draw drafts, make revisions, and step by step fall apart under the pursuit of DDLs.

Off screen, the 5 students who made this 17-minute graduation film went through almost exactly the same process: the script was revised six times, key animation was drawn until dawn broke outside the window, and the climax sequence was reworked right before the screening... Until 9 a.m. on the day of the screening, the director was still editing the film.

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Why did this wildly talented CUC team shout “I hate drawing animation” during graduation season?!

,Why did this wildly talented CUC team shout “I hate drawing animation” during graduation season?!

​Donghua XueshupaFollowing

In a sense, the group of animated characters chased by DDLs in “Welcome to the Animation Academy” also became a portrait of the creators themselves.

This time, Donghua Xueshupa invited the main creators of the Communication University of China animation graduation short film “Welcome to the Animation Academy” to talk about how these animated characters came into being, and the story behind the work.

01 “Boiling a whole plate of dumplings just for the vinegar”: how one story went through six versions​

“We spent quite a lot of time finding a theme that was both what we truly wanted to express and something more people could understand: the love between a creator and their creation.”

​Feichai：The earliest source of inspiration was an extra episode, “Snow Battle Fortress,” from the Team Fortress 2 (Team Fortress 2) fan animation series “Team Neighborhood.” It tells of two teams locked out of their home because they forgot their keys; one of them throws a snowball at the other side, they start fighting, and it eventually escalates into an “epic snowball fight.”

They shot it in a documentary-like style, making a tiny, almost absurd event feel grand and hilarious, and I wanted to try making something in that absurd style myself.

1. The nature documentary stage: At first we wanted to film our real classmates as if they were animals, imitating the nature documentary format of Planet Earth, depicting the lives of animation students: how they attended classes, how they studied, how they made animation.

Everyone had their own routine. Back then we designed a lot of characters, and even thought about designing different species, personalities, and ways of speaking based on the different roles students were responsible for — for example, “Huawanmeiyou” was given a “glug-glug” bubbling underwater voice, because she lives in the sea.

During this stage, the DDL was just a sudden “natural disaster” that arrived at the story’s climax, not the true core of the story. But because the production workload was too large, we scrapped this version.

2. The music MV stage: During summer break, we tried developing it toward a music MV. At the time we wanted to imitate Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” and conceive a story along the lines of “Welcome to the Animals”:

A freshman who had never touched animation arrives at the animation academy, meets students in different roles, and listens to them introduce their positions and tasks following the animation production pipeline. As production keeps progressing and the pace keeps speeding up, he, like real animation students, gradually falls apart.

Then the person who first guided him reappears and asks, “Was this how it was at the beginning?” and takes the student back through memories of how much he loved drawing as a child, how he got onto the animation path through hobby classes and exams, and arrived at the animation academy. Just as the protagonist seems to rediscover his original passion, the guide assigns him an animation assignment — the very first animation assignment our teachers gave us when we enrolled. The moment he sees the assignment, he breaks down again.

From this version onward, we decided: no matter how the story changed, the ending had to have a character shouting “I hate drawing animation!”

But the MV faced the same problem — too much work. So we started thinking of alternatives, and only then did the prototype of the current work take shape.

3. Mockumentary: Looking back, it was a bit like “boiling a whole plate of dumplings just for the vinegar.” Since what we really wanted to depict was the state of animation students facing DDLs and the psychology of gradually falling apart during production, why not just imitate a documentary format and film a group of animated characters going from working earnestly to gradually breaking down.

We chose to have the animated characters make animation themselves because we felt it would be more interesting to let animated characters who were supposed to be “made by animators” experience the pain of making animation firsthand. The script at this stage basically followed the documentary format, driving the plot mainly through interviews and narration, with shot design mimicking real filming as much as possible.

But later we found that if we explained all the setting clearly in a fully documentary way, the film would need to be at least half an hour long, so we decided to shift toward a feature-film direction.

4. Reality show and feature film: After discussing with our advisor, we found that the work’s narrative style was closer to a reality show. So from the third and fourth versions of the script onward, we deliberately adjusted the dialogue and plot toward a reality-show direction.

We tried to recreate the classic reality-show tropes of two people having conflicts and those dramatic moments, like a group of people charging up to Fanqietou saying “we can’t keep going,” “this thing simply can’t be finished.”

But later we realized that if we wanted every character to be vivid and likable within a limited runtime, we couldn’t rely too heavily on these deliberately manufactured conflicts, or the characters would come across as “performative.”

From prototype to the final version, the whole story was actually adjusted over nearly an entire semester; what everyone sees now is the sixth version.

We made a trade-off between reality-show-style personal expression and a broadly accessible feature film: from initially wanting to express the exhaustion and breakdown of the animation production process, we shifted to focusing on the emotional relationship between creators and their OCs (the characters they created). Using the process of breaking down while making animation as the vehicle for this relationship made it easier for general audiences to recognize and accept.

​Linlu: I gave a lot of consideration to audience accessibility. Most of these animated characters have real-life prototypes, drawn from classmates around us. We hoped to treat this work as a graduation keepsake, keeping the people everyone was familiar with and the things we had experienced inside it. But after hearing our initial idea, our advisor warned us that if we simply turned our real classmates and experiences into animation, it would likely be a self-indulgent work no one else could understand.

So we spent quite a lot of time finding a theme that was both what we truly wanted to express and something more people could understand: the love between a creator and their creation.

​Linlu: Actually, most of these characters existed before the film’s creation. The director came “with capital,” having already drawn many related character designs. We barely changed these designs — just slightly adjusted proportions and details before using them directly.

​Feichai：These character designs, and their names, were originally created for a horror game. Because I love horror games myself, and this film was meant as a memento of our four years of university, I took the “mascot horror” vibe of Western horror games and created a set of “mascots” modeled on my classmates at the animation school — and that’s how this bunch was born.

The character designs were made over the summer during the horror-game fan-song MV imitation period; we wanted to write English songs back then, so they all got English names.

The prototype of “Fanqietou” is Fanqiezi, the director of the neighboring team’s Xihuan de Xuezhang Yao Biyele (related reading：Interview | Chaotic yet heartwarming, a “otokonoko animation” dedicated to graduation season）:

When designing her, I thought of three elements — tomato, hot girl, and demon — and let her pick one of the three

Fanqiezi asked if she could be called Animatto Tomagic, I said sure, and so Fanqietou’s full name became Animatto Tomagic.

At first, I just wanted to draw some “non-human” characters, so I designed figures for myself and my friends, and then it spiraled — I kept drawing my roommates and other classmates:

​Linlu：The special one is the protagonist “Xiaomo,” a character the director designed specifically for this graduation project.

​Feichai：Xiaomo’s role is a freshman arriving at the animation academy for the first time; she had no name or concrete design. During creation we found that if Xiaomo were merely a character who enters the story and observes others, her presence would be extremely weak, almost becoming a “useless” character. But we didn’t want to give up on any character, so the script adjustments in the later versions were basically all aimed at strengthening Xiaomo’s sense of being the protagonist.

​Feichai：Actually, no. Xiaomo doesn’t correspond to any specific person, and the student’s experiences in the film aren’t adapted from my real experiences either. As for why I played the student, the reason is a bit funny.

Because they felt this student’s aura was rather “dark,” while I usually like to wear long hair that covers my eyes, making me a better match for the student in temperament — so they had me play her.

​Linlu：The more important reason is that the OCs in the film were originally created by our director based on herself and her friends, so she already has a deep connection with them. Since the story is about the emotional relationship between a creator and her OCs, having the director play this character herself makes it more immersive.

​Feichai：The “behind-the-back throw” actually wasn’t deliberately designed. During filming, I was lying on my back on a stretcher, and purely due to the posture and framing it looked like a “behind-the-back throw,” so we never bothered to explain it.

“Shooting hoops in mid-air” was to convey the character’s “athlete” setting. At the time Xiaoli (the actress) didn’t know how to play an athlete, so I told her: just stand behind me like this, and when I walk forward, do a mid-air shooting motion, and everyone will know you’re an athlete.

In fact, a lot of the content in the film was added suddenly during the creative process. For example, the scene at the opening where the student collapses in front of the computer was originally designed as a rather slow, theatrical falling process, using slow motion to show her gradual breakdown. But when Linlu and I discussed how to revise the opening, she said “why don’t you just die by slamming headfirst into it,” and that’s how it became what you see now.

​Linlu：There was also a runtime consideration here. Our film couldn’t get any longer, and we had to find a way to compress the content, so we needed to convey her breakdown in a shorter, more direct way. Rather than using a long, dramatic slow-motion shot of the student collapsing, having her just slam headfirst into it was better.

​Feichai：The explosion scene came about the same way. While discussing how to write the “play within a play” (the animation the animated characters are making) in the second version of the script, Linlu wrote a title in that spot: “Fanqietou Escapes the Exploding Building.” But when we discussed it with our advisor, he thought Fanqietou was going to blow up the building. We figured that worked too, so that’s how we designed it.

​Linlu：Right, a lot of the plot and content in the film happened through such accidental twists.

02 Five people, 17 minutes: first act the story out, then draw it​

“We idealized animation production far too much at the start”

​Feichai：The way the two of us write the script is a bit like “playing catch.” First I would act the story out, and Linlu would turn my performance and ideas into a script; after she finished, she’d hand it to me to revise, and after I revised it I’d give it back to her, and she’d keep revising — going back and forth like that. So by now, it’s honestly hard to say which specific parts of the script were written by whom.

​Linlu：After we locked the plot and before officially entering storyboard production, in order to check the timing and confirm the director’s vision was achievable, we first made a “live-action animatic.” The director performed, I filmed and documented, and after performing we split the editing work, stitching the performances into a relatively complete version to show our advisor.

​Feichai：This method was suggested by our advisor. Because our film had strict runtime requirements, rather than discovering the film ran over time only after finishing the storyboards, it was better to act the entire story out ourselves first. That way, before officially drawing the storyboards, we could get a fairly direct sense of the film’s rhythm and rough runtime.

When designing the storyboards, we also didn’t fully follow traditional animation shot logic. Apart from the few scenes at the computer, the second and third scenes set in the art studio were actually all deliberately imitating reality-show camera positions. So the film often features rather “tricky” angles, like placing the camera on the tabletop for a big perspective effect.

To draw these scenes and perspectives, we built sets and characters using furniture and blocks from the game “gogh” to find suitable camera angles. But because the 3D camera in “gogh” has a certain amount of perspective distortion, using it directly as a drawing reference wasn’t accurate enough, so Yuchuan, who was in charge of background art, also built a set of scene models in Maya specifically to work out the perspective.

​Feichai：The live-action shots in the film were basically all done by ourselves, and the characters on screen were all teammates from the graduation project group.

The stretcher-carrying scene was shot in a room borrowed from a classmate’s home. Because the room’s original layout made it hard to get the camera positions we wanted, this set of shots was actually mirrored — filmed in the reverse direction, then flipped back in post. To keep audiences from noticing, we removed anything in advance that could reveal the direction, like posters and text.

​Linlu：The high school scenes were shot at Beijing International Studies University. We spent ages looking for a location, only to find that the BISU campus next door looked almost exactly like this.

​Feichai：Actually, as long as you don’t show too much wall and only frame near the windows, it doesn’t look like a university classroom. The four people appearing in the memory are the four key animators in our group — me, Linlu, Xiaoli, and A’hai.

To make everyone look more like high schoolers, I had my parents mail over my old school uniforms from Shenzhen. I’ve always felt Shenzhen school uniforms carry a stereotypical high schooler image; the high school uniform designs in many novels and manga are also fairly close to them.

​Feichai：September–October: we completed the pre-production character art designs and keyshots, finalized in October.

October–February: transition from pre-production to production. Feichai and Linlu completed the script, storyboards, and animatic. Yuchuan and A’hai worked in parallel on backgrounds, props, scene mood illustrations, and other art design; A’hai also worked on character performance tests for Zhipianfu and Mihuashi. Xiaoli joined slightly later, and at that stage mainly focused on adapting to the art style and performance style, such as drawing Huzhen’s character expressions.

There was also some testing work. For example, for the part where characters interact with the animation software on screen, we needed to design the appearance and buttons of these “software” interfaces in advance, decide how to split up the parts, where the character key animation should stop, and where post-production would take over. We initially wanted to do the interface motion in AE, but after A’hai’s actual testing we found it was actually more convenient to do directly in CSP, so the later interface animation was also moved to CSP, with AE mainly handling rendering and post-processing.

March–May: the mid-production key animation stage. We prioritized the key animation for the interview segments, because those shots were relatively short and numerous, with less complex performances — well suited for磨合 the art style and practicing lip sync. Although we had actually already started drawing some key animation during winter break, we made some workflow mistakes back then that slowed progress.

One was that the pre-recording was done too late. We drew a portion of key animation based on the live-action animatic first, then went into pre-recording. But only after the recording was done did we discover that my speaking pace in the live-action animatic didn’t fully match the voice actors’ pace in the final recording, so the key animation had to be redone. For example, for Xiaomo’s big breakdown performance near the end, we had already animated thirty-plus seconds of performance, but because the sound and lip sync didn’t match, we had to redraw it all. Looking back now, the pre-recording should have been finished much earlier, which would have avoided a lot of rework.

​Linlu：The other was a production management problem. We idealized animation production far too much at the start. The earliest production sheet was extremely simple — basically just a schedule and a shot list: who drew the storyboard for this shot, who did the key animation, who did the in-betweens; fill in the names and done.

But once we actually started, we realized this was nowhere near enough. Because our key animation was divided by character — Feichai was responsible for Fanqietou and Huawanmeiyou, A’hai for Mihuashi and Zhipianfu, Linlu for Xiaomo, and Xiaoli for Huzhen. But sometimes three or four characters could appear in the same shot, each handled by a different person. If the “key animation” column in the sheet only had one name, we simply couldn’t tell who had finished this shot and who hadn’t.

​Feichai：In February this problem caused the same character to be drawn twice by two different people, so we realized the workflow had to be reorganized, and everyone held a meeting specifically to rebuild the production sheet.

So the later sheets went down to every single character and every single production step:

Who finished key animation, who finished line cleanup, who finished coloring, and when it could be handed to post — all at a glance. After this workflow was officially settled in March, the whole production actually went much more smoothly.

​Feichai：Mainly to keep the characters consistent. Everyone has their own drawing habits, and it’s hard to guarantee five people would draw identically. Since absolute overall consistency was impossible, we hoped to at least keep each individual character’s overall design and performance style consistent.

For instance, A’hai is better at designs with strong graphic sensibility, so Mihuashi, Zhipianfu, and the many software windows in the film were all her responsibility; Xiaoli’s own drawing style leans more anime, which suits Huzhen.

​Linlu：Of course, even divided by character, everything still had to pass the director’s review; if it didn’t match the character’s state, it would be sent back to be redrawn.

​Feichai：Not so much sent back as I’d step in and fix it myself. Especially during the early art-style adaptation stage, I was quite strict about nailing the characters’ “forms” and performances.

Take Huzhen: although her design doesn’t look complicated, it’s actually very delicate. Move the mouth down a bit, the eyes up a bit, and the face might look especially long. So when Xiaoli first started drawing her, I stepped in to adjust almost every single shot.

Same with performance: the live-action animatic we made stayed in the group chat the whole time; if anyone had no clear idea for a performance segment, they could reference the live-action performance first; and if they had a better idea, they were free to improvise — but they had to watch the animatic first to get the impression.

​Linlu：One month before the screening, we suddenly received notice that the explosion sequence in the film’s climax could not be kept and needed to be revised.

We were devastated, because everything leading up to it had been designed for that final sequence. If the original ending couldn’t stand, a lot of content would need to be adjusted along with it. But at that point our production capacity was stretched thin — the key animators were working back-to-back shifts with no time to rest. Finishing the original content was already hard enough, and now we had to overhaul the ending from scratch — it was practically an “impossible” task.

​Feichai：We were given only three hours from receiving the notice to delivering a revision plan. And that day we had just finished shooting, with more key animation due that night. So all I could do was go back and draw like mad, and I cranked out the version everyone sees now:

This plan actually involved even more work, because it added a lot of characters. I’m truly so grateful to my classmates!

Many of the characters appearing in the explosion sequence were ones we “borrowed” from other graduation project groups — most of them were characters people created during last year’s joint-creation exhibition. We reached out to ask for permission, asking whether these characters could appear in the film as Easter eggs, and almost everyone agreed. Without them, we probably wouldn’t have been able to finish this film.

Afterwards we negotiated again with the studio; they also really liked the plan, so they didn’t raise the price much and cooperated with us on adjusting the division of labor. We handled the character model sheets and key animation, and they completed the subsequent animation, line cleanup, coloring, and rendering. Truly, thank you so much!

Over the following days, we threw ourselves into overtime drawing the key animation of characters popping out, delivering the files to the studio before the weekend — the file size was absurdly huge. Once that was done, we continued pushing forward on our own remaining key animation and compositing work. Looking back now, it actually only took three days — roughly the 24th to the 27th — which seems pretty fast in hindsight, but the whole team was falling apart at the time.

​Feichai：In fact, at 9 a.m. on the day of the screening, I was still editing the film.

​Linlu：We turned it in in a very, very last-minute way. On the day of the screening, I only tested the film’s audio one last time before leaving home.

​Feichai：One night, we were rushing the “play within a play” (the scene where several characters face the school together before the explosion). Partway through drawing, Xiaoli suddenly posted in the group: “Oh my god, I had the lights on while drawing — it’s dawn outside.” Then we all looked out and said, “Ah, it’s dawn.”

​Linlu：The four key animators — none of us slept that night.

​Feichai：Do spend time on pre-production, but don’t spend too much of it. The most important thing is knowing what you truly want to make.

One big reason we revised back and forth during pre-production was my perfectionist streak. I’m the kind of person who needs someone to tell me “this can work” before I dare to truly commit. If the advisor didn’t explicitly tell me a plan was OK, I’d feel it wasn’t good enough and could keep being revised — which is also why Linlu and I clashed during the creative process.

Of course you should listen carefully to your advisor’s opinions, but you need to know what you truly want to make. If there’s something you know you’ll regret not doing, then stick to your own idea and do it.

​Feichai：Making animation is genuinely painful, but after finishing, there’s still a brief moment of happiness.

​Linlu：When the film was screened, I felt it was all worth it.

​Feichai：Right. (During the screening) hearing people laugh — it was all worth it.

“Even though memories naturally fade and distort, animation offers another possibility of ‘preservation.’”

The animated series Memory Administration Bureau officially concluded on bilibili on August 30, bringing down the curtain on this dream of memory that spanned six years.

The series tells the story of the protagonist Guan Chao, who, in order to return to the past, searches for “Burning Stone,” the energy source needed to activate the time gun, only to unexpectedly enter the Memory Administration Bureau. Over the month since the series began airing, its plot, characters, and animation have sparked round after round of lively discussion among anime fans.

While these discussions occasionally sparked controversy, almost no one would question the creative team’s complete inheritance of the spirit of the original short film from six years ago, or their courage to keep thinking in their creation and expression and preserve their authorship despite the pressures of commercialization and production schedules. This sincere spirit of independent creation carved out, by sheer force, an inviolable plot of land for itself under the extremely cramped conditions in which Chinese 2D animation struggles to survive.

01 “Analog” Memory​

Memory is an ambiguous thing for human beings. It is a product of our sensory recording and secondary transcription of reality. Memory cannot replace reality, yet it is also a vital bond between human perception and the real world; how to balance memory and reality is a lesson one keeps learning throughout life.

The most distinctive feature of Memory Administration Bureau since its short-film days is that it concretizes, through its setting, the blurriness and ambiguity between memory and reality.

And in the series, I was delighted to find that the creators’ expression of the theme of “memory” was no longer confined to the setting and narrative text; instead, using different visual elements as media, they translated memory into something more perceivable.

Throughout the series version of Memory Administration Bureau, there runs a relentless pursuit of the texture of “analog media” (media systems that record, transmit, and reproduce information through continuously varying physical signals, such as film and tape, as opposed to digital media).

The pursuit of a “film look” is one of the show’s defining visual traits.

Compared to digital photography or reality itself, film photography is imperfect. The process from shooting to finished print is complex and cumbersome, and due to its own characteristics, the final images can deviate somewhat from the real scene. But it is precisely this imperfection that endows film photography with unique meaning—as if the temperature, humidity, and time of the moment of capture, even the mood of the recorder and the recorded, were all condensed into that imperfection. And film, existing as a physical object, makes the memory frozen in an instant feel almost within reach.

Memory Administration Bureau imitates this “imperfect” quality of film in its visual presentation. Every scene in the small town of Red Card Port glows with a sunset-like warm yellow, as if time and space here had stopped together with memory in the year 2000;

Flickering grain and noise fill the entire frame, making the image feel as though it carries temperature and humidity; the large white patches in the frame simulate overexposure in film photography, and around every overexposed patch—even including the linework—is wrapped a faint, orange-red halo unique to film. These details, as accents, give life to the frame as concretized memory.

In more extreme cases, Memory Administration Bureau even cuts in a few frames of live-action footage flashing by quickly, attempting to deepen the viewer’s perceptual confusion between the real and the virtual.

This imitation and use of analog media seems to signal the creative team’s attempt to weaken animation’s conventionality and connect the real with the virtual.

And just as memory can never truly equal or replace reality—in the age of all-digital animation, no matter how meticulous animation’s “imitation of analog media” is, it cannot transcend the limits of its own nature as a digital medium; yet in terms of the result, it can achieve the maximum degree of perceptual confusion.

In episode 5, the creators also put this speculative question before the audience through the Protagonist Halo’s line: “If you put a digital image transferred from film next to a digital image with a film filter, could you tell which one is film?”

What do “simulation and reproduction” truly mean? The creators buried this question within the exquisite imagery, leaving it for the audience to ponder. This keeps the visual presentation of Memory Administration Bureau consistent with the work’s inner expression of the concept of “memory.”

02 “Peering Into” Memory​

Perception differs depending on the stage of memory. Memory Administration Bureau divides its narrative structure into three spaces—the real world, the memory layer, and the Memory Administration Bureau representing the order of memory—and the element that visually distinguishes these three spaces is the aspect ratio.

The aspect ratio is like a window the image opens onto the real world; the size of the window frame determines the angle from which the viewer peers into the image. Memory Administration Bureau uses three different aspect ratios corresponding to the three spaces where the story takes place.

The different aspect ratios visually separate the three spacetimes at a glance, and also leave room for visual playfulness in the transitions between spaces.

Changes in aspect ratio make it easier for creators to steer the audience’s emotions. 16:9, as the standard ratio used at the opening, gives the audience a scale for perceiving rules, order, and reality at the story’s point of origin. Moreover, the creators portray Baizhong and Fangtang’s peering into Guan Chao’s memories as watching a movie—this both prepares for the later seamless shift from 16:9 to 4:3 and establishes the audience’s identity as absent observers.

Later plot developments reveal that the reality Guan Chao inhabits is not truly reality either. In episode 7, the thick black bars on either side of the 4:3 frame become a barrier that can be broken, shaking the audience’s identity as absent observers in an instant—and the enormous sensory imbalance brings with it a correspondingly enormous emotional impact.

The 16:9 and 4:3 ratios can interact and shift horizontally. By comparison, the space carried by the 2.35:1 ratio is relatively independent.

Under this ratio, you can regard the space presented on screen as a movie screen, or a theater stage. Whatever your perspective, the image’s quality of being watched is beyond dispute. This extremely clear positioning of the viewing experience lets the memory-layer segments serve, visually, narratively, and emotionally, as transitional filler between the Memory Administration Bureau and the reality portions.

Furthermore, the differences in aspect ratio also give viewers a chance to glimpse the creators’ intentions and understanding of the different spaces in the story.

The Memory Administration Bureau, in 16:9, is like an order of iron law. It is neither reality nor the mad private phantasm of an individual, but more like a set of established rules constructed within a world of illusion;

The 4:3 ratio carrying the story’s real world compresses the visual space on left and right, narrowing the field of view—seemingly mirroring the cramped, confined reality full of regret and loneliness that Guan Chao faces;

The 2.35:1 ratio, representing the memory layer’s environment, lends the fantasy world grandeur on the scale of cinema. Yet that splendor and brilliance are merely the swelling and distortion of protagonist Guan Chao’s intense obsession.

03 “Deconstructing” Memory​

If imitating the texture of analog media is memory made visually concrete, and manipulating the aspect ratio simulates the way memory is observed—then how can the mode of memory’s operation be reproduced?

How can the process of remembering, the retrieval of memory, even memory’s deviations and omissions, be structured—even deconstructed—through narrative and audiovisual means?

Memory is always divergent and disordered. To capture a specific memory, one usually needs to anchor it in a specific medium. Memory Administration Bureau’s presentation of memory likewise rests on pastiche of multiple media. This creative approach is concentrated in episodes 5 and 6.

In episode 5, the Protagonist Halo’s reconstruction of memory is achieved through an editing bench in a real theater. This dull tool that in reality only editors use becomes part of the narrative, forming one link in the staging’s playfulness and giving viewers a very concrete imaginative anchor for how memory operates.

In the same episode, Baizhong’s memory is also presented in the form of black-and-white comics. Through the creators’ deconstruction, the medium’s characteristics here follow the same line as the editing bench’s effect on memory.

The essence of comics is to break up and recombine a complete span of time and space through paneling, letting a sequence of static images operate on their own in the reader’s mind. This quality perfectly matches the power of the Protagonist Halo’s real theater—the ability to freely cut, collage, delete, or restructure memory.

At the same time, the actual viewing experience here is not entirely equivalent to reading a comic; it is more like an artificially created “force-played comic.” It retains the comic’s paneling, but strips the reader of the agency to turn pages, pause, or imagine within static images.

No matter how well the panel forms, speech bubbles, and screentone effects in the frame match the comic forms within the memory, they cannot replace the unique perception of actually reading a comic. By imitating the comic medium and letting animation’s medium characteristics clash against comics’, this segment gains a core of expression visually as weighty as its narrative one.

The same creative logic applies to the arcade-game structure nested within Guan Chao’s battle against the bug men in episode 6. Memory here is packaged as an immersive repetitive-experience simulator; Guan Chao’s struggle against memory trauma is concretely expressed through the arcade loop of failing, inserting coins, and starting over.

The video editing bench, comics, and arcade games—three media, each with its own characteristics, annotate the operation of memory from different angles in Memory Administration Bureau. In this process, the show demonstrates the manipulability of memory’s mechanisms—memory’s operation, though precise, is also extremely fragile. Every point along a thread of memory can be influenced by external forces and produce deviations in the outcome, like an editing bench that can be freely edited.

Such memory, though vivid, is not trustworthy, and pales next to true reality. Throughout its first half, Memory Administration Bureau continually uses setting, narrative, and audiovisual technique to emphasize to viewers the trustworthiness of memory—only to overturn that painstakingly built trustworthiness in the later plot. By simulating multiple media forms it shows the audience memory’s mechanisms, and repeatedly expresses through Guan Chao that his memories of those concrete experiences have long since blurred—that what the audience sees is not an unblemished reality.

04 Epilogue​

In just seven episodes, Memory Administration Bureau fully presents the creators’ understanding of memory as a mental activity, letting the audience experience the vividness of a memory and also sense its illusoriness.

Memory may be riddled with holes, may be fragile and easily destroyed, yet it is almost the only proof by which a person confirms their own existence, and the only vessel of sincere feeling between people. This theme, tinged with existentialist philosophy, is to me the most precious core of Memory Administration Bureau.

In the animation, Guan Chao would rather accept the death of his body than forget his memories, because memory records his real experiences, feelings, and existence. And those carefully crafted imitations of physical media in Memory Administration Bureau are likewise engraved in the audience’s memory of this anime.

Many works tell stories about memory, but few animations can, like Memory Administration Bureau, translate memory’s ambiguous and shifting inner workings from abstract psychological feeling into visual narrative. Perhaps its worldbuilding and plot arrangement are not yet refined enough, but those sharp, romantic, even reckless expressions are enough to make this summer unforgettable for Chinese animation fans.

Especially the final two episodes, which suddenly plunge into a cruel, realistic storyline, make the show’s existentialist landing all the more visceral. The creators did not let Guan Chao resolve his predicament in a conventional sense, delivering a happy ending that satisfies both character and audience. Nor did they try to offer a clear solution to the plight Guan Chao suffers. Instead, they acknowledge existence itself, wrapping the pain born of the predicament in memory’s powerful, genuine capacity for feeling. Perhaps the value of memory lies not in whether it is faithful to objective truth, but in that it once carried real feeling.

Even though memories naturally fade and distort, animation offers another possibility of “preservation.” Six years of creative labor have frozen those fleeting emotions within the frame.

Memory Administration Bureau offers its viewers, through its story, a reflection on memory itself. Even though reality cannot be relived, a memory that has been seen and empathized with gains a power that never fades. This six-year creative journey has, through animation, completed the act of treasuring memory itself.