‘Niu Lai,’ the $200 Chinese Animated Film Taking Social Media by Storm, Might Be ‘The Room’ for a New Generation

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. This story originally ran in “Sketch to Screen,” an animation newsletter. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox. 2026 has been a year where small films have broken out to become major box office phenomena. “Obsession.” “Backrooms.” And now, a new movie that most Americans definitely haven’t heard of yet has emerged as the latest viral success story: “Niu Lai.” A microbudget animated film made on a budget of roughly $200, “Niu Lai” has a bizarre, dreamlike plot, and production value that would generously look rough for a Nintendo 64 game. And it’s now, thanks to the power or word of mouth and lolcow culture, possibly one of the most profitable films ever made. The story behind the production of “Niu Lai” is the type of scrappy underdog narrative that would be wildly inspiring if the result wasn’t so terrible. The film was directed and written by Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang, a mother-and-son team who began an interior design company Dalian Jingyuan Decoration Engineering in 2016 and turned it into a production company in 2021 when they began work on the project. The two made the entire film together: Xin directed and animated it himself, Sun wrote the soundtrack and performed the theme song, and every character in the movie is voiced by the two. SketchUp, an architectural modeling program, was used as the animation software. The cost of the film was only several thousand yuan; an exact number doesn’t exist, but the production budget was likely less than a thousand if you were to convert to U.S. dollars. Dumped in theaters by Tianjin Yamazaki Film on August 5, the film had zero promotion beyond a single poster design, and initially seemed set to fade quietly into obscurity. Then, Chinese social media found it. On apps like movie-review platform Duban or microblogging site Weibo, clips and reviews of “Niu Lai” went viral, spreading the word of the film’s so-bad-it’s-good potential to a mostly young, Gen Z demographic of Chinese filmgoers. Ticket sales spiked dramatically in the next few weeks of its release, outperforming American blockbusters like “The Odyssey” and “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in the country. As of this writing its made ¥31.54 million in China, the equivalent of around $4.8 million, making it likely one of the most profitable films ever and certainly one of the most profitable in China. It’s the cult of “The Room” or “Plan 9 From Outer Space” reborn for a new generation; reports of underground screenings in San Francisco have already popped up. If recent animated Chinese films like “Ne Zha 2” became major successes because of the incredible detail of their production, “Niu Lai” succeeds because of the exact opposite. So with all this fervor, what is the film actually about? Having watched a subtitled version of it via some…less than legal means, I still quite don’t know the answer to that question. “Niu Lai,” whose title roughly translates to “The Bull is Coming,” has a wildly abstract, difficult-to-follow plot, and a languid, meandering pace that one can compare to the slow cinema style of Edward Yang if they wanted to be insanely generous. Watching it is a baffling, often hilarious, even more often extremely boring experience like no other. As can best be summarized, the title character Niu Lai is a young calf born to a forest/shifting dreamscape who relies on his mother for protection. The film, across 85 interminable minutes, follows the calf as he goes on adventures throughout this strange land, meeting new companions like an adventurous leopard and enemies like a pack of wolfs as his mother and a friendly skylark who was there for his birth attempt to shepard him into maturity. Think a very surreal version of “Bambi” and you can get a sense of the general idea for the narrative the film is trying to tell. It’s not even that the film’s free-flowing storyline logic is an inherent flaw or devoid of merit so much as it is that “Niu Lai” is such a poorly produced movie on a fundamental level that it can’t tell its story with any sort of gravitas. The animation is truly ugly, the characters moving at the framerate of a PowerPoint and looking less like the animals they’re supposed to be than weird hybrid troll creatures. The backgrounds are sparse and artifical, with generous bloomed lighting and mist applied to seemingly random places. Occasionally, when the film lurches toward an action scene that has to apply generous use of slow motion to even sort of pull off, it gets wildly entertaining: an early scene where Niu Lai attempts to jump across the river is the hardest I’ve laughed at a movie maybe all year. When it focuses on a nearly still frame of Niu Lai blinking for what feels like a full minute? The experience is…less fun, although bad film aficionados know that some level of tedium is inherent to almost all of the most canonical worst movies ever. Is there value to be derived from “Niu Lai” beyond its status as meme fodder? Yes and no. This isn’t the type of disasterpiece like “Megalopolis” that fiercely splits audiences into so-bad-it’s-good or just-plain-good camps. At the same time, for all that watching it doesn’t serve as a particularly pleasant experience, there’s something oddly endearing about its existence. There are plenty of far more high-polished, studio animated films I found to have a lot less value than what I got from “Niu Lai,” which is less Disney movie than it is outsider art made by someone with no connections to the animated film world and creating his own bizarre, one-of-a-kind logic towards the art form. It’s ridiculous and rough not just around the edges but from beginning to end, but also unlike anything I’ve seen before. And in an age where animation threatens to be taken over by AI slop, maybe we should treasure getting something as ugly and incompetent as “Niu Lai” that actually comes from human hands. When IndieWire scheduled our Sequel Week for last week, we did not do it with the scheduled D23 press expo in mind. But it felt fitting that Disney’s fan event served as a capstone, because at the event, most of what people were talking about were follow-ups of things we’d already seen before. Full disclosure: I planned to write this whole column about D23, then realized I had frustratingly little to say about most of the announcements. That’s not to say I’m not looking forward to most of what Disney showed off, but much of what was announced is pretty expected. “Frozen 2,” “Incredibles 3,” and “Zootopia 3” are all movies that we knew were happening. Then there’s something like “Coco 2,” a sequel to a movie that absolutely doesn’t need one and mostly makes me depressed at Pixar’s overall direction as a company. But to give some stray thoughts on other films showcased or announced: “The Bluey Movie,” a film spinoff of a very cute preschool show, lost me when it took the cute 2D designs from the show and brought them to somewhat uncanny and unnatural 3D. The Disney film “Clay” starring Kieran Culkin, seems cute, while the first look at Pixar’s “Gatto” looks gorgeous in how it melds a hand-drawn look with CG animation. A Disney+ series starring “Oswald the Rabbit” made by Jon Favreau feels like a joke from “The Studio,” but sure! My most anticipated project to come out of D23? “Kingdom Hearts,” a new anime series inspired by the popular RPG video game franchise that crosses over Disney properties like Mickey Mouse and “The Little Mermaid” with pretty anime boys. If you don’t know anything about “Kingdom Hearts,” know that it’s an incredibly complicated franchise with an unnecessarily convoluted and hard-to-follow narrative that’s spiraled into insanity over the course of three main installments, six spinoffs, and a web browser game that proved bizarrely important to understanding the mythos. I have every bit of confidence that this new anime show, billed as an original story “inspired by” the games, will only make that mess all the goofier and somehow more inaccessible to newcomers, and I truly cannot wait for it. By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. 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