Niu Lai is a truly horrendous animated tale following a cow and her calf through a half-rendered CGI sandbox – high on drawn-out dramatic pauses, low on consequence. But while it reviews have inevitably evoked discussion around being one of the best ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ watches ever, it also offers nothing that veterans of that medium won’t have laughed harder at elsewhere. So, what is its grand appeal? In the age of sterile, hyper-sharp computer imagery, it might just be its undeniably human shortcomings.
Not every film which secures meme-status reaps the rewards at the box office – see the embarrassing second release of Morbius – but Niu Lai has cracked the code. It has immediate payoffs, and slow-burn absurdity that have snared a growing audience in its native market, and beyond.
Made entirely by two people – Xin Yumeng (信雨萌) and written by Sun Lifang (孙丽芳), a son-and-mother team of self-taught animators – on a budget of around $7,000, there was clearly nobody around to tell either of them what wasn’t a good idea. And even if there had been, it is hard to see how they could have afforded to action that advice.
The resulting omnishambles is now captivating theatre-goers in China, where viewers assembling just to guffaw at its low-rent animation and lifeless voice-acting have already seenNiu Lai rake in ¥17 million, or approximately $2.36 million. The fact this turnaround resulted after a paltry ¥7,359 (roughly ¥1,025) in its first nine days – while the film was released without any marketing campaign – shows the level of word-of-mouth influence which its shoddiness commands.
What exactly is it that inspires such devotion among witnesses, that each has resolved to bring in new recruits as soon as the credits roll? A potent blend of mercilessly rigid movement, and nightmarish anthropomorphism go a long way. The humanoid cows – sometimes quadrupedal, sometimes disquietingly bipedal; always with faces upsettingly reminiscent of the Gigachad – creak and shuffle their way across a barren landscape, as if the attendees of a senile furry gathering accidentally wandered away from the convention centre, and into the Mojave desert. Their pre-emptive rigor mortis only relents to momentarily allow them to leap unfathomable distances, or to stand proudly and moooooooo into the face of danger. Neither of these factors makes the character design any less creepy: every moooooooo reveals a toothless set of pallid gums; while every leap suggests that however secure we feel observing the apparently decrepit forms, one of these haggard beasts could in fact be upon us in the blink of an eye. And when the leopard (who resembles a small boy wearing the hollowed out skin of a deceased cat) turns up, things get even worse…
As high as the technical aspects of the film set the bar, however, the plot and writing are decidedly underwhelming. The limitations of a mother and son team on a micro-budget mean there is a perceivable lack of ambition here – a shying away from anything that might either take more money out of the household budget, or which might be conceived of as inappropriate.
There is none of the ineffable, obscene lore of Sir Billi here (no Irish-talking-rabbit-diaspora in rural Scotland; no humanoid goat pissing himself while decked out in a skin-tight Kill Bill onesie; no banter about stinky, wet beavers); there is no grotesque genealogy of Dwegons and Leprechauns (a purported children’s film; in which the mutant spawn of leprechauns and fairies live every moment in agony, born as heads without bodies, living on scraps beneath a human house); and there is no sudden, inappropriate edge to any of the jokes as per Little Bigfoot 1 & 2 (a child suddenly berating Little Bigfoot with “GET OUTTA HERE – I HATE YOU”; a father suddenly suspecting his child has a life-threatening illness because of the stench his flatulence apparently produces).
And that’s what you really need for a top so-bad-it’s-good experience. The filmmakers need to bite off more than they can chew, they need to make bizarre, ill-advised decisions with unintentionally obscene implications, because they’re their own bosses, and they believe they know best (at least until the budget runs out). There is precious little of this kind of hubris to be found in Niu Lai because mother and son seem so painfully aware of their limits. There is no attempt to add anything unnecessary to convince audiences of their ‘coolness’; or any attempt to embellish on their crude character design, in an ill-fated bid to add sheen to their production. That goes right down to the fact none of the cows have udders – which frankly would have been hilarious to see. And while it is funny to imagine the discussion as to why the cows should be so under-endowed (neither the scandalous image of a humanoid cow kneeling to suckle from his mother’s udders as she stands on two legs; nor the equally unacceptable alternative of her hunched double, milking herself into a cup for him to sip from, would have been acceptable for a children’s animation) this is the kind of embarrassing misstep that many other terrible family movies have been provoking ridicule with for decades.
Overall, it’s not especially bad-good, then. It’s not even especially bad. Never mind the predictable ‘worst film of all time’ banter; I’ve seen worse films this year. Sure, the animation isn’t good, but have you ever made something move in Blender? I haven’t. For most of us, the idea that we could use polygons to create any kind of discernible story is still little short of a miracle.
And perhaps that is actually why Niu Lai has struck such a chord with viewers. There are plenty of passably funny moments. There are also moments where the glacial pacing and repetitive cliché plot points (including seemingly unending sequences where good-hearted characters sacrifice themselves for each other) deliver us into a kind of feverish delirium, where everything elicits a wave of demented laughter from the audience. But more importantly, there is something deeply human about Niu Lai’s haphazard end-product. As AI snake oil salesmen enlist Hollywood studios in their quest to insist “actually, you really DO want every movie to be the same assortment of slowly rotating, sharply rendered computer-generated intellectual property stamping on a human face, forever”, the popularity of Niu Lai seems to be as stark a response as you could imagine. We don’t even want this technology for our crap films. Nobody is ever going to fill a theatre to watch Fruit Love Island. Only free-range, corn-fed, human-generated so-bad-it’s-good will do.
If you can, seek it out when it heads to a cinema near you. It begs a communal experience. Failing that, make the most of the audience-copies on YouTube while you can; bad films are miserable when endured alone.
