Chinese Wuxia Animation *The Young Embroidered Guard* Is a Hit — How Did It Get Those Visuals?

Good-looking faces and a wuxia style: the animation team says it wanted to make a show that was clean, good-looking and pretty.

This 3D wuxia animation, The Young Embroidered Guard (《少年锦衣卫》), may be the hottest Chinese animated series of the moment.

Twenty-one days after it went up on the video sites, its view count had passed 100 million, and more than 3,000 Douban users had rated it 8.6. By April 6 the count had passed 200 million.

The Young Embroidered Guard, built around a young man's adventures, is an alternate-history wuxia series set in the Ming dynasty, produced jointly by Baiyan Yinghua, Youku and Kaisa Culture. Its central character, Yuan Xiaotang, is the only son of Yuan Xiaozhi, commander of the Embroidered Guard's Northern Command. Soon after joining the Guard himself, he disobeys an order and is locked up to reflect on it. By chance he befriends a mysterious prisoner in the cell and learns a strange set of martial arts. When Yuan Xiaozhi finds out and moves to punish his son harshly, he is interrupted by the "Three Thieves," who have broken into the palace to steal a treasure — and each of the three carries a mysterious past.

The Young Embroidered Guard has drawn a lot of attention lately, and you can trace a path much like the ones taken by two other popular 3D animations, Qin's Moon and Ill-Fated Men (《画江湖之不良人》): a wuxia style tinged with fantasy, good-looking 3D models, sharply drawn characters, voice acting that fits the roles…

And most important of all: instead of aiming at small children, it fits the tastes of young viewers, women above all, and is likelier to set fans making things of their own — on Bilibili especially, where a fair number of fan videos based on the show have already appeared.

On the evidence of the nine episodes released so far, the plot has not gone very far, but the show has become a talking point among Chinese animation fans on the strength of its images and its fine 3D modeling. Details like the delicate texture of the characters' skin and the weight of their clothes have led some viewers to say the money spent on it "was money well burned."

This looks like a "foreseeable" outcome. Sun Tian, a producer at Youku's animation center and head writer of The Young Embroidered Guard, told QDaily that they pitched the show high from the start. That confidence came mainly from the team behind it.

Around 120 people make up the animation's core creative staff, most of them out of the Beijing Film Academy and the Communication University of China — a distinctly academic pedigree. Beijing Wulifang, the studio that handled the animation itself, was founded in 2012 and has made CG for many games, including Dao Jian and Dungeon Fighter Online; its founders, Jiang Wei and Hu Yangzi, both graduated from the Beijing Film Academy and led one of the first teams in China to do high-quality CG animation. Baiyan Yinghua, founded in 2014, was set up for this project alone; its founder, Chen Baiyan, also came out of the Beijing Film Academy and is better known as an illustrator and designer — the art book for Empresses in the Palace (《甄嬛传画册》) is his best-known work.

The animation's art director, Zhao Yuqing, supervises graduate students at the Communication University of China. The dubbing director is Jiang Guangtao, a big name in Chinese voice acting. Zheng Chunming, who handles scene concept design, has worked with Tsui Hark and John Woo several times. They all graduated from the Beijing Film Academy.

In fact, The Young Embroidered Guard began life as a spin-off animation of the film Brotherhood of Blades (《绣春刀》).

In January 2016 Youku announced its "Create Plan," pledging to spend 500 million yuan a year on homegrown animation. In the early planning, Sun Tian says, Youku wanted an animation that could break through the wall between anime fandom and a mainstream audience, and picked wuxia, a genre Chinese viewers take to easily. The proposal the team was first handed was an animated version of Brotherhood of Blades — Chen Baiyan, the animation's general director and one of its investors, had earlier acquired the rights to adapt the film into animation.

But the animated Brotherhood of Blades never came to be. Beyond the question of how long development would take, the animation would not have been built on an IP of their own, so there was no way to keep developing it over the long run — a practical problem the producers had to face. So The Young Embroidered Guard, drawn from the story of the Embroidered Guard, became the Create Plan's original animation project.

"It's not one person's work, and one person's style can't carry the whole thing. We've always believed that anything led by a single person can't be professional — you have to find the most professional person for each stage." Head writer Sun Tian also came out of the Beijing Film Academy. Besides the script, she worked on the animation's early planning and supervised production in the middle stage.

She had more than a decade in animation planning and screenwriting behind her, but most of those projects were "assigned essays," work done to someone else's brief. This time, she says, she finally did something different: "I've made a lot of shows, but the chance to make what I actually want to make comes rarely. The biggest difference with this project is that I finally did something I wanted to do, something I genuinely thought, 'ah, this is interesting.'"

Q = QDaily

S = Sun Tian, producer at Youku's animation center and head writer of The Young Embroidered Guard

Q: The show is called The Young Embroidered Guard, but as it stands it looks less like the story of how Yuan Xiaotang, the young guard, grows up, and more like an ensemble piece.

S: Right, from the start we wanted to define it as an ensemble piece. That probably has to do with the kind of scripts, stories and novels I like to read — I like building a lot of figures inside one world. I love broadly; I like a great many of the characters, I want to write all of them, I'm fond of all of them, so it gradually shifted into an ensemble piece. I'm not saying Yuan Xiaotang isn't the lead, or that a young man's coming of age isn't a storyline. I wanted to show a bigger world, and my private hope is that the show can expand later, so every character can have a story of their own.

Q: If you're telling a story about the Ming dynasty's Embroidered Guard, why set it in an alternate history?

S: The "Embroidered Guard" is an old IP — there's already a fair amount of film and TV about it. Once we'd fixed the subject as a wuxia ensemble about a young man growing up, I wanted room for wilder ideas and more space to work in, so I chose an alternate history and folded in a small amount of fantasy. That makes the characters richer and the plot better.

Fantasy elements aside, every large piece of background in The Young Embroidered Guard was checked against the historical record, weaving in Ming events and figures, researched and then rebuilt. It's because of that research that plot-hunting viewers now use the history the show reflects, the titles that appear in it and other details to guess at what's coming — and their deductions are often very sound.

Q: How do you control the balance between "wuxia" and "fantasy"?

S: If you turn the fantasy up without limit, the show loses much of its baseline balance. I want the fantasy in it to be scarce. This kind of setting, a "low-magic world," comes from a Western approach: in a novel like A Song of Ice and Fire the fantasy is released a little at a time. It starts as an ordinary human society and fantastical things are added in slowly, so the audience feels itself inside the story, rather than opening on a sky full of flying immortals.

Q: The art and modeling are very fine, and that's part of what pulled viewers in. How was the modeling done?

S: Modeling is Wulifang's strong suit — they're strong on materials and models. The models in this show lean realistic, so there's a basic model underneath everything. Body and face are built separately, and facial modeling is painstaking work; it's common to revise one face more than thirty times. We also spend a long time testing the style at the outset. A single high-precision model generally takes one to two months of adjustment, and only after repeated tweaking does it come close to what people see now. It's a long process.

While modeling, we also look at real people — Chinese and foreign film and TV stars, and some game models — to set an initial direction. Say the script calls for a certain kind of character; I'll gather a large amount of reference material on the traits he should have, and they rework the model against those traits before it goes into the modeling stage proper. Every costume also goes through several rounds of research and selection, and at the end there are plenty of other questions: can this fabric be simulated, are there too many layers, does a two-dimensional design have to be pared back before it can become a model. That's another process of weighing things over and over, and these high-precision models are probably the company's biggest asset.

Their weaker side is character movement — you can see it in the show as it stands, and we're working to make up for it. Because the show has to keep to a certain production speed, it has to use motion capture, and that technology throws up a lot of unsatisfying results: stiff movement, simulated motion that isn't smooth enough, a slightly wooden feel. We'll strengthen that later. Modeling has always been the strength, so we'll keep it up.

Q: How long did it take to finish the character models we're seeing now?

S: Pre-production took a year, but not all of it went into modeling; the production line is laid down alongside the story. Say episode one needs a few characters — we make those first, with several groups working at once. Three or four modeling groups might work on a single character at the same time, and a month might produce three or four main character designs. The first model we polished obviously took the longest; the further in we got, the more the style was settled and the faster it went. Modeling pre-production took at least six months to prepare.

Q: Voice actors viewers know well, like Baomu Zhongyang and Zhang Jie, are both in the cast. How were they chosen?

S: We have Jiang Sir (Jiang Guangtao) with us. His habit is to pin down a character's nature as he reads the script or watches the show, and immediately hear a suitable voice in his head — that's how he works. On my side, when I write a character I also have a sense of what the voice should be, and I give him a list of actors for reference. But the list isn't final; there are always several rounds of auditions, and that step can't be skipped.

After one or two rounds, a role is more or less set. We have some veteran actors mentor newcomers, because Jiang Sir has always believed this show can produce new talent, so he wanted us to try more newcomers — Yuan Xiaotang and Fang Yuting, the lead pair, are both voiced by newcomers. Students from his studio, Guanghe Jimu, also get to try for some of the small ABC-tier parts, which gives them practice. Sometimes I see how hard he works tuning these actors: a few minor roles, palace maids say, might take eight hours in his booth and seven or eight different people.

Baomu was our own pick for his role — the moment that character came to mind it had to be an uncle's voice, it had to be him. We settle a few roles like that ourselves; the rest are mostly recommended by Jiang Sir.

Q: Plenty of fans complain that each episode is too short, that it ends before much has happened. Does that affect how the story develops and how the plot connects?

S: When the project was greenlit, it was approved at a core runtime of 10 minutes an episode. The extra length you see is because it's the first episode: it needed enough plot, so I asked the director to let the first one run longer, which is how it ended up at its current length. Our actual runtime capacity is 10 minutes. It won't run shorter than that, and it won't run much longer either.

In 10 minutes of drama I can write two or three main scenes, one main event, one secondary event and one supporting character to carry a thread, and then I have to hit the brakes fast. In that short a span you need the main plot to move and turn, you need enough screen time for the leads, you need suspense, you need things for people to gripe about, you need laughs, you need one distinctive signature scene. For a screenwriter that's a real challenge. I'd like to write it more satisfyingly and the director would like to draw things in more detail, but first our production team has to keep up.

We were already adjusting this when season two was greenlit: episodes go up to 15 minutes, a third more than before, so season two will try to fill the story out. The shortness can't be avoided for now — all sorts of practical factors really do hold it down.

Q: A number of the characters have very distinct personalities, and the "Three Thieves" who open the story stand out. What do you watch for when you shape these characters?

S: With the show's runtime so limited, every character has to show his personality the moment he appears; that's the most basic demand I make of the script. How each one enters, every line, every action — we go over all of it with the directors again and again and settle on it out of many options. The Three Thieves, the spark that sets the story off, are characters I worked out as a novel long ago. A monk, a Daoist and a Confucian scholar as the three thieves; explosives, disguise and lightness skill — the wuxia art of near-weightless leaping — as their three different specialties; and borrowing the old trope of "three thieves and the nine-dragon cup": all of that carries some meaning.

Q: But Yuan Xiaotang still looks like a fairly traditional coming-of-age wuxia hero. Will he break out of that mold later?

S: This kind of lead is hard to write. I've seen comments saying a coming-of-age lead can't escape formula and is very, very hard to do well, and I think so too — he'll never satisfy everyone. Since we designed this environment for Yuan Xiaotang to grow up in, where he goes from here has to be plausible first of all: the reactions, the feedback, the growth this character ought to have. But we also want him to carry a lot of positive energy and become a lead people don't resent, because plenty of leads do get resented.

Writing Yuan Xiaotang's personality took in influence and advice from all sides. America is making some alternative American heroes now; Japan has its own formulas and subverts them too. For a lead built on a Chinese formula, what's at stake may be chivalry, and how we dig into it. It's a set brief in a way, and not something one person can solve. But I hope he turns out a solid, real lead who can carry a story people find both plausible and fresh.

A spoiler, if you like: we hoped the show would be better received by women. Even though it's aimed at young people, we hoped women might make up half the audience. The director asked me what kind of lead women would approve of, and after thinking about it I said: a man who grows for the sake of a woman. So that's probably one of my directions.

Q: Was the fish-bone jailbreak gag added on purpose after the bullet comments — the viewer messages that scroll across the screen — gave you the idea?

S: That's hardly possible. Our production cycle is a year; I can't see bullet comments and then rewrite something into that in a few days. It was a seed planted very early on. The audience guessed the plot, and all you can say is that they're sharp — they found a trap we'd buried, that's all. It isn't that they said it and we changed it to match. There's no chance of that.

Q: The show is planned for four seasons, 52 episodes. Is the scriptwriting all finished?

S: The whole script is still being revised and worked over constantly — there have been at least ten drafts or so. From the first outline to now, the original script has been changed past recognition to grind out what you see, and it has genuinely taken a great deal of time.

Two seasons' worth of scripts are finished. Where it goes afterwards will be adjusted according to the response to the first seasons — that way of working is a lot like American television, where the writers see how season one lands, what people are hoping for, or what direction would make it more popular, and there's an exchange before seasons three and four are planned. But season two's content is basically fixed.

Q: The story is laid out to run a long way. What do you most want it to say?

S: There's quite a lot I want to say. The director has talked about bringing in some modern values — the relationship between father and son, for instance, or how a young person grows up inside a system. What I want to describe is more a state of being, and that state is the hardest thing to write.

What I set out to do was describe the various states I long for. Summed up, it might be a spirit of chivalry embodied in the work, something that lets people feel for a character the moment they see him. Mention Little Princess Duan Yun and people may picture the scene of them setting lotus lanterns afloat; I hope my own life can hold moments like that. I want to carry a lot of beautiful hopes into it.

I hope everyone can find something to hold onto in it emotionally, because wuxia itself is a fairy tale for adults. There's scheming, but that isn't the point; the point is probably still how the protagonists grow, and how the characters chase their own ideals inside this world.

I wanted to make a show that was clean, good-looking and pretty, not one full of fighting and killing and blood. Maybe because I'm a woman, I resist anything blatantly macho. I didn't want too many of the tropes everyone is sick of. I'd rather it stayed a little more innocent.

Cover image from: the animation The Young Embroidered Guard