I just finished Director Niu Lai’s interview before his film opened. His verbal tic is shuobaile—“look, here’s the thing.” You can tell he is not a smooth talker. What he has is stubbornness. A kind of ox energy.

The whole making of the film was brutal. Five years is a long time. He said he almost quit more than once. His family is ordinary. They could not afford proper gear, so a lot of it was making do. I suspect that is why the final render looks so rough. No money, so he bought secondhand hardware on Xianyu. The quality was all over the place. One board he bought burned out.

His family kept backing him and did a lot of the work with him. He still mentioned the fights—real ones, not just arguments. An art-and-landscape major, switching to an animated feature at thirty. Of course nobody thought it would work. He was carrying a huge amount of pressure the whole time.

However hard it got, he stayed until the end. However many compromises he made, finishing was already the win. Then he still pushed it into theaters.

I see myself in him

I see my own product work in that story: one person writing the code, one person shaping the product, one person raising money, one person doing the marketing. It is brutally hard. I probably have not hit that kind of wall yet. I have not found the ox energy that just keeps going. Five years. I could not do that.

I am a perfectionist. I keep adding features. I tell myself it cannot go to market until everything is there. I also want one network setup that works the same in China and abroad, plus high availability. That is not realistic. Compromise earlier. Face the market earlier. That is the actual move.

However ugly the first version is, however thin the features are, ship a version and put it in front of people. That is what you are supposed to do.

At the end of the interview they brought on a cinema manager, or someone in that lane, who said it was a Chinese ink-wash animation and the images were beautiful. I laughed so hard I lost my breath.