China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Fans can look forward to Liu Jian’s latest animation film
Film director Liu Jian is by no means talkative. Liu, who was invited to the opening ceremony of the fifth Festival of German Cinema in China in Beijing on Friday as chief guest, spoke just five sentences in his opening speech.
But his work does speak out more.
Have A Nice Day, his latest 77-minute-long animated film, was nominated for the Golden Bear in the main competition section of the 67th Berlin International Film Festival in February.
The film is 48-year-old Liu’s second theatrical release.
However, it is the first Chinese animated film to be nominated in the Berlin festival, and even the first Asian animated film to be nominated for a Golden Bear since Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s iconic Spirited Away in 2002.
Though the film lost out, it has aroused a lot of expectation in China.
Earlier this month, Have A Nice Day premiered in China via an originally unscheduled screening at the first Pingyao International Film Festival in Shanxi province.
Chinese film director Jia Zhangke, who launched Pingyao festival, called the film a milestone in Chinese animation on the occasion.
Liu was not present in Pingyao.
But when Liu finally appeared in Beijing, he said that the film will be publicly screened in Chinese cinemas before the Chinese New Year in February.
Speaking about the movie, he says: “Animation can have many meanings or formats. And after seeing the film, people may accept that animation can tackle serious issues.”
Unlike most Chinese animated films today, which are based on fairy tales, myths or ancient legends, Have A Nice Day has darker shades to it.
It shows what happens after Xiao Zhang, a driver working for a gang, takes his boss’ monspeak ey to fix his girlfriend’s failed cosmetic surgery.
Speaking of how such films tackle serious issues, he cites examples of French-Iranian film Persepolis (2007) and Israeli production Waltz with Bashir (2008), both of which deal with weighty topics in realistic ways, and were nominated for the Academy Awards.
According to Yang Cheng, producer of Have A Nice Day, the copyright of the film has been sold in more than 30 countries and regions, and it will soon be distributed in cinemas all around the world.
The film is set in Nanjing, capital of East China’s Jiangsu province, probably as a way for Liu to acknowledge his hometown.
Also, most of the dialog is in the Nanjing dialect, and the dubbing sounds amateurish. Sometimes, it is even like reading a book aloud.
“I know some will find this a little bit strange, but I deliberately avoided professional voice actors,” says Liu, adding that such voices can feel like “plastic”.
“I wanted normal conditions,” he further explains. “Thanks to my artist friends from Nanjing who contributed their voices. I just picked the roles in the film for each to in a natural way.”
Liu is also a maverick when it comes to animation.
Before releasing his first film in 2010, he had been a contemporary artist for long.
He is a painter, a photographer, and once played in a band.
Though Liu switched focus to cinema, he still does a spot of painting. After all, he is also an associate professor at the China Academy of Art based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.
“The crossover is not that dramatic as you may think,” he says. “For me, film is just another form of artistic expression.
“The reason I decided to shoot a film in the first place was because what I had was not enough to express my ideas.”
As a comprehensive fine art form, animated film can maximize the expressional method, he adds.
Liu says the role of a painter in the film is partially based on his own life.
In the film, he kept adding new elements throughout the three years of its making. It even includes background sound from a news broadcast on Donald Trump winning the US presidential election in November 2016, which was only three months before the Berlin premiere.
Liu drew all the animation in Have A Nice Day, but he considers storytelling more important than images in animated films. He rules out the possibility of using real people in his films in the near future.
“In animation films I can control everything. I don’t need to adjust to actors’ moods,” he says. “So, I will still stick to animation, but I’ll keep bringing something new in each production.”
For the music, the song Our 80s was sung by the 1980s’ Chinese disco music diva Zhang Qiang, and it was used as the ending theme song in the film. This may have left the audience confused because it seems irrelevant in the context of the film.
Liu, however, says the song is a preview of his next film. “It will possibly be a story about the 1980s,” he says.