If any lesson can be taken from the extremely, laughably ugly animated film Niu Lai, as it dominates the Chinese box office, blowing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey out of the water, it’s probably that people will always love a viral, memeable disaster just as much, if not more, than a meticulously crafted masterwork. And they will come out in droves so they, too, can be in on the joke.
Niu Lai is an 86-minute animated film about a newborn calf learning life lessons or some such s—t. It went from making roughly 7,700 yuan in its first 10 days to more than 14.9 million yuan, according to The Guardian, after social media turned the too-earnest-and-scrappy-for-its-own-good movie into a national joke.
If you haven’t seen any footage, it looks like the animation you see in a late-90s children’s TV show. Like ReBoot, but much worse. Probably closer to the more recent Adult Swim show Xavier: Renegade Angel, but Xavier had the benefit of looking shitty on purpose. Niu Lai was made over five years by just two people, a mother-son filmmaking duo. It had no marketing, no trailer, and almost no audience.
Then some of the few people who did see it started posting clips recorded in the theater showing off its bizarrely bare-bones visuals, and it took off.
An Animated Movie With Almost No Audience Became a Hit After Everyone Started Mocking It
That puts Niu Lai into the proud cinematic tradition of movies that become successful because they sucked real hard. American film history is littered with films with more ambition than budgets and filmmaking know-how could support, creating a whole subgenre we affectionately call “so bad it’s good.”
I feel like we’ve been seeing fewer and fewer of these in recent years. There used to be a whole lower-middle class of filmmakers and film financiers who seemed to specialize in making objectively terrible movies that were still undeniably watchable. The kinds of movies that were the bread and butter of podcasts like How Did This Get Made and the legendary show Mystery Science Theater 3000 before it, along with countless local TV hosts like Elvira and Joe Bob Briggs.
While I haven’t seen the whole thing, from everything I’ve read and seen online, Niu Lai is bad in a way a lot of things aren’t bad anymore. In an era where things are bad because they were run through AI, which only knows how to make things aggressively subpar using a factory process that churns out a sea of sameness, Niu Lai is a special, handcrafted kind of bad that used to be an abundant resource and has sadly dried up like the rivers and lakes being chugged by data centers. It’s quaint. It’s cozy.
It has the distinct whiff of human-made garbage, and that’s exactly why it’s made millions.
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