Chinese Indie Animation Superstar Busifan on His Annecy Competition Player ‘The Storm’
07.06.2024 - 11:25
/ variety.com
Holly Jones China’s unwitting creative phenom Yang Zhigang, known as Busifan, presents an imaginative, heartwarming and gleefully chaotic animated journey in his latest feature, “The Storm,” selected to screen in main competition at this year’s Annecy Festival. The auteur previously worked in telecommunications and never formally studied filmmaking, yet emerged as a self-taught cult figure on China’s animation circuit via its Flash scene in 2004 with “The Black Bird,” a seven-act episodic that craftily followed a wary warrior and his avian aide.
With his brutal and defiant debut feature, 2017’s “The Guardian” (“Dahufa”), Busifan disconnected from the rules imposed by the commercial market as he sussed out his inner turmoil for the script. This solidified him as a boundary-breaking artist, and the film’s simmering success served to bolster the region’s independent movement and further out-of-the-box concepts.
Busifan followed this underground acclaim with an Academy Award nomination for his 2018 short “The Valley of White Birds,” which won Annecy’s Special Prize in 2017. In his second feature, “The Storm,” Busifan returns to family-friendly fare with a punchy and sly hero’s journey for the ages.
The narrative follows a young, spirited rascal named Mantou and his makeshift father, Daguzi, as the two explore a fabled dark ship that has arrived on shore. Legend has it the ship holds treasure that could secure their future, but as they inch closer to the prize, a raging storm in the distance sets the vessel’s terror in focus, revealing a fate the two will struggle to overcome.
“Creating ‘The Storm’ was both a personal and artistic adventure. Through this film, I wanted to take viewers on an immersive journey into the heart
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