8.7→8.0, why is China's most luxurious animation short film project no longer a phenomenon this time?
“While observing and expressing the present, offering the most genuine empathy and comfort”
On February 19, 《Chinese Chimerica 2》 officially concluded, locking in a Douban score of 8.0 and over 73 million views on Bilibili. However, compared to Season 1's 8.7 rating and its explosive popularity across the internet, this season's ripple effect on social media seems far smaller, with no shortage of harsh voices in the comments.
The author previously wrote an article outlining three characteristics that define excellent domestic supernatural folklore short films(“folklore flavor”), namely: stories drawn from classical texts, emphasizing the “strange” and “fantastic”, creation featuring art styles that fuse ethnic characteristics, and an aesthetic pursuit of saying more with less. The article concluded by expressing anticipation for this creative direction:
Academic Pai Editorial Team, WeChat: 动画学术趴Folklore Supernatural “Dark and Gritty” — Does Chinese Animation Have a Promising Future This Way?
Now, three years have passed. With 《The Little Monster of Langlang Mountain》 and numerous domestic animated features paving the way, it's worth taking this opportunity to discuss: does this season's 《Chinese Chimerica 2》 live up to the expectations of audiences and fans? Is the “folklore flavor” of these works strong enough? How well do they align with the “Chinese Chimerica” theme and the creative motto “wondrous realms of the strange, myriad minds of the mundane”? And do they truly express an authentic ethnic style?
Allow me to be playful here — the following will rank the nine episodes of 《Chinese Chimerica 2》 from “hit” to “miss” to discuss the above topics.
Of course, a disclaimer is needed before going into details: as general director Chen Liaoyu noted, 《The Little Monster of Langlang Mountain》 as a project launch was nearly contemporaneous with 《Chinese Chimerica》, meaning there's an inherent time lag between the creators' production cycle and audience expectations. Creators' predictions and intentions can hardly — and cannot — respond “on command” to every comment. At most, audience expectations and feedback interact with creators at the level of production details; the two remain relatively independent perspectives.
Therefore, the author maintains an overall attitude of tolerance and encouragement toward domestic animated shorts (episodes). The ranking and interpretations below are merely personal perspectives — said with all due humility and taken with a grain of salt. (Also: contains minor spoilers, but not many.
01 The Hits and the Best
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is truly a “gold mine” for domestic supernatural animation. Director Hu Rui this time selected the eponymous story “Echo in the Ear” (from the Qingkɔtíng woodblock edition, Volume 15).
The story is quite simple: the protagonist Tan Jinyuan firmly believes in the art of guidance (Daoist health cultivation, also described as qigong), practicing day and night, until one day he feels a small inch-tall yaksha-like figure crawl out of his ear. Neighbors suspect he's gone mad, but he gradually recovers.
The animation's plot, however, is far richer, clearly also drawing from “The Pupil Voices” (Volume 1), another anecdote about strange occurrences in the facial organs:
The scholar Fang Dong is punished for harassing behavior and goes blind in both eyes. He reforms his ways and cultivates virtue, and eventually notices strange sounds arising from his eyes — two small figures emerge from his eye sockets, pass through his nasal cavity, and go out into the world together. In the end, though one eye remains lifeless, Fang Dong gains a double-pupiled eye and his vision is restored.
Combining the two source stories with the final presentation, Echo in the Ear's thematic core does not deviate from director Hu Rui's long-held philosophy: stripping away the original texts' heavier worldliness satire and moral edification, what truly resonates with contemporary audiences in classical supernatural anecdotes remains the ontological questioning of self and existence.
Why does the ear-being appear? What does it do after coming into the world? What exactly does the scholar fight against? Is the scholar truly enlightened in the end? These questions — like the peddler's predicament in 《Goose Goose Goose》 — have no clear answers, yet they foster those moments worth savoring repeatedly: those moments of truly witnessing the blooming of the night-blooming cereus.
As an animated short, Echo in the Ear's most ingenious expressive device is its soundscape (soundscape), woven tightly with the theme.
Of course, the author is not here to discuss academic definitions, but simply to emphasize the film's excellence in creating atmosphere through sound. In other words, even without considering the visuals, Echo in the Ear — through layers of sound with varying depth, volume, and timbre — already delivers a remarkably immersive “ventriloquism” performance.
From this perspective, this creative approach is itself rooted in Chinese folk art traditions — not to mention its incorporation of the Mudan Ting (Peony Pavilion) “Garden Outing” aria, puppet theater aesthetics, and deft use of traditional five colors. Within a 22-minute synesthetic space, the creator's imagination and the audience's sensibility collide and spill over — this is what is meant by “seeking marvels beyond the image, expressing the vitality of motion, and writing the profound and wondrous thought.”
Taking off the headphones and returning to reality, amid the many interpretive details from creators and audiences alike, the myriad faces of humanity gradually emerge.
Compared to Goose Goose Goose, Echo in the Ear has a far less eerie quality and a stronger sense of playful strangeness. Perhaps this marks a shift in creative mindset — after all, in the end, one must come to terms with the ear-dweller within and the thoughts of the heart.
As the only stop-motion piece in the series and the work with the strongest authorial voice, the author makes no secret of favoring Light Snow. For behind-the-scenes details and craft processes, readers can consult Animation Academic Pai's latest interview (Hardcore Behind-the-Scenes | How Did the First Wool-Felt Stop-Motion Animation in Chinese Chimerica Depict the Oppression and Weirdness of a Chinese Family?) — no need to repeat here.
Continuing the interpretation of Echo in the Ear, I'd like to revisit the question of “ethnic style.”
Light Snow was created by a team led by director Chen Lianhua, as was the previous Chinese Chimerica: Small Full. The emphasis on “team” is because Chen Lianhua's earlier works bore a more distinctly personal stylistic exploration.
In 2008, Chen Lianhua and An Xu's collaborative “Solar Term” (Solar Term) series debuted with Winter Solstice. It had a distinctly Flash-era animation style, but precisely because of the simplicity and concision that came with that production method, it aligned beautifully with flat graphic art aesthetics. The two creators subsequently turned toward traditional flat folk arts like New Year paintings and shadow puppetry, producing later entries in the “Solar Term” series. By the time of Grain Rain and Heat Stopping, they began borrowing the spatial expression of scroll painting (traditional Chinese painting), such as fixed camera positions and long takes, and developed the use of looping shots.
By the time audiences saw 《Chinese Chimerica: Small Full》, this style had shifted subtly: not only did it move from the creators' familiar computer animation to handcrafted paper-cut, wool-felt, and other multi-form stop-motion — a “2.5-dimensional” approach — but it also turned thematically toward a child's perspective and intergenerational family dynamics.
Yet this change manifested in the work as an aesthetic maturation. On one hand, the renewed team collaboration brought more collisions and new possibilities; on the other hand, whether it's the bilu and konghou of Tang-era court music or the lacquer-painted gold-foil technique and the compositions of framed scenes and symmetry, Small Full embodies a further development of the “Solar Term” series' established aesthetic — ultimately presenting a refined, richly layered ethnic art style bearing the marks of collective creation.
In Light Snow, this style becomes even more understated.
There's no dialogue voiceover at all; the plot is conveyed solely through the puppets' movements, the score, and minimal transitional subtitle cards. This silent-film-like approach — where less is more — leaves ample room for interpretation. The production team also mentioned in a podcast conversation the important influence of 《The Goddess》 (starring Ruan Lingyu) on their filming; a careful comparison of Mother Light Snow's expressions and gestures reveals echoes of it.
The handwritten medical records, the landscape-painting-style sets and compositions carry on the established visual language — serene as moonlight on snow, calm and composed, revealing nothing overtly. This also echoes the theme: a wounded heart needs heart medicine; Chinese parent-child relationships must ultimately move toward “separation of tasks,” returning to that restrained, understated optimal distance — wanting closeness but willing to let go.
Light Snow thus fully achieves a distilled style — an artistic expression born of ethnic tradition and lived reality, maintaining a certain aesthetic distance from the audience. And this may well be one of the ideal effects Chinese Chimerica aspires to.
Mountain Pilgrimage is a work that genuinely dazzles — not just for its high-saturation color palette, but for its modern treatment of the classic theme of nostalgia and its perfectly pitched emotional expression.
At first glance, Mountain Pilgrimage shares a thematic affinity with Season 1's 《The Country Bus Took Away Wang Hai'er and the Immortals》 — both seem to depict that “place of return” that exists only in stories passed down by the elders. But The Country Bus looks back at a homeland traversed barefoot in youth, while Mountain Pilgrimage looks back at a lost, invented tradition.
“Bai Shan” (mountain pilgrimage) is a term used in the Guangxi and Guangdong regions — especially among Hakka communities — for ancestral tomb-visiting rituals. The entire work employs large amounts of Hakka and Cantonese (vernacular) dialogue, telling the story of Ayuan, a midlife-crisis “Hong Kong drifter” who, after returning home for a mountain pilgrimage, experiences a visionary trance and undergoes a profound shift in mindset.
The narrative structure is simple, and the protagonist's transformation is naturally motivated: the visions he witnesses and his bond with his grand-aunt Bai Po and elder uncle completely reshape Ayuan's understanding of “home.” By the short's end, Ayuan invites his father to visit Hong Kong, rediscovering his true connection to his hometown and family.
Many viewers were surely moved to tears by Bai Po's line, “Eat well, sleep well.” Mountain Pilgrimage indeed fully expresses a shift in many contemporary creators' sensibilities: as we approach the age where we must confront “goodbye” head-on, the “old folk traditions” we once avoided become, through artistic reinvention, a form of imagination and solace — a kind of cyber-nostalgia. Increasingly urgently, we reach for whatever connection we can grasp between ourselves and the faraway.
For most ordinary people, it's the Odyssey-like cycle of leaving home combined with the deep-rooted cultural yearning for “home” in Chinese tradition that creates such resonance with these themes. As the creative team put it, rituals exist to solve the problems of the living; we keep looking back because the road ahead is uncertain.
Artistically, Mountain Pilgrimage displays remarkable expressive power. The colors and dialects speak for themselves, and the theme song “Fragrant Flowers” draws from the “Fragrant Flower Buddhist Rites” popular in Meizhou, Guangdong — a genre whose chants encompass poetry, mountain songs, and rhymed recitations, interweaving chant and song, movement and dance.
The lyrics of “Fragrant Flowers” continue this tradition: “The world's affairs are vast and uncertain / Like a dream within a single night in Nanke” — echoing the animation's visionary adventures while reflecting that widely cherished “ancestral” wisdom of life and philosophy.
In other words, we still yearn for a flourishing of regionally distinct creativity, just as we still yearn for a family atmosphere, a social climate, and life ideals defined by acceptance above judgment.
02 The Contenders
As the season opener, Three Dragons faced pressure far exceeding any other work — that much is beyond doubt. Its narrative choice to lean toward the market-tested “underdog story” structure is therefore quite understandable.
Within the internal lineage of Chinese Chimerica, this perspective continues from Season 1's Summer of the Little Monster and The Little Monster of Langlang Mountain. In terms of character design details, the three local little snakes (based on the big-eye rat snake, beauty rat snake, and green leaf snake) owe more to Three Monks (Ah Da) and Nezha Conquers the Sea.
But “you can't have it all” — which means Three Dragons faces genuine difficulty in breaking new ground, and much of the controversy centers exactly there.
In some sense, our repeated telling of the same story about commoner heroes precisely reveals our continued “lack” of such genuine commoner heroes.
This anxiety and longing also form an intertextual resonance with this season's Today's Zoo — looking up, there are those in power who are negligent, and true heroes who are knocked back down; looking down, everyone is repeatedly disciplined and treated like draft animals, nameless and faceless. Within this circular logic, individual action ultimately brings no substantive change, even contradicting the “people's view of history” that barrage comments celebrate.
Even when the work leaves an emotional escape hatch, it often still falls into the form of an “open ending.”
Of course, this issue shouldn't be laid at the creators' feet. An allegory pointing at reality is, after all, just a story — a side reflection of a contemporary symptom, a question none of us has fully thought through: if everyone wants to be “the people,” then who are the three dragons?
The Big Benefactor is also part of the Chinese Chimerica series, sharing the same urban-spirit world as Season 1's The Little Convenience Store. Overall, it's one of the season's few heartwarming gems — as down-to-earth and relatable as its predecessor.
The husband-and-wife duo Gu Yang and Liu Kuang teamed up again. The old man at the hutong convenience store (uncannily resembling actor Niu Ben) faces a new challenge, and his old spirit friends rally to help — but in the end, it's the old man himself who pulls out sincerity as his ultimate move. In short, this episode uses playful artistic creation to depict intergenerational support and elder care, tackling life and solving real problems with whimsical, magical means.
Technically, The Big Benefactor also refines its predecessor's approach, placing greater emphasis on the soak-and-bleed quality of ink-wash painting, and imitating hand-painted brushstrokes to create a visual style that shifts from the concrete to the ethereal.
Watching it, I was reminded of the Falling to the Stars screenwriter Kang Fu's Strange Tales from the Chao Yang South Road — likewise urban spirit tales set in Beijing, equally concise and delightful. To wonder whether spirits exist or whether magic works is far too adult a pursuit. These little spirits are charming precisely because they can coexist “harmlessly” with humans, embodying the animist reverence of those of us who believe in them.
“Wishing you all the best.”
03 The NPCs
One-line quick review — a brutal yet tender heavy-industrial dark fairy tale; the art deserves to be framed frame by frame.
The Great Bird's story isn't hard to grasp: with enough patience, most viewers can tell this is a dark, cruel fairy tale. Browsing director Du Pengpeng's social media, his own tags read “new Chinese dark fairy tale” and “poetic ghost aesthetics of sorrow.”
To summarize via the director's creative journey, The Great Bird's core message is “through a unique tone tinged with sorrow and grief, to express the protection of innocent beauty and resistance against oppressive reality.” And in its final visual form, The Great Bird indeed exhibits a “refined imperfection.”
The molehe (muhoula) figure (磨侯罗) runs through the entire work as a motif — a symbol of pure innocence. This child's-eye view of brutal survival themes recalls Season 1's Lingling and the multi-award-winning Wild Animals. But The Great Bird is heavier; the historical subtext and meditations on human nature entangled within make it more ambiguous and polysemous, which can leave audiences struggling to grasp every detail.
One-line hot take: a tidy, well-executed assignment piece — ideal for the nine-to-five crowd(in the broadest sense) to leave heartbroken barrage comments while scarfing down airport food, mourning the other road not taken.
This is probably the season's most reality-oriented, most “workplace-toxic” work.
The mockumentary fable already declares what the creative team wants to say, so no need to elaborate. The Robert Frost poem (Robert Frost) “The Road Not Taken” (The Road Not Taken) has long been a fixture of Chinese middle-school textbooks; ideally, it should plant a seed of insight in every teenager before they formally step into society.
There's a lighter behind-the-scenes anecdote worth mentioning: the various dialect voices in the zoo were mostly voiced by this season's directors themselves, emphasizing that the animals come from all corners of the country while also tempering the work's relatively heavy main tone. As for “what's in the zoo” and “where's the forest” — well, the predicament is similar to Three Dragons: which character, exactly, do you project onto from the other side of the screen?
One-line hot take: in terms of color, it knows what makes it work; in terms of narrative, it doesn't quite know what makes it work.
Sanlang tells a story of “breaking obsession” — a quintessential Western-movie narrative: no-man's land, the Yardang ghost city, and martial-arts heroes. Sanlang's tiger-head helmet design references the animal-faced hoods of Tang dynasty warrior tomb figurines, extracting red and yellow as paired colors to underscore the character's personality. Its scene design and color application are both commendable — especially the rendering of gobi terrain, dune vistas, and mirrored otherworldly visions. It could honestly serve as a nice promotional short for northwest landscapes (bushi.
By comparison, the storytelling lags a bit — overall a fairly predictable story of self-discovery and breaking inner obsessions set in a generic martial-arts world.
One-line hot take: a commendable attempt at an anti-hero narrative — bold, can be wild, but not quite necessary.
Xingtian tells the “prehistory” of the eponymous mythological figure — the story before and after he is decapitated. The director's interview mentions a perspective of “a tiger's heart that pauses to smell the roses,” but in the final product, even adding tribal and mythological backdrops, Xingtian remains a fairly traditional heroic elegy; the fusion of ancient and modern is hard to call seamless.
That said, the episode's visual style deserves attention — for instance, using motion capture to highlight the choreography's physical expressiveness, thereby precisely reconstructing a primal life force: “When emotion stirs within, it takes form in words”; “When song proves insufficient, the hands and feet begin to move unbidden.”
04 Concluding Thoughts
After a series of plainly opinionated reviews, I'd like to return to the most fundamental question: How should “Chinese” and “Chimerica” be read?
Zhou Zuoren once said, “The emotions and thoughts of the Chinese people are concentrated on ghosts,” and “to understand China, one must study its customs and rituals.” This is easy to understand, and it's one reason more and more artistic works are turning toward commemorating things that have passed.
As an animated short, Chinese Chimerica burst onto the scene in 2023, using formal lightness and innovation to temper this deep gravity rooted in ethnicity and reality. But The Little Monster of Langlang Mountain feature film and this second season have perhaps moved closer to that gravity.
In this light, whether mythology, ethnicity, and contemporaneity can find a harmonious point; how better to transform obscure allusions into animated works where imagery and aesthetics unify; and how to observe the present and express reality while offering the most genuine empathy and comfort — these remain questions for creators to ponder in the years ahead.
As for audiences' feelings and impressions, time will ultimately provide the answers.
References: [Japanese] Maruo Tsuneyoshi: The Tangle of ‘Human’ and ‘Ghost’ — Analyses of Lu Xun's Novels, trans. Qin Gong, People's Literature Publishing House, 1995.