Director of ‘bizarre’ Chinese film Niu Lai says creators didn’t want to let precision get in way of story

Shahana YasminTue, August 18, 2026 at 11:49 AM UTC

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The director of a Chinese animated film that has become a surprise box-office hit despite being widely mocked for its crude visuals, has said he deliberately chose to prioritise the story over visual “precision”.

“If we focused all our energy on rendering precision, this film would never have been made. Between perceiving details and the overall narrative, I chose to let the story run first,” Niu Lai director Xin Yumeng said in a radio interview for Entrepreneurial Youth Talk, per Wenxue City.

He added that he had prioritised the overall story over making every visual detail technically polished, arguing that audiences were not going to the cinema to inspect “every hair under a microscope”.

Niu Lai, whose title can be translated as The Cow Is Coming, has become one of the strangest cinema stories of the Chinese summer.

The 86-minute animation follows a calf named Niu Lai on a surreal journey, but its rudimentary 3D models, jerky movement, awkward dialogue, and occasionally bizarre sound effects have made it an online punchline, with one Chinese review likening it to a “3D beginner’s work”.

It was released on 5 August with no trailer, promotional tour, or pre-release publicity and initially drew just 236 viewers, taking 7,169 yuan (£786).

State-owned Beijing News even warned that cinemas could “lose the trust” of audiences if they continued to “lower their standard” by giving more screenings to Niu Lai.

The paper argued that cinemas should not simply “act as gatekeepers for the audience” and cater to online hype, urging them to reject films that were “obviously not up to standard”.

Then, clips and screenshots of its deliberately rough-looking animation began circulating online, with audiences buying tickets partly to see whether it could really be as bad as everyone claimed. Some recommended it as a prank, while others seemed to ironically be drawn to its handmade appearance as an antidote to AI-generated imagery flooding social media.

The joke ended up taking off, as Niu Lai’s box office eventually climbed past 14.9m yuan (£1.6m).

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Cinemas began adding screenings as demand grew, turning a film that had barely been seen at the start of its run into an unlikely rival, at least in box-office conversation, to major releases like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Even the film’s tiny crew has an unusual backstory.

Xin had worked as an interior designer and had no formal film background before making Niu Lai, according to Tatler Asia.

His mother, Sun Lifang, taught herself screenwriting for the project and voiced the female characters.

Xin said he used the spatial thinking he used in his previous design career to build the scenes, saying: “It's all about building things up, only we used to use bricks, now we use polygons”.

He spent five years making the film, handling modelling, rigging, animation, lighting, rendering, and editing himself. Most of the equipment, he said, consisted of second-hand computers bought through Xianyu, a Chinese online marketplace.

Xin and Sun were the film’s writers, directors, voice actors, and producers, making it essentially a two-person production.

The DIY nature of the Niu Lai spilled into cinemas as some theatres had no official posters to display, leaving staff to draw their own by hand. One Beijing cinema displayed a simple pen-and-ink calf alongside the handwritten slogan: “Come on over if you’re into the bizarre” and, rather ominously, “No refunds”.

On the film’s reviews, Xin said that he accepted “all criticism”, but insisted that the film’s sudden popularity was not the result of a carefully engineered publicity stunt. “There’s nothing to market, I don’t even have the money for marketing,” he said.

Xin also revealed that production has begun on his next animated film, Yang Gao, or Sheep High. This time, he said, “we won’t have to wait five years”.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”