Animator Pi San: "When We Fight Something, We Usually End Up as Ugly as the Thing We're Fighting" | Interviews ③

Independent animator Pi San, and his 18 years of making animation.

A 1,500-story building of the future is going up. Debris falls from the site all day long, and the residents below, with no way to stop it, can only put up umbrellas.

In a courtyard at the foot of the tower, an old woman sweeps her yard with care, tending especially to the Buddha statue that sits there. But the city keeps climbing, the rubbish piling up in her small courtyard becomes impossible to keep clean, and she is forced to move. Just as she decides to leave and take the statue with her, a falling shard snaps off one of the Buddha's fingers — and the building that rose into the clouds comes down.

The story comes from City of One Finger (《一指城》), a 2015 graduation film by animation students at the Communication University of China. In 2016, the roughly nine-minute film won its three directors, Cao Runze among them, the Satoshi Kon Award at the fifth China Independent Animation Film Forum. That October, Kyoko Kon — widow of the Japanese animation master Satoshi Kon — and two of his collaborators came to Beijing to hand out the prize.

Introducing City of One Finger, the forum's chief curator, Pi San, boiled the award down to this: "Technically it has a style all its own, and in spirit it holds to realism."

Work like City of One Finger has not been rare at the China Independent Animation Film Forum these past couple of years. Pi San has noticed that the forum he founded with the artist Dong Bingfeng keeps turning up more and more good animation — work that is "more varied in subject matter than the official productions, and far better than the commercial stuff."

The forum was founded in 2011, in independent animation's leanest days. After 2009, China's Flash animation boom receded, but it left behind the country's first generation of independent animators — people who were screenwriter, director, animator and editor all at once. Because everyone still sized animation up by the standards of the old big-studio system, work finished by one person alone led a kind of semi-underground existence.

Pi San decided these semi-underground animators needed a room of their own. "I wanted a forum animators could actually talk in — one with an academic side and an ecosystem side. It should care about how animators stay alive, how they look after and support each other, and use academic exchange to draw people in." As for what counts as "independent animation," Pi San simply set a broad theme: "independent thought, playful expression."

That is how "the first non-official, non-profit animated film art project on the Chinese mainland, jointly initiated and organized by civil-society institutions" took shape. Across the six forums held so far, the organizers have tried to gather China's independent animators in one place, using competitions, screenings, lectures and workshops to coax good work into the open.

Before 2004, Pi San went by another name: "new media artist Wang Bo." After graduating from the oil painting department at Shanxi University, he quickly became a modestly known artist.

But he liked new-media interactive installations better than art museums. In one early piece, "The Man in the Case," viewers could use a DVD to steer the protagonist and trigger different storylines.

That is close to the way he later thought about telling stories in animation. To get his work seen and argued about by more people, in 1999 Pi San started turning his interactive pieces into linear forms, then into video installations — and when Flash took off that same year, he tried animation.

Flash brought Pi San at least three things. A work: Happy Station (《快乐驿站》), a variety program on CCTV-3 made by his company, Huxiang Animation. A fight: veteran animators from the old art-film studios accused Flash-based work of being crude and fragmented. And finally the thing that actually made his name — the Clang Clang Clang (《哐哐哐》) series.

Happy Station was an animated version of Quyuan Zatan (《曲苑杂坛》), staging traditional crosstalk and comic sketches in Flash. Its audience share once hit 12.4 percent, but it sold cheaply, and censorship had to be handled at every turn.

"CCTV vetted programs very strictly back then. We drew Song Jiang in a yellow robe once, and the guy reviewing the film told us Song Jiang couldn't wear yellow. It made no sense to me. That was when I felt the television system just didn't work."

The Clang Clang Clang series came out of that feeling.

It launched in 2008. Built on the adolescent memories of people born in the 1970s and 80s — the age range of the internet's main users at the time — episodes like "Old Man Ding," "Blowing Up the School" and "The 38th Parallel" spread fast online.

By today's standards it is hard to call Clang Clang Clang polished. The series ran 20 episodes. Its hero was an elementary-school boy named Kuangkuang, a white paper cutout with a bloody nose, set against a background of corrugated cardboard.

For a piece of childhood memory, Kuangkuang was rough from the first episode, "Blowing Up the School." In class, Kuangkuang angers the teacher and is thrown out of an upper-floor window, blood smearing his paper head; a gray machine of gears presses every listless student into the same shape, and Kuangkuang, who does not fit, is bullied by classmates outside school. Blunt metaphors like these run all through the series, and Pi San explains them this way: a child fighting the adult world, an individual fighting the system.

"How do you show that fight? You still need violence… An individual is too small next to something like a system, but he simply won't give in. The nail goes up against it and draws blood — that looks great."

It sounds like something Pi San would make. Born in 1971 in a mining district in southern Shanxi, he was a frail, bookish child who liked to draw at home, an arts-minded young person of the kind that era produced. As an adult he went to Taiyuan to sit the college entrance exam, and became a classmate of Jia Zhangke.

Pi San is not tall and tends to wear low-saturation earth-tone and olive-green T-shirts. He calls himself "the kind of kid a teacher never notices in class," and says he is far more introverted than Kuangkuang: 26th out of the 50 students in his class.

His parents had come to Shanxi years earlier to work on the Third Front industrial buildout. As an adult he went back to Shanghai with his father and found he had lost his hometown. He understands Shanghainese but keeps slipping into his Shanxi accent in interviews. "My mother is from Sichuan, my father is from Shanghai, and I was born in Shanxi. It twists you up. In the city you're a country person, in the countryside you're a city person. It's strange."

Pi San began to be instinctively wary of "the majority" — though not through the literal violence Kuangkuang resorts to.

"Chinese people instinctively love to follow the crowd. Once I started drawing, I paid close attention to this collective excitement and collective anger. The crowd gives you too little time to react, and you can't help going along with it. But when you're making something, you have time to think."

Clang Clang Clang became a way to say things. Over the 2011 Lunar New Year, Pi San and a few colleagues privately made a special episode, Clang Clang Clang: Year of the Rabbit Greeting Card. Because it concentrated a year's worth of his "anger" at public scandals — the melamine milk case, the "My Dad Is Li Gang" incident — the piece was banned almost at once. Then in April 2011, after the authorities detained the artist Ai Weiwei, Pi San, worked up again, spent a night making the 54-second Clang Clang Clang: Cracking Sunflower Seeds. It was, of course, deleted.

Around 2012, a number of foreign outlets read all this as a protest against the authorities by Pi San's team, and tried to reach him to get him to say more. But Pi San said: "I made Greeting Card and Cracking Sunflower Seeds to express my own feelings. I can't accept commissions — not a revolutionary commission, and not a counter-revolutionary one either. I don't want to be used by them; there's no point in that… you understand? Keeping your inner freedom is what matters."

Strangely enough, even on advertising jobs Pi San cared about the same feeling of not fitting in. In 2010, Huxiang Animation launched the series Miss Puff. Miss Puff, too, is out of step with everything around her. Pi San slowly realized that this girl, who has the power to "give ordinary things inspiration," has something in common with Kuangkuang. "This is an age that worships objects, and I made a girl who isn't a slave to objects. … Her resistance isn't Kuangkuang's, but at heart she's still someone who doesn't fit."

In 2017, the Clang Clang Clang feature film, once killed by censorship, was revived. Pi San posted on Weibo that this feature, Roar Ha Hey (《吼哈嘿》), was "a film that can get into theaters." He described it with two words: "inspirational" and "wuxia." The way it got past the censors was that he deliberately pulled back the series' theme of the individual fighting the system.

What Pi San values most now is a sense of humor. He picked the idea up one year from someone at an art forum in France. After the terrorist attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, the magazine put out a statement saying humor is a weapon against tyranny. That suddenly made clear to him what the "playful expression" he and the forum had been chasing all along actually was.

"Chinese people lack a sense of humor. We go out to fight something, and we usually end up as ugly as the thing we're fighting. We lack a relaxed side, we lack the ability to make fun of ourselves and of authority. Of course, humor takes imagination — and animation happens to give us that room for humor."

Q: QDaily

A: Pi San

"I'm very wary of becoming part of the majority"

Q: Everyone making Flash animation back then had a different style, but yours leaned toward reflecting reality. Why?

A: I like realistic subject matter. I've thought about this before — why do I make things so real? Once I was walking my son to school. He was in first grade and completely obsessed with architectural sand-table models. We were standing at a red light and he pointed at a building in the distance and said, "Dad, sand table." I felt dazed for a second. I thought, that's actually philosophical — think about it, reality is a sand table. What he said sounded exactly like the philosophical theory behind animation: what is truth, what is really real.

Our company is called Huxiang, "mutual image," because reality and animation are like two parallel worlds that resemble each other. Some animation builds a completely invented world but still uses plenty of real relational structures — the characters in Avatar are all essentially real, just given a visual treatment that makes reality feel unfamiliar. What I do is push closer to reality while keeping that unfamiliarity. Take Kuangkuang: I made him out of cardboard boxes and the character design is very simple, but a lot of people say, how is this so real? It's real psychologically. I'm not doing the representational kind of realism at all, nothing like the very literal style of Japanese anime.

The closer you get to reality, sometimes the further you get from it. There's a lot to mine in animation on this front. You don't have to draw some vision out of the Classic of Mountains and Seas. You just have to make it feel unfamiliar against people's experience — shrink a person down here, and the whole perspective changes.

Q: You and Jia Zhangke are both from Shanxi, but his work is more about a place, while yours often works back through memory along a timeline. Why?

A: He's Shanxi through and through; my family was from a mining district. I grew up at a copper mine in southern Shanxi, between Houma and Yuncheng, and he's from Jiajia Village. Where I'm from, everyone was an outsider, mostly people from the Northeast. I was born in Shanxi but I never had any sense of belonging there. My mother is from Sichuan, my father is from Shanghai; they married in Shanxi and I was born there. It twists you up. You feel like a country person in the city and a city person in the countryside — it's strange, and everyone from a mining district feels it. When I go back to Shanghai I can't even speak Shanghainese. I don't have a region.

My Kuangkuang is a small-northern-county thing too. I don't want to make something tied to a place. All of it comes out of my own experience.

Q: Were you a kid like Kuangkuang? Or were you a generally happy child?

A: Not the happy type. Kuangkuang is actually pretty happy. I wasn't as brave as him; I was a fairly weak person. I stayed home and drew, timid, not very capable, couldn't fight at all. Don't fall for the artist myth — Jia Zhangke can't fight either. People who could fight didn't end up doing this. Frankly we were all just the arts-minded youth of the time. In the 1980s people revered poetry and writing; even if you read nothing else you'd read Reader's Digest. I think I was still the introverted type. It was teaching later that changed my personality and turned me into a talker.

Q: Do you feel out of step with the world?

A: I do. Whenever anyone speaks to me I have a reflexive doubt, an instinctive reaction. Maybe it's because as a kid I was the 26th of 50 in the class — completely overlooked. I was the student whose name the teacher didn't know. So for a long time I served as part of the majority, and at the same time I was very wary of becoming part of the majority, even though getting lost in the crowd was how I survived. Once I started drawing, I became wary of this majority. Chinese people instinctively love to follow the crowd, and I pay close attention to this collective excitement, collective anger — especially because in a crowd there's so little time that you've gone along with it before you can react. But when you're making something you have time to think, to make something different. We can look at the problem from another angle; otherwise there's no point doing any of this.

Q: What do you think is the best thing about you?

A: A sense of humor. Humor is what keeps you relaxed, or free. I used to look down on it — I thought having a sense of humor meant you weren't serious. A lot of my artist friends were far more serious than me, working on the deep themes of humanity, and I had no confidence in myself. But once in France I was talking with a Frenchman — they appreciate humor over there — and we got into it. One of the Charlie Hebdo journalists had said humor is a weapon against tyranny. Sitting in that panel I thought, comics are a ridiculous thing, and yet in France they're deeply respected. They have no tyranny in its overt form there, only tyranny of ideas, and they call themselves a weapon against it. I found that fairly stunning at the time. It made me feel what I do has value. Chinese people lack a sense of humor. We go out to fight something and end up as ugly as the thing we're fighting. We lack a relaxed side, we lack the ability to make fun of ourselves and of authority. You have to be able to mock yourself first — that's our greatest weapon against authority, because it takes imagination to be funny, and animation happens to give us that room for humor.

Violence, resistance and censorship

Q: For a piece of childhood memory, Kuangkuang comes off as very violent — not what childhood or children are supposed to be. Why?

A: I designed the violence in Kuangkuang fairly deliberately. The images were too simple, there wasn't much action, it didn't look good. The nosebleed was a color decision too. Beyond form and logic, I wanted that era rendered simply. And what I wanted to say through Kuangkuang was a child fighting adult society, or an individual fighting the system — what I really wanted to get across is that this individual never gives in. So how do you show that fight? You still need violence.

I also think Chinese people may have an inborn fondness for violence — think of reading Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms as kids. I think Chinese people are numb to violence: page after page describing it, people killed the way you'd chop up a melon. We're not like Westerners in that… Chinese people have a lot of the bystander in them. I don't really know. I was conflicted about it myself while making it. When we were doing the violent scenes in Kuangkuang, I noticed everyone got excited, couldn't hold back, went all-out on the violence. It was all that bystander feeling. I thought there was no need to be that happy about it. Maybe our culture has been repressed so long that we need to let it out in our work. They were really taken with it, and that left me with very mixed feelings.

Q: What was the thinking behind Year of the Rabbit Greeting Card that year? Its violence was even more blunt.

A: That one was pretty screwed up, and it was what I genuinely felt at the time. That was my first year on Weibo, and I found so many things that made me furious — though I'm numb to it now. Why did I stop? Because I went numb, you know? For those couple of years it all just scrolled past, and I really was angry; I'd argue about it with everyone in the office every day. When New Year came around I pulled a few longtime staff together and said, let's not use company time, let's make a short film on the side, just for fun. It took about half a month, came together fast, and it was pure release. And in the end I found that everyone scrolled right past it, went numb, and started consuming the violence.

I really was pretty bold about it, and back then I figured, it's animation, how bad could it get. Of course, I never actually got called in for tea — though there was a great deal of self-censorship underneath. I remember I uploaded it and the site took it down on the first day; it hit 300,000 views, then came back and got another 200,000. People clicked on it incredibly fast. Pretty funny.

Q: How did it feel to be banned? Did you react strongly at the time?

A: No, not at all — I'm not some naive outsider. Being banned doesn't matter to me. I just want it to get around, to be seen; that goes for independent film too. I've always thought none of us are naive outsiders here: you have to weigh what you're doing and be willing to carry the risk before you do it. Don't finish something and then act surprised — this is simply how it is. Don't walk around feeling wronged and aggrieved about it. I knew there would be consequences, but I didn't think the risk was that big, because in the end this is an animation, a fable.

Honestly, I still think inner freedom matters most. I won't say censorship is good or bad, but staying free inside is what matters. Sometimes the things outside you can make you lose yourself. Some of my peers really are angry, but I think: you're an author, not a journalist. You have to make things this world doesn't have. Your work can have politics in it, but it can't be only politics. I feel like I overdid the anger in that stage of mine, so for now I can leave it alone and make something again when I actually feel it. I won't put a label on myself, call myself a revolutionary artist or anything else. I went from Kuangkuang, fled to Puff, fled again to children's songs — I've been running from labels the whole time.

This is a society built on success stories, so people get confused about what kind of person you are. A life like that would be far too dull.

Q: Is Roar Ha Hey violent?

A: Not very. This one is "inspirational plus wuxia" — it's really a martial-arts film, about a kid who goes to the Shaolin Temple to learn kung fu.

Q: How much self-censorship went into it?

A: There's self-censorship, guaranteed. But I never set it up as that kind of story to begin with, so there was very little to censor. From the start I positioned it as an inspirational story. I've always known Kuangkuang is a child fighting the adult world, an individual fighting the system, so I just pulled the individual-versus-system part back a bit — there can still be some allusion to it. The two feed each other.

Animation, animators and the animation forum

Q: Compared with "independent thought," is "playful expression" the harder half?

A: It's harder, because for Chinese people, challenging your imagination is hard — challenging your imagination means challenging the habits of thought you already have, and staying inside a familiar way of thinking feels safe. That's how we were brought up. Ah, no — "we" as in my generation. Not yours.

Q: After running the forum all these years, what do you find least acceptable in the animation world?

A: I think the problem is still with the creators. If I had to name the least acceptable thing, it's creators losing their footing — and I'm saying this to myself too. A creator has to know what he can and can't do. A director gets some money and decides to make a blockbuster, when he really only has a ten-minute story in him. Some people also put unrealistic hopes on directors, or put together a financing deal. I think China is out of position: directors doing the producer's job, key animators fretting over directing. Money magnifies everyone's desires, and the whole industry moves more slowly because of it.

Q: What does an animator need most?

A: Imagination, still, because animation isn't reality. But I don't mean imagination let off the leash entirely. It doesn't have to be an invented world, doesn't have to be outer space. What matters is how much distance you keep from reality. You just have to open up some space. Chinese animators have gotten a little stuck in this relationship between imagination and reality.

Q: But isn't that partly because the closer something gets to reality, the more likely it is to run into censorship?

A: That's a factor, but I think there's still a lot that hasn't been dug up — you could show real white-collar life, use animation to show the absurd side of daily life, and that's rarely been done either. Animation can express a great deal without ever touching politics, but people haven't opened up their imaginations that way.

Q: Where does the limit come from?

A: Still from only watching other people's work, from not seeing enough. I encourage animators to watch less animation and watch some documentaries, some other things, go see contemporary art shows. You don't have to watch only animation. I think you have to take in more, and then it opens up. A lot of our animators watch only one kind of thing — watch Spirited Away a few times and you really can have trouble getting back out.

Q: How do you keep yourself in that state? Has anything lately made you feel your worldview got refreshed?

A: I rarely get a jolt from something new out there. New things do keep coming — books in new fields, plenty you'll want to look into. If you're a creator, sure, everybody read Italo Calvino in the early days, but step outside that circle and there's still plenty that's new. Popular doesn't necessarily mean good.

These past few years I've been hooked on Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, reading him over and over. I like him a lot — maybe it's age, being past forty. A few days ago I read One Hundred Years of Solitude again. I think people have to step out of whatever stage they're in and not let it hem them in. If there's a book you're supposedly not meant to read at this stage, why not try reading it. A lot of it turns out to be genuinely interesting, and there's bound to be something in there that sparks you.

Cover and long-form images from: posters for the Clang Clang Clang series (cropped)