Director of Chinese animation Have a Nice Day on bringing his lurid vision of China to the world, despite pressure from Beijing
With his trademark simple cel animation, Liu Jian explains why he paints an unflattering picture of modern-day China with his second feature film Have a Nice Day, the winner of a Golden Horse award in Taipei last year
When you think of animation companies, you probably envisage vast enterprises with thousands of employees like Pixar or Blue Sky. Even the more boutique Japanese outfit Studio Ghibli, who brought us Spirited Away in 2001, has had up to 300 workers in the past.
So it is something of a shock when I ask Chinese director Liu Jian about his Le-joy Animation Studio, which he formed back in 2007.
“There are only two people in the studio – me and my wife,” explains the 48-year-old matter-of-factly. It is a surprising revelation, particularly when the bespectacled, goateed Liu also reveals that for his latest film, Have a Nice Day, he did 95 per cent of the animation himself, across three years.
While most animators are patient creatures, you have to admire someone who dares to fly solo. Liu’s 2010 debut, Piercing I, was also created almost single-handedly, with an artisanal approach that used very spare-looking, hand-drawn techniques.
Premiering at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Have a Nice Day was the first Chinese animation to officially compete at the prestigious event. Far from the fantasy and fairy tales of Studio Ghibli, Liu’s effort is a modern-day film noir; an adult-oriented tale of greed, murder and betrayal, like a Chinese Coen brothers film. (For the record, Liu tells me that Ghibli maestro Hayao Miyazaki is “one person I respect a lot”.)
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Set in a small town in southern China, the story revolves around a bag of money stolen by a young driver, Xiao Zhang (voiced by Zhu Changlong), who intends to take his fiancée to Korea for corrective plastic surgery. The trouble is, he has inadvertently robbed a local mobster, who soon sends an assassin (and part-time butcher) after him and the loot.