The bizarre-looking Chinese animated film Niu Lai appeared destined to vanish from theaters and take its place among the countless bad movies no one remembers. That was until the internet noticed just how badly it was failing.
On Aug. 14, it went viral that Niu Lai had only made 7,352 yuan ($1,000) at the box office — and no, there isn’t a “ten thousand” after that. It’s a number so unusually low for a nationwide theatrical release that people assumed it had been written incorrectly.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Once clips of its stiff characters, glitchy animation, and surreal plot followed, mockery quickly gave way to… curiosity. People began buying tickets to see whether an actual theatrical release could really look that bad. And, apparently, it was. Within days, Niu Lai had gone from nearly disappearing to playing before packed crowds — and its unmistakably human flaws had turned it into an unlikely anti-AI digital sensation.
Niu Lai, also translated as The Bull Comes or The Cow Is Coming, follows a newborn calf who struggles to stand and enters an extended dream. Accompanied by a lark, he encounters other animals, faces a wolf attack, loses his mother, and learns about courage, friendship, and sacrifice.
Credit: Hector Retamal/Getty Images
The story is earnest. Its execution, according to many viewers, is something else entirely.
Clips posted online showed low-detail 3D models, stiff movements, and characters clipping through one another. Chinese commenters compared its stop-start animation to a PowerPoint presentation, while another viewer likened it to AI-generated homework completed at the last minute. In one especially surreal shot, the Chinese word for “grass” reportedly appears written across an otherwise sparse field. One reviewer on Weibo declared that calling it bad would be “an insult to bad movies.“
Normally, uploading a film’s most memorable scenes might discourage people from paying to see the rest. But in this case, the clips had the opposite effect. One review summed up the appeal: “You’ll regret watching it for 86 minutes, but you’ll regret not watching it for a lifetime.”
As for the film’s marketing campaign, there wasn’t much of one. Before its release, Niu Lai had no trailer or publicity tour, only a poster that gave audiences little indication of the rudimentary 3D animation awaiting them inside the theater. Once cinemas began adding screenings, the production allegedly didn’t even have enough promotional posters to display. Theater employees responded by drawing their own.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Within 48 hours of it entering the Chinese zeitgeist, Niu Lai had earned more than 3 million yuan. Its daily screenings, which had fallen close to zero, climbed to more than 10,000, according to Chinese media reports.
By Aug. 20, the film had grossed more than $4 million and appeared in China’s daily rankings alongside Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. Its staggering return also generated claims it had overtaken the low-budget horror hit Obsession as the most profitable film ever made. (That record relies on a claim that Niu Lai cost only $200 to produce.)
The path from obscurity to box-office success inverted the usual movie-marketing process in a way interesting for me, as a digital culture editor. Rather than a distributor creating awareness before theaters committed screens, users generated attention first. Viewers then began calling cinemas to ask why they were not showing Niu Lai, prompting theater managers to add screenings. When those tickets sold, they added more. And more. A Chinese report described the movie as having effectively been “distributed” by the internet.
The screenings themselves then generated another wave of content. Moviegoers arrived in groups, sometimes wearing cow masks, and treated the film as a comedy event. At one packed Beijing screening observed by Reuters, laughter reportedly began before the opening credits. When one person shouted that they could not believe the theater was full, the audience cheered.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Chinese director Remo Zhu told Reuters that Niu Lai had tapped into a rebellious “don’t tell me what to do” mood among younger moviegoers. Watching it in a crowded theater, he said, became an “interactive, immersive communal experience.”
The earliest attention surrounding Niu Lai was largely derisive. Some viewers questioned how something so technically unpolished had reached theaters, while others speculated that it must be connected to subsidies or even money laundering. A Beijing News commentary described the mockery as an outlet for people’s frustration with poorly made films.
Niu Lai was indeed made by an amateur — it’s the first film from Xin Yumeng, a 34-year-old landscape designer with no formal training in animation or directing. He started developing it in 2021 and spent roughly five years learning the filmmaking process while making the movie.
In an interview recorded shortly before the film’s release, Xin said, “Basically, I was doing it all by myself.” The technical obstacles made him consider abandoning the project “many times.” Unable to afford professional hardware, he bought used computer parts through the resale platform Xianyu — and “some of the used computer motherboards burned out,” he said.
Those limitations shaped what eventually appeared on screen. When his computer could not efficiently render an ambitious sunrise over a large mountain range, for example, he reworked the sequence using techniques from his landscape-design background.
When asked about the lack of detail in his characters, Xin acknowledged that more intricate models required better equipment and more money. But he also argued that visual polish should not become the entire point of a film. “Audiences don’t go to the cinema to look at strands of hair, right?” he said.
Xin’s mother, Sun Lifang, provided him with more than emotional support. Sun, who is in her 60s and worked at a state-owned company, actually helped develop and write the screenplay, voiced characters, handled administrative work, and taught herself to compose music.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Despite having no previous musical training, she wrote the film’s score and performed its closing song, which became one of its more warmly received elements. Fans later noticed that two lines of the lyrics appeared to conceal the characters in her son’s name, turning the song into a message about her hopes for his future.
Once audiences learned that a mother and son had spent years trying to finish the project on limited equipment, Niu Lai stopped looking like just another careless commercial product. Instead, it became something more sentimental — something worth rooting for.
Niu Lai became an anti-AI hit
Notably for moviegoers, Xin said he did not use generative AI anywhere in the production. He began working on the film in 2021, before tools such as ChatGPT were publicly available, and described making the animation manually. As that detail spread, fans began calling Niu Lai “purely handmade.”
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Its low quality did not suddenly become good, but it acquired a different meaning. The stiff movements and pixelated characters were no longer just mistakes to audiences, but rather traces of a five-year human process. Every awkward frame pointed back to someone manually trying to make a calf move, while the homemade closing song carried the voice of the director’s mother.
That contrast resonates at a moment when the internet is filling with “AI slop.” One Chinese blogger described Niu Lai‘s quality as a form of “clumsy sincerity,” according to The New York Times: However unrefined the movie looked, at least it was made by a person.
Not everyone found the story inspiring. A Beijing News commentary argued that Niu Lai had pushed audiences’ expectations for shoddy filmmaking to a new low. An unnamed film industry source told The Guardian that the movie was “bad in every aspect imaginable” and that its success felt like “an embarrassment to the Chinese film industry.” Other commentators worried that cinemas were rewarding viral curiosity at the expense of better-made releases.
Nevertheless, its success is substantial, and nearly impossible to reproduce. Shanghai animation producer Liang Xia told Reuters that phenomena like Niu Lai are “hard to predict and impossible to replicate deliberately” because they are driven less by the content itself than by a sudden swell of public emotion.
As Niu Lai spread beyond movie circles, Chinese investors found a stock-market pun in its title. Niu lai literally means “the cow” or “the bull is coming,” while the Chinese term for a rising market, niu shi, translates to “bull market.” Some moviegoers therefore treated their tickets as good luck charms for future gains. Fans also focused on a leopard named Bao La, whose name sounds like a Chinese phrase for a sudden market surge.
The joke soon became attached to actual stocks. Shares of several companies with the Chinese character for “cow” or “bull” in their names rose as the film went viral, Bloomberg reported, though there was no evidence that the movie had affected their businesses. The speculation became prominent enough for a journal operated by the People’s Bank of China to warn investors against treating the film as a market signal.
Before its release, Xin acknowledged that a traditional promotional campaign made little sense for a project like his. “There was no need for things like a roadshow,” he said. “Just release it. Whether audiences accept it can only be judged in practice.”
But the public did accept Niu Lai, although not in any way its creator could have anticipated.