Chinese Animated Film *Monkey King: Hero Is Back* Is Breaking Box Office Records. Here Is the Story Behind It

Eight years in preparation, one change of release date, and now in theaters.

Fifty-four years after Uproar in Heaven, another animated film drawn from Journey to the West, Monkey King: Hero Is Back, has finally got people talking about this classic subject again.

Since opening on July 10, Hero Is Back has taken 95.2 million yuan in three days, and its 40 million yuan in a single day broke the one-day record for a Chinese animated film. Its share of screenings has risen from 9% on opening day to 13% this Monday. At the current pace, it is very likely to beat the 295 million yuan record held by Boonie Bears 2 and become the first Chinese animated film to pass 300 million yuan.

No one expected this. Going by the title alone, you would probably have taken it for yet another Chinese cartoon trading on the Journey to the West name to make a quick buck—that has happened plenty of times before. The film has no stars and no scandals, and apart from its subject it had nothing to sell, so audiences knew nothing about it and cinema managers expected little.

Last weekend, Hero Is Back held two days of paid previews. It was the first time ordinary moviegoers had seen the film, and the response was surprisingly strong. The previews took 9.7 million yuan and built word of mouth online: film accounts on Weibo and WeChat began sharing posters, trailers and animation sketches, and some people who had seen the previews (including several of my colleagues) began recommending the film on their own initiative on WeChat Moments and Douban. People later joked that they were “tap water”—a pun on the Chinese slang for paid online shills, which literally means “water army”: these promoters came of their own free will.

More than 45,000 people have now rated the film on Douban, and its average score stands at a startling 8.8. Reviewers praise the special effects and the fresh take on the original characters most often. The criticism centers on a story that is too simple and on suspicions that the film borrowed character designs and plot beats from similar films. The debate has only made audiences more curious about Hero Is Back and more eager to talk about it.

Just a month ago, few people had heard of the film, and there was hardly any promotion for it online. When we interviewed the director, Tian Xiaopeng, back then, he was much more relaxed. He felt he had done his part and the rest was up to the audience. When we tried to reach him again today, he had gone into “hiding” because too many people were knocking on his door.

Tian spent 8 years preparing Hero Is Back and 4 years making it, and until a year before it was finished he paid for it out of his own pocket.

Sun Wukong is a middle-aged man, Tang Seng has become a small child, and the Earth God turns out to be a groundhog. Tian will explain to you, in all earnestness, why these are the personalities and looks the characters in his Journey to the West ought to have. To most investors, though, these changes probably looked like “fantasy” and “nonsense,” and no one would give him money.

Money was not his only problem. He could not find the right people, existing equipment could not give him enough technical support, and there was the unavoidable censorship review and the revisions it demanded. In solving these problems, the film changed from what it was meant to be—or, to put it more bluntly, it made some sacrifices and compromises.

Compared with films that never reach cinemas, Tian is lucky. Not only did people get to see his film, it has also won rare applause and box office success.

Tian told us he hopes Hero Is Back can become five films. The outline for the second is already written: the little Tang Seng will enter adolescence, turn rebellious and begin to doubt Wukong's “authority.”

But all of that depends on the first film being a hit. “It would be best if everyone liked it—it gives you a sense of achievement. But whether it works out is still uncertain,” Tian said at the time.

The following article was first published on June 15 under the original headline “Sun Wukong Is a Middle-Aged Man and Tang Seng Is Adorable: Will Hero Is Back Do Well at the Box Office?”

“Holy cow!” Wukong shouts this line in Monkey King: Hero Is Back while fighting the mountain god. But when China's film regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, reviewed the film, the line was cut.

It was cut because the regulator classified Hero Is Back as a children's film. The filmmakers do not see it that way. In fact, the director, Tian Xiaopeng, made the film precisely because he felt Chinese animation was too childish. He believes that “animation is made for adults.”

Tian spent 8 years preparing the film. Earlier reports said it cost more than 100 million yuan to make and set a record at the Cannes Film Festival for overseas rights sales of a Chinese animated film. Tian says that throughout the preparation no one would invest. Unable to wait any longer, he began producing the film with his own money 4 years ago, and real investment only arrived about a year ago.

He did not want to make a childish Chinese cartoon, nor a traditional Journey to the West story. Perhaps that is because the project began as a gift for his son—in Tian's Journey to the West, Wukong and Tang Seng are more like father and son.

In Hero Is Back, Wukong is a dejected middle-aged man, and Tang Seng is still a brat. “Think about what you'd be like after being locked up for 500 years,” Tian says. Wukong would hardly be in a good mood, and he would not be a teenager or someone in his twenties; he should be middle-aged. A person's face reflects what he has been through; you cannot say that because Wukong is immortal he must always look young. As for Tang Seng, he has great compassion in his heart, but “if he hadn't gone through the seven emotions and six desires, would he be willing to go west for the scriptures?”

The director often raises questions like this when explaining his character designs. Others include: Tang Seng should be a chatterbox, but he can't be annoying, can he? What should the Earth God look like? Should he still be drawn the old way, as a short old man with a white beard? Think about how the legend of the Earth God first spread. Didn't someone see a clever, amusing groundhog in the mountains and, because it had a “long beard,” take it for a spirit? A character like this should be more “natural.” So should the Little White Dragon, which at the start should behave more like a wild dragon.

Tian's team believes that much of the logic in the original Journey to the West does not hold up. Tian says that when he read it as a child, his favorite part was the first 10 chapters. After that comes the story of Sun Wukong escorting Tang Seng to the Western Heaven, and he would wonder what had happened to Sun Wukong—he was no longer a “person.” So in his version, he tried as far as he could to trace a person's inner journey.

He holds the voice acting to the same standard. The boy who voiced Tang Seng was fairly experienced, and the night before recording, as usual, he memorized all his lines. The next day, as soon as he started, the director felt something was off: a child should not recite his lines in crisp, formal diction like a little adult. In the end, the six-year-old recorded them the way the director wanted, and in some long speeches you can barely make out the first half of the line.

Another example is Wu Wenlun, who voices the little Tang Seng's master (he previously voiced the tortoise Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda). In one passage he got so worked up that his false teeth flew out. Tian says that was his best take, because the scene happened to call for an excited old man who could not speak clearly.

(Sea-urchin-haired Tang Seng: the animation was meant to show his hair growing all the time. The exaggerated hairstyle was not used in the end.)

The film is now only a month from release, and you may never have heard of it. Little promotional material has appeared online so far. Search for the film on Youku and the top result is a fake video that claims to be the full high-definition version but is in fact a baffling piece of piano music. Although the filmmakers want audiences to see that this is something different, a high-quality Chinese animated film, it is not generating enough buzz on social media.

The filmmakers explain that releasing an animated film is unusual in many ways: with no stars, it is hard to find news hooks, so they can only rely on releasing material, which in turn risks spoilers... So releasing information too early can easily leave a campaign with nothing left later on. Until now they had been busy with all kinds of preparation, and only recently began an intensive marketing push.

So far, Hero Is Back has been mentioned most often in connection with the Cannes Film Festival. This year's Cannes is often described as the liveliest ever for Chinese cinema, and Hero Is Back appeared there alongside The Assassin, Mountains May Depart, Mojin: The Lost Legend, Legend of a Rabbit and Rock Dog, and released a trailer. There was even word that it had earned back overseas distribution fees equal to a quarter of its cost at Cannes, making it the best-selling Chinese film at the festival in recent years.

But that report is not accurate. Lu, the head of the production company Gaolu Animation, told QDaily that Hero Is Back cost about 60 million yuan and that overseas distribution fees have not been finalized, though he estimates that sales of rights to video sites and overseas distribution together could bring back 10 to 20 million yuan.

So whether it was the best seller at Cannes in recent years is hard to verify. The more serious problem for this film is that, even after all this, it is still not clear many people know about it. In fact, Hero Is Back was originally scheduled for release on February 6 this year, and in mid-January it moved its release date. The marketing was not ready, and the production team also felt the finished film still needed a lot of revision.

Perhaps that unease was there from the start. Tian says the film first drew attention at the Hong Kong film festival in 2013. They were playing the opening sequence of Hero Is Back at the exhibition, and a member of the organizing committee, wandering around the venue, saw it, found it fresh and wrote about it on the official website. It was a small thing, but Tian says that was when he first gained a little confidence, because at that point the film had no investment and he was paying for it himself.

(Zhu Bajie's transformation in the film)

After that, the producer Feng Yi, who has experience in overseas distribution, began contacting foreign film festivals and getting foreign distributors to watch the film. A year ago, production companies also began coming forward to invest.

Tian began preparing Hero Is Back about 8 years ago, and counting from the start of actual production it took 4 years—a fairly long production cycle for a Chinese animated film. At the crucial screenwriting stage, Tian, as chief screenwriter, wrote the story outline himself. He then went through the plot with the production team scene by scene, settling it bit by bit. Every scene in which characters face off was first rehearsed by live actors, film school students at the time, and in those rehearsals they contributed a good many improvised lines.

In the current trailer, for example, there is a scene where the little Tang Seng pesters Wukong with chatter when they first meet. One of his string of questions is “Is Nezha a boy or a girl?” The director never figured that out as a child, and now he has the little Tang Seng put it to Wukong. The questions that follow—does the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King really have a pagoda, and are there people inside it?—came out of the actors riffing off each other on the spot; the director found them funny and kept them.

Many teams in Chinese animation already use live-action rehearsal to give animators a picture of scenes and characters. The step is needed because Chinese animators are too shy. During production, they are too embarrassed to act things out at their desks as they work, the way animators abroad do.

When it comes to actually making an animated film, this weakness can be fatal. Animation differs greatly from live-action filmmaking: in animation, the animator is also the actor, and even does “behind-the-scenes” work such as a lighting technician's. Think how important these roles are in a live-action film, and you can see how much the animators' shyness and awkwardness hurts production. That is why the animation itself was the hardest part of making this film.

The production team behind Hero Is Back comes from October Animation, the studio Tian founded. Before this, he led the team that made two animated Spring Festival Galas for CCTV, and the studio also did outsourced work for Hollywood. Its better-known projects include promotional videos for the games Spider-Man and Chinese Paladin 5, and 4D films for the China Science and Technology Museum and for the Pompeii museum in Italy. There are many more such “small” projects they could point to, but by Tian's own account none is worth mentioning.

October Animation has nearly 100 employees. To make Hero Is Back, the team also had to hire extra people temporarily. At the peak, more than 200 people worked on the film. But, maddeningly, “no more than 4 of them could actually produce something satisfying,” Tian says. His producer often talks to him about managing the team by process, by job type and by workflow, but in actual production, what matters most is grinding away. Solving this problem, Tian says, also requires finding a way of managing that suits how East Asians work.

At this point Tian turned to another subject. Speaking of what suits East Asians, he raised a problem he also considers important: many animators who have done a lot of outsourced work for Hollywood have fallen into fixed habits of thought. When a character has to look startled, for example, the animator's instinct is to make him spring backward like a character in Kung Fu Panda. Tian thinks that is wrong; it is not how Chinese people move. That is another reason live-action rehearsal helps animators so much.

A week ago, Monkey King: Hero Is Back held its first preview screening, for teachers and students from the animation programs of several Beijing universities. They saw the version from before the January date change, and afterward pointed out many problems. The director said he had already been aware of nearly all of them.

It was also in January that Tian first watched Hero Is Back on a big screen. Many problems surfaced, because his team had no big-screen experience, and that version had many glaring flaws. The biggest was that they had deliberately packed in more fight scenes and cut back on dialogue scenes, which made the pace very fast. That works on a small screen, but on a big one it looked far too fast. In the months since the date change, slowing the pace in targeted places has been one of their most important revisions.

This may reveal a misconception in Chinese animation. The filmmakers behind Hero Is Back say that when they talked with veterans of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, the veterans told them animation should be all fight scenes—isn't that what people watch cartoons for? Dialogue scenes are there to ease the mood; only action scenes can move people.

Another problem the director largely regards as the film's one regret: an important interlude uses a song by Wang Feng. When he approached Wang Feng several years ago to buy the rights, the director did not foresee how much baggage Wang Feng's public image would come to carry. At the first screening, the audience burst out laughing at this passage, and it pulled them out of the film. But it is hard to change now. The animation for that sequence was built to match the lyrics, and the rights holder did not give them the audio track, only a CD, telling them to rip it themselves... That makes it even harder to change.

The film has put real effort into the rest of its music. The filmmakers hired Raymond Wong, music director of Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, to write the score. The opening theme, “Order of the Charging General,” and the fight music, “Contending for Supremacy,” give a sense of what the fight scenes feel like.

Beyond the music and pacing, the production team is still working hard on the dialogue and voice acting. After the first screening, a student asked the director what gap in Chinese animation he hoped to fill with a film like this. The director said it could not fill any gap; it was just about confidence—showing that we can make animation to this standard, that Chinese animation technology can get this far.

That said, in some respects Chinese animation, as it stands, still cannot get there. The most immediate problem is that China is very weak at developing animation technology. Off-the-shelf animation software gives you functions you can use, but they will not necessarily do everything you need. You also have to develop plug-ins while you make the film. Take the snow in Frozen: for that kind of “custom” animation, you have to write your own plug-ins. But China does not have the talent to do this. And Hero Is Back is not a big Disney production; it does not have the money for that expense.

For the marketing push after the new release date was set, Hero Is Back chose a strategy resembling an Apple teardown: putting the film's production process online. The rollout began the week after the first screening. Like Apple's marketing, the approach is meant to show that the filmmakers are confident in the film's content and craft. Whether it works will not be known for a while.

Lu of Gaolu Animation says that if the film takes 110 to 120 million yuan at the box office, it will recoup its production costs. But when we asked Tian, he said: “On the box office forecast, everyone says it has to pass 100 million at least, and some say even more outlandish things. I really am not that optimistic; reality will knock a lot off.”

In the early-February slot, Hero Is Back would have competed with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Running Man, Boonie Bears: Mystical Winter, A Place Only We Know, and a batch of Spring Festival films led by From Vegas to Macau II—some Hollywood blockbusters, some domestic hits. In the early-July summer slot, there is no Hollywood blockbuster, but domestic hits are crowded together: Hollywood Adventures, Monk Comes Down the Mountain, I Am Somebody, Tiny Times 3, Girl Nezha, Gardenia Blossoms, Monster Hunt, Jian Bing Man... The competition is just as fierce.

The classic case of a Chinese animated film's box office plight is Kuiba. It was well reviewed but earned little. The first three films grossed 4.98 million yuan (2011), 25.29 million yuan (2013) and 24.29 million yuan (2014). By the analysis of Lu of Gaolu Animation, the production company, competition only hurts badly when you run into a Hollywood blockbuster. True, Kuiba 3 went up against Guardians of the Galaxy over the National Day holiday in 2014, but the film that soaked up the most box office then was the domestic Breakup Buddies.

“It would be best if everyone liked it—it gives you a sense of achievement.” Perhaps Tian can afford not to care about the box office. He studied software design, but he had loved drawing since childhood. How could a respectable child make drawing his profession? That is probably what many people in China think. But he ended up making animation anyway. “I started making animation for an ideal. If you ask what I'm thinking now, maybe my ambition has grown.”

Next, Tian is preparing a more adult-oriented suspense animated film. As for the plan to make Hero Is Back into five films, that is what is being said, but Tian says it is uncertain whether it will happen. Still, he has already written the script outline for the second film.

In the second film, the little Tang Seng will enter adolescence, turn rebellious and doubt Wukong's “authority.” Wukong, for his part, will go from a man with no faith to one willing to make the little Tang Seng his faith. The groundwork for all this is laid in the first film. Tian feels that people today no longer believe in Journey to the West, so he has to spend a lot of the film explaining why Tang Seng is willing to go for the scriptures and why Sun Wukong is willing to follow him.

Finally, why tell a Journey to the West story at all? Tian says it was not to ride a Journey to the West craze; when he started, there was no such craze. He chose it simply because inventing a new story and getting people to know and love it is much harder. Taking Journey to the West as his subject is like standing on the shoulders of giants—it saves trouble.

(Images courtesy of October Animation)