"Terrible Quality" Low-Budget Chinese Animation Makes Stunning $28 Million Box Office Turnaround

An Amateur Mother-Daughter Duo Spent Five Years Creating the Animation

From Mockery to "A Rare Sincerity in the AI Era": A Shift in Perception

The low-budget Chinese animated film "Niu Lai (牛來·Niu Lai)" is generating an unexpected box office buzz in China.

Poster for the movie 'Newlie' drawn by a theater staff member due to the lack of an official promotional poster. BBC capture

According to reports from foreign media outlets such as the BBC and The Guardian on August 20, the box office tracking site Maoyan has confirmed that as of this date, "Niu Lai" has achieved cumulative revenue of over 29.08 million yuan (approximately 6.1 billion won). "Niu Lai" has ranked among the top titles at the Chinese box office, alongside Hollywood blockbusters released around the same time, including "Odyssey" and "Spider-Man: Brand New Day."

Released in China on August 5, "Niu Lai" is an 86-minute animation that follows the journey of a newborn calf named Niu Lai as he embarks on an adventure, learning about friendship, trust, responsibility, and sacrifice. Ultimately, all his adventures are revealed to be nothing but a dream, ending on a somewhat anticlimactic note.

Shen Weimeng (34), who majored in landscape architecture, began making the film five years ago together with her mother Sun Lifang (60), an employee at a state-owned enterprise. Neither of them had any prior experience in animation production; they taught themselves skills such as illustration, screenwriting, and voice acting. The mother even wrote the script and composed the ending theme herself.

During its initial release, the film was ridiculed for its rough drawing style and awkward character movements, prompting comments like "How did a movie like this make it to theaters?" Suspicions also arose that it might be a vehicle for money laundering or created to seek government subsidies. However, the bizarrely clumsy calf character became a meme on social media, drawing more viewers curious to "see just how poorly made it is." The story of a mother and daughter spending five years self-teaching themselves to complete the film later became known, prompting reactions such as "A rare sense of sincerity in the AI era."

Online users shared responses such as, "You might regret watching this movie for its runtime, but you'll regret it for life if you don't," "I'm going to the theater just to support this movie," and "It's a terrible film, but the title is great."

A scene from the movie 'New Life'. Weibo

The film's box office numbers have also seen a dramatic turnaround. In the ten days following its release, total revenue amounted to only 7,000 yuan (about 1.5 million won), but income began rising in real time. China's ticketing platform Maoyan now predicts final box office revenue will reach 135 million yuan (about 28 billion won). Analysts suggest this connects with the so-called "Shen Chou" (悪丑·finding enjoyment in crudeness) phenomenon, in which young Chinese weary of "Nei Juan" (内卷·hyper-competition) intentionally seek out tacky and poorly made works.

According to Bloomberg, the movie's popularity has even spread to the Chinese stock market. The Chinese word for "ox" symbolizes a "bull market" in the stock exchange, so the film title "Niu Lai" (牛來) is read as "the cow is coming," and some individual investors have rallied around the movie. Additionally, the name of the jaguar character "Baola" (豹拉) in the film is pronounced similarly to a Chinese expression meaning "sharp rise in stock prices," spreading as a meme in financial circles.

In particular, Chinese retail investors who suffered heavy losses in last month's market plunge are consuming "Niu Lai" as a kind of "black comedy," comparing the calf's hardship—wandering a barren wasteland while escaping predators—to their own investment experiences. This has inspired a wave of parody videos and emojis, such as using AI to overlay film scenes with dialogue that relate to developments in the Chinese stock market.

At some theaters, since the movie was produced on a shoestring budget and doesn’t have an official poster, staff are hand-drawing posters for "Niu Lai" to attract moviegoers. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) analyzed that in an era when anyone can create convincing content using AI, the "visible traces of human imperfection" paradoxically became the film's key box office factor.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.