The Year’s Ugliest Animated Movie Has Become an Anti-AI Phenomenon

The film-related portion of Chinese trivia nights will never be the same after this weekend, and it’s all because of a film called Niu Lai (“The Ox Comes”). The film has raked in almost 15 million yuan ($2.25m) since its release on August 5. This is impressive, but not as impressive as the fact that, according to reports from Chinese outlets , its opening day grossed only 342 yuan ($50), and only 236 people saw the film in its first nine days of release—a genuinely remarkable figure in a country of 1.4 billion people. In other words, the film has gone from being a historic box office bomb to something of a phenomenon—and it’s all because it’s spectacularly bad.

Chinese film site Mao Yan lists Niu Lai as being written, animated, and voiced entirely by two people , Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang; according to The Paper , the former handled “all aspects of the work, including modeling, animation, editing, production, and even voice acting,” while the latter wrote the script and also provided voice acting. A machine-translation of the report says production “was conducted without the support of a professional production team, outsourced processes or rendering teams.”

There are conflicting reports about the degree to which the film was promoted on its release. Some commentators credit the film’s poster , an undeniably lovely piece of ink-wash art, for luring curious cinema-goers. The BBC, however, is reporting that “[ Niu Lai ] does not even have a proper promotional poster, [so] cinema staff have resorted to drawing their own posters to entice audiences to watch,” accompanying the report with a picture of a hand-drawn poster as proof.

Poster or no poster, it seems that while initial viewers were few in number, they were so dumbfounded by what they saw that they took to the internet to post stills and TikTok videos. These clips led to more people going to see Niu Lai for themselves, and those people posted more videos—and suddenly, everyone wanted to see it for themselves. Audiences seemed to appreciate its outsider-y charm, and the fact that whatever its merits, the film feels undeniably human—largely because even AI slop doesn’t look quite this bad. On Western social media, that sentiment has been picked up by the masses and exploded.

So far, so heartwarming—except that some reports from China suggest that the film is now being removed from cinemas. The BBC’s report quotes state-owned outlet Beijing News as, um, suggesting that theaters “act as gatekeepers for the audience,” and that they should “clearly reject films that are obviously not up to standard instead of letting films like Niu Lai run rampant.” At least one report suggests that Xin Yumeng himself has pulled the film, “acknowledging that all opinions will be carefully listened to,” and promising to “continue to strive for improvement in future works.”

The film "Niu Lai" became a huge hit. Since the cinema had no promotional posters for "Niu Lai," they had to hand-paint promotional posters for it.