Forget China's Animation Industry — the Fight Over *Big Fish & Begonia* Has Nothing to Do With It

The visuals are gorgeous, the music moving. Neither can hide how thin the story and its characters are. And yet the film was a hit. How?

On July 8, the animated feature Big Fish & Begonia opened across China. A Zhihu user with the handle "Niaochuanjie" went to a midnight screening. He had planned to film the closing credits as a keepsake: by his own account he once worked at Bi'antian, the studio that made the film, and a dozen-odd seconds of it were drawn by him.

In the end he didn't.

He wrote on Zhihu: "Such a shame — all that good material, pulled together through so much struggle, poured into a terrible script."

Go by box office alone and Big Fish & Begonia did very well. According to Maoyan's tracker, it took 73.62 million yuan on opening day, a record for a Chinese animated film, and filled a higher share of seats than any other film in its release window. Its first week came to 230 million yuan, second only to Kung Fu Panda 3 and the second-best opening week of any animated film released on the mainland.

Its reputation is another matter. The film currently sits at 6.6 on Douban, and it has provoked not just argument but real resentment. On Douban's discussion page, a question titled "Why are you all being so hard on Big Fish & Begonia" drew more than 60 answers. Together they cover the main lines of criticism running across Chinese social media: that the film traded on sentimental attachment to Chinese animation, that the protagonists and the worldview behind the plot are a letdown, and that the "12 years of hard work" story is itself open to question.

Answering those criticisms, director Liang Xuan said: "Some people think this is the story of a scheming girl playing the innocent, others think it's the legend of the eternal backup boyfriend, still others call it a trashy love triangle. Zhang Chun and I don't see it that way. We think it's a story about protecting someone. We never set out to make a love story."

Being asked to explain what kind of story this is may not be what Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun had braced themselves for. Before the film opened, QDaily interviewed the two lead creators, and they showed almost no hesitation about the script itself. It was production they were careful about. "On the technical side, after all, we didn't have the money or the time to make things more refined," Liang Xuan said.

Praise or attack, though, almost nobody has questioned the music or the images. Liang Xuan, Zhang Chun and Enlight, the studio's investor, had all probably thought about how to answer the question "what does a Chinese animated film that took 12 years look like" — before release, that was the heart of the discussion: how long it had taken and how crooked the road had been. The result was not what they expected. Beautiful images and music have not made up for a thin story.

As Niaochuanjie wrote in another line of that Zhihu post: "A film that embarrasses the people who were waiting for it. An exquisite, gorgeous bad movie."

The Twelve Years of Big Fish & Begonia

2004

Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun make the Flash animation Big Sea (《大·海》) and drop out of Tsinghua University

2005

Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun found Bi'antian

2007

They raise $250,000 from Ceyuan Ventures

2008

They make a Big Fish & Begonia short

2009

The pilot reel is finished and entered in a competition

2010

Clips from the pilot leak online — the first time many people hear of Big Fish & Begonia

2011

The deal with Shanghai Media Group collapses; Bi'antian pivots to online games and fails

2012

Zhang Chun leaves Bi'antian for a while, then comes back

Mid-2013

A crowdfunding campaign, and investment from Enlight

Late 2013

Japanese composer Kiyoshi Yoshida starts work on the score

Mid-2014

South Korea's Studio Mir joins and mid-stage production begins

Late 2014

A Weibo post promising "a ten-year promise" is called a misunderstanding, and fans are furious

Late 2015

Coloring is finished and the film enters post-production

2016

July 8: the film opens

What people attack most about Big Fish & Begonia is the "12 years." The number spread even to viewers who had never followed the film at all, and it quietly inflated what everyone expected of it.

The "12 years" is counted from the day Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun released a Flash animation called Big Sea. In 2004, both still students at Tsinghua University, they entered an email-advertising competition run by 263. The animation was widely praised, and the next year they dropped out and founded Bi'antian Culture. For their first three years out of school, Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun "kept themselves alive" on commercial animated ads. They ran a cute-style brand called BOBO & TOTO, but they didn't want to put their main energy into it.

In 2008, Bi'antian took investment from Ceyuan Ventures and began work on a Big Fish & Begonia pilot reel. That was also when Bi'antian announced it would turn Big Fish & Begonia into a full-length film.

But a short and a real feature are two different things. From what they had learned so far, Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun reckoned a 90-minute feature would cost $5 million, or 30 million yuan. In 2010, Shanghai Media Group and Youyang Media, the company behind Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, were both interested. The talks went badly, because Shanghai Media Group wanted the two of them to think about younger tastes. By then the Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf series had been running on local television for more than four years, and starting in 2009 its two features, 《牛气冲天》 and 《虎虎生威》, had taken 90 million and 130 million yuan at the box office. After a year of negotiation, Shanghai Media Group restructured and the matter simply died.

At that time nearly every animation team with "grown-up" ambitions faced the same problem: money. Tian Xiaopeng, director of Monkey King: Hero Is Back, has said that of the eight years he spent preparing that film, half went to looking for investors, failing again and again. Gao Song, executive director of Dragon Nest: Warriors' Dawn (2014, 57.4 million yuan), put it this way: "Early on, animators almost all kept their dreams alive by taking jobs, making commercial shorts. Plenty of animators back then drew no salary; what they earned went straight back into the film."

Big Fish & Begonia may have had an easier time solving this than most, because ordinary viewers were already watching. In August 2013, Liang Xuan launched a crowdfunding campaign for the project on Demohour and raised 1.58 million yuan, a record at the time. Investors noticed, and several approached Bi'antian.

Bi'antian chose Enlight, after first ending its contract with Ceyuan Ventures.

In an interview with QDaily, Yi Qiao, the film's chief producer, said the investment in Bi'antian showed how determined Enlight was at the time to get into animated film. The company had decided against cheap animation, but it also would not touch 3D projects whose budgets it couldn't estimate. That made Big Fish & Begonia, already a little known in the market, close to an ideal target.

Enlight wanted a new source of profit beyond live action. In April 2013, The Croods took nearly 400 million yuan in China. Earlier still, in 2011, Kung Fu Panda 2 had passed 600 million. Animation looked worth a try.

The deal was worth 30 million yuan, production started in the second half of 2013, and all the money came from Enlight. So despite the "12 years" slogan, Big Fish & Begonia was in production for three years — which, measured against how long an animated feature normally takes, is not "long" at all. In Europe, the United States and Japan, an animated feature takes three to five years on average.

Count in the extra preparation time Big Fish & Begonia burned because its team was green, and the production period looks shorter still. In its workflow the film followed the standard division of labor in the animation business: early creative work in-house, mid-stage production outsourced, music outsourced.

One of Big Fish & Begonia's mistakes was to make so much of that time when it sold itself.

In nearly every interview Liang Xuan says the story came from a dream of his. And the marketing for Big Fish & Begonia is almost never without the words "dream" and "passion." "Dream" carries several meanings here. First, this is a work Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun spent a long time on — twelve years, per the marketing line — so "dream" signals something polished by craftsmen. Second, by Liang Xuan's own earlier account, Chinese animation had gone thirty years without a good work, so Big Fish & Begonia was carrying the dream of Chinese animation as a whole. That twelve-year dream is printed on the official poster too: "Keeping our twelve-year promise to you."

In fact time was once the thing Bi'antian could least be sure of.

"We got the first money in 2007, 2008, and we made 20 minutes. So we worked it out: seventy or eighty minutes left, about 80 minutes. We roughly estimated that much work would take two years. But there were a lot of things we couldn't control. Would our release window be a strong one? The date wasn't set then. And would post-production need more work than we thought?" Zhang Chun told QDaily.

Enlight's job was to help manage the schedule. "What I think we had to keep hold of was the early stage, because for an animated film the early stage matters most — script, art, character design, storyboards. That's the soul of the film. For the mid-stage, as long as you find a decent team and keep revising with them, you can get it done. So the understanding we reached was that we'd keep the early stage entirely in our own hands and send the mid-stage out," Yi Qiao said.

By Liang Xuan's account, the first draft of the script was finished in 2009 and revised many times after that, "because revising a script never ends — it can always be better." Yi Qiao's account to QDaily doesn't match the director's.

Yi Qiao said that when Enlight invested in 2013, Big Fish & Begonia had no script; the company simply "felt they had taste and could pull this off."

Early work, the script included, set the pace for everything. Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun stressed to QDaily that the early and mid stages "overlapped," but the mid-stage formally began at the end of 2013, which is also when Japanese composer Kiyoshi Yoshida (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) was confirmed for the score. Through all of it the script kept getting detail revisions, and it wasn't finished until mid-2014. Unverified rumors outside the studio say production was once delayed by a messy workflow and redone work. Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun denied that thin early preparation ever forced them to scrap the film and start over, since "the budget and the manpower wouldn't have allowed that."

Once they decided to make a feature, though, Bi'antian's 20 people really were badly short-handed, so they started hiring as soon as Enlight's investment was settled. From late 2013 to early 2014 Bi'antian recruited continuously, for every position. "In the end we never found the people we wanted — for the script, I mean. And we were always very short of mid-stage talent. China has a missing generation in mid-stage production, in key animation specifically. Abroad, in Japan, a key animator needs at least ten years before he sits in that chair." Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun both came back again and again to the shortage of people.

Hunting for the best value among outsourced mid-stage teams, Bi'antian spent a long time looking through mainland China, Japan and South Korea before settling on South Korea's Studio Mir, which finished at the end of 2015. That studio had animated Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender and had also made animated series with DreamWorks.

It was in 2015 that Big Fish & Begonia did the one thing everyone waiting for it could not forgive.

At the end of 2014 a poster appeared on Weibo with the line: "2015.11.11. A ten-year promise." That was exactly when Studio Mir was in the middle of production, so there was no chance of a release.

In the interview, Yi Qiao insisted this was a misunderstanding: "It was only that we knew we had to do something on November 11. What the directors had in mind was at least to put something out then — maybe set the release date, release some material. That's the promise we made."

Liang Xuan's verdict: "We were careless. If we'd been more careful we shouldn't have handled it that way. We should have told people another way."

Fans clearly felt Bi'antian had played them. For a while after November 2015, social media filled with posts questioning the team's honesty and its work rate, the most famous a Zhihu thread titled "What do you make of Big Fish & Begonia missing its release date?"

On April 18, 2016, Enlight held a press conference to announce that Big Fish & Begonia would open on July 8 — the first release date the team had ever officially given. That promise, at least, they kept.

Look at it purely as a production problem and what Bi'antian ran into is everything an unseasoned animation team can run into: managing an outsourced production team, attracting talent, controlling workflow, controlling what gets said about the project.

Judging by the finished film, nearly all of it got solved. Audiences marvel at the beauty of the images and the pull of the music, and even some of the voice work stands up. But there is one enormous flaw: the passion the film advertises doesn't match the story it tells.

Liang Xuan says over and over that Big Fish & Begonia came out of a dream of his own. Even the studio logo at the front carries the line: welcome to our dream.

If so, this dream has let a lot of people down.

An animation screenwriter who asked not to be named told QDaily the story has plenty of problems: the characters' personalities are incoherent, their motives are far-fetched, the narrative structure is loose, the story fails to make you feel with anyone. In this screenwriter's guess, that is most likely because the production ran so long, with so many variables, that the story ended up scattered and in places even dated.

"Dated" may be fair. Plenty of people today are no longer moved by this kind of headlong devotion. It just makes them wince.

Liang Xuan avoids calling the film "a love story," but he can't avoid the questions about how the female lead is written. On screen she comes across as willful and "unable to see past herself." In the top-rated review on Douban, a user with the handle "Self-Aware Pariah" needled the film as "the greatest love I have ever seen," and listed at least five reasons he couldn't go along with, among them: "To love someone is to be willing to make an enemy of the whole world for them — and if the whole village dies for that love, so be it." That post has 6,552 "helpful" votes, 1,948 "not helpful" votes and 1,380 replies.

Liang Xuan does not appear to think there is anything wrong with his script. "This story can be read deep or read shallow," he said. "It depends on your age and what you've lived through — you'll read it differently."

Liang Xuan wrote the first draft of Big Fish & Begonia. By his and Zhang Chun's account, Enlight gave the production team enormous freedom. Yi Qiao said the same: Enlight's role, including that of company boss Wang Changtian, went no further than taking part in script discussions, repeatedly. They trusted the judgment they made when they first invested: "We felt these things were strange and very Chinese, things our live-action films could never do."

Enlight invested in the whole Bi'antian studio, not in Big Fish & Begonia alone. Worth noting: after Monkey King: Hero Is Back made its name, Enlight quickly invested in the company founded by its director, Tian Xiaopeng, taking 20% for 20 million yuan. In October 2015, Enlight Media announced an animation group called Coloroom Pictures. The company obviously cares whether Big Fish & Begonia succeeds — but it does not care only about this one animated film.

"I don't think Monkey King: Hero Is Back's success was the market's success. It was Tian Xiaopeng's success, it was Monkey King's success. For everyone else, what do I think it did? It raised the danger. First, everyone's taste has gone up, and so has the standard… Second, it easily creates an illusion: not every film can make 900 million… As for whether Big Fish can take the baton from Monkey King today — if it can't, Monkey King may turn out to be a one-off, and audiences may end up feeling that Chinese films still aren't good enough… For the industry as a whole I think that would be a fatal blow: audiences stop caring about you, stop expecting anything of you. The most important thing, I think, is that over the next two or three years we need films this good, one after another, year after year, at least one — and I know even one isn't easy." Yi Qiao told QDaily.

That is a fair way to put it. But Big Fish & Begonia does settle two things. One is that "Chinese films still aren't good enough" may have very little to do with whether the animated-film business has matured. The argument this film started has nothing to do with the industry at all. It is about how the people telling the story see the world, and see human nature.

The other almost distills the awkward spot Chinese cinema is in: a film this contested in reputation and in its own story, yet near the top of the box office. Did it take the baton or not?