Beijing Watch | China's Viral Animated Flop Exposes Regulatory Blind Spot

A low-budget Chinese animated film widely mocked as the worst movie of the year has become the country's most talked-about cinematic spectacle of the summer — earning more than 11.4 million yuan at the box office not despite its terrible quality, but in large part because of it.

​Niu Lai debuted in Chinese cinemas on August 5 to virtually no fanfare. In its first ten days of release, total box office receipts barely exceeded 7,700 yuan and the film drew only a few hundred viewers.

What it did have was a beautifully rendered ink-wash promotional poster. What audiences found inside theaters was something altogether different: clunky character models, stiff motion that barely qualified as animation, and frequent visual glitches. Chinese social media users compared the visuals to "4399 mini-game graphics" — a reference to a popular online gaming portal that became a cultural touchstone for China's post-1995 generation — and described the film as "beginner 3D homework" and "worse than an AI exercise." The story, which follows a young ox named Niu Lai as he grows up through dream sequences and learns the meaning of responsibility, fared no better, with viewers dismissing it as "a bunch of upright cows delivering motivational speeches on a flat plain" and "incomprehensible."

The production was as bare-bones as its visuals. Niu Lai was created almost entirely by two people: director Xin Yumeng, who handled 3D modeling, animation, editing, voice acting, and production, and his mother Sun Lifang, who wrote the screenplay, contributed voice work, and performed the film's closing theme. Their production company, Dalian Jingyuan Culture Film and Television Media Co., Ltd., had a registered capital of only 100,000 yuan, had previously operated as a renovation and construction firm, and reported just one person enrolled in the social insurance system. No outside investors were involved.

That such a production cleared China's national film review — what the industry colloquially calls the "Dragon Seal" (龍標) — has unsettled filmmakers and audiences alike.

Niu Lai remained invisible until mid-August, when a wave of social media posts transformed it into a viral phenomenon. On Douban, China's leading film review platform, initial one-star ratings gave way to a flood of tongue-in-cheek five-star write-ups hailing it as "a milestone in Chinese animation" and "the best theatrical release of the year." One widely shared post captured the mood: "You may regret it for 80 minutes if you watch it, but if you don't, you'll regret it for life."

Part of what drove the surge was the film's unexpected resonance with anxieties about artificial intelligence. Many viewers actively praised the film's crude, labored animation as proof that it had been made by human hands — celebrating it as an antidote to the AI-generated content flooding social media algorithms. "That's some serious craftsmanship," wrote one Weibo user, deploying the kind of irony that has become the film's dominant register online. Others called it "pure handmade" and the biggest "dark horse" of the summer movie season.

A separate strand of enthusiasm had little to do with filmmaking at all. In Chinese, the characters for "bull" and "cow" are identical, and the film's title carries an implicit association with bullish stock market sentiment. "If the index reaches 4,000 tomorrow, I will go to the cinema to support this movie," one Weibo user wrote. "It is a terrible movie but has a great name," another commented — a sentiment that blended irony and genuine financial hope in roughly equal measure.

The result was a box office reversal with no real precedent. Cinemas that had barely screened the film began adding showings to meet surging demand. Because the film never had a proper promotional poster, cinema staff in some locations drew their own by hand to advertise screenings. By August 18, cumulative box office had surpassed 11.4 million yuan, putting it in competition — however improbably — with Hollywood releases including The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. "This record is unprecedented and will likely remain so," wrote one Weibo account dedicated to tracking Chinese film releases.

China's film censorship system is designed around content, not craft. Reviewers are charged with screening for political sensitivities, sexual content, and violence; technical review is limited to confirming that prints are free of corrupted frames or audio-sync failures. Artistic merit and production quality are explicitly outside the scope of review. Niu Lai's screenplay was filed with authorities in 2021, and the film passed both content and technical review in 2024. The process was, by all accounts, fully compliant.

Article 18 of China's Film Industry Promotion Law stipulates that film reviews must be conducted by no fewer than five experts, whose opinions should serve as a critical basis for the final ruling. Commentators in China's media industry have since asked pointedly: who exactly were those five experts, and what did they make of what they watched?

The distributor reportedly advised Xin against releasing the film at all. He refused. "It took so much effort to make," he was quoted as saying. The distributor ultimately arranged the theatrical run.

Not everyone has cheered the film's unlikely ascent. A commentary published by Beijing News, a state-owned outlet, warned that cinemas risk "losing the trust" of their audiences if they "continue to lower their standard" by adding screenings of Niu Lai. The commentary explicitly urged theaters to "act as gatekeepers for the audience, and clearly reject films that are obviously not up to standard instead of letting films like Niu Lai run rampant."

The backlash in the film's home city was more abrupt. Multiple cinemas in Dalian, the northeastern city where the film was produced, pulled it from their schedules on August 16. Staff at one location told reporters they refused to screen it because it was so bad, and that being made by locals made its poor quality an embarrassment for the city. Director Xin posted a farewell message in response: "The theatrical run of Niu Lai has officially concluded. This was a complete creative practice. We received both love and criticism, and we take all voices seriously."

As the film's notoriety spread, so did speculation about the financial mechanics behind its production. Circulating screenshots alleged that the production company's predecessor — the Dalian renovation firm — had been unable to collect payment on a government construction contract, and had pivoted to filmmaking specifically to access government film subsidies as indirect compensation.

The claim remains unverified. Liaoning province, where Dalian is located, does maintain a subsidy framework for low- and medium-budget films, with grants potentially reaching up to 10 million yuan under certain conditions, according to publicly available policy documents on the provincial government's website and in state media reporting. As of publication, the Liaoning provincial government had issued no public response.

Some analysts have argued that the timeline and scale of the production make a subsidy-laundering scheme difficult to sustain. But the broader discussion has shifted well beyond this single film — touching on whether China's industry has the tools to distinguish genuine creative work from opportunistic exploitation of regulatory loopholes. Chinese social media users distilled the mood into a phrase that has since circulated widely: Niu Lai is "not bad money driving out good money — it's ghost money driving out bad money," a play on Gresham's Law implying that quality standards have collapsed so thoroughly that even previously low-quality films now seem comparatively respectable. （Related： Beijing Watch | Zhu Rongji, China's Reform-Era Premier, Dies at 98 ｜ Latest ）

Xin Yumeng, for his part, acknowledged publicly that the film — which he and his mother spent five years completing — had many shortcomings, but framed the entire endeavor as the fulfillment of an ordinary person's dream. That framing may be sincere. It has also become a lens through which Chinese audiences are examining much larger questions: about an industry where censors police ideology but not quality, where a family workshop can obtain the same theatrical credential as a major studio production, and where the irony economy of social media can reward failure more reliably than merit.