The Real Appeal of the Internet’s Favorite Terrible Movie

One of the only compliments I can offer the new Chinese animated film Niu Lai is that it certainly qualifies as a film.

There is sound.

The pictures move.

But beyond the basics of what makes a movie a movie, Niu Lai , which translates to “The Ox Comes,” contains little artistic merit.

The plot, about a calf coming of age with the help of a leopard, a bird, and his mother, is thin, and the characters have been so nightmarishly rendered on a rudimentary computer program that they might as well be sleep-paralysis demons.

Yet Niu Lai has become a bona fide box-office hit in China.

Since a small distributor unceremoniously dumped it in theaters in early August, the film has become one of the most lucrative movies in Chinese history, making more than $7 million off a reported budget of no more than $500 and outperforming recent blockbusters such as The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day .

Much of its success is thanks to Chinese social media, where clips of it first went viral: Some users have embraced Niu Lai as a meme, purchasing tickets so they could ridicule the baffling work with an audience.

Others have championed the project as anti-AI art, arguing that it deserves to be appreciated as a purely human creation.

As flawed as Niu Lai may be, to the fans, it’s at least better than AI slop.

I’m not so sure about that.

Watching a bootleg version of Niu Lai felt painful but apt: What better way was there to see a jankily made film than in potato quality on my computer at home? Instead, what’s distinctly human about Niu Lai comes from everything around it: how it was made, how it became a sensation, and how it has inspired further creativity in turn.

Theater workers have drawn posters by hand to help advertise the movie.

Businesses have made plush toys of the bovine hero.