The mother and son who made Niu Lai

Who they are

Two bios, because that is the entire crew

Xin Yumeng 信雨萌

Director · animator · producer · editor · the voice of Niu Lai

34 as of August 2026, from Dalian. He studied landscape and environmental design, not animation, and has said the switch was genuinely hard: “how you design a landscape and how you design a film are two completely different ways of thinking.” He had the idea in early 2021, committed to it that December, and spent the next five years building the film on second-hand equipment bought online, in SketchUp — architecture software, not an animation suite. That single choice is the direct cause of the stiff, geometric movement everyone ended up posting about.

He did the whole technical pipeline alone — modelling, rigging, rendering, editing — and said so plainly in an interview in August: “frankly, it's just me doing this, I'm not a big studio.” He also voices the calf. Why that rules out AI →

Sun Lifang 孙丽芳

Writer · the mother cow and the lark · songwriter

Xin Yumeng's mother. She wrote the story, voices two characters — the mother cow and the lark — and wrote, composed and performed the end-credits song, “雨后轻风有香” (“A Gentle Breeze After Rain Carries Fragrance”). She had never studied music. She taught herself for this.

Chinese listeners caught something in those lyrics that no English coverage has picked up: an early line quietly spells out 雨萌 — her son's given name — across two consecutive phrases. She hid a message to him inside the song.

The process

How two people actually made an 86-minute film

1. Early 2021 — the idea, in an ox year

   Xin Yumeng was working in landscape and environmental design. The project was conceived that spring and formally started in December 2021.

2. A second-hand computer and the wrong software

   Equipment was bought used, online. The film was built in SketchUp, a program made for architectural modelling — no character rigging tools, no animation timeline of the kind an animator would expect. Everything the internet mocked follows from this one constraint.

3. Five years, one pipeline, one person

   Modelling, texturing, animation, rendering and editing were all done by Xin Yumeng himself. At feature length. In his own words: “frankly, it's just me doing this.”

4. His mother wrote the story — and taught herself to score it

   Sun Lifang wrote the script, voiced two of the characters, and then wrote, composed and sang the closing song with no musical training, hiding her son's name in the opening lines.

5. 5 August 2026 — released with nothing

   No trailer, no teaser, no press screening, no interviews. One ink-wash poster that looked nothing like the film. In nine days it sold about 236 tickets and took ¥7,169. On 14 August exhibitors cut it to four screens.

6. Then strangers did the marketing

   Clips spread because of how bad the animation looked. Daily screenings went from 21 to 359 in 24 hours, and the film is now past ¥63.9M — live figure and the full day-by-day run →

In his own words

An interview with director Xin Yumeng

The only long-form interview with the director that has circulated in English, subtitled by the same YouTube creator who subtitled the film itself. He talks through the five years, the software, and doing every job on the picture alone.

Exclusive interview with Xin Yumeng (Pet the Actor)

Questions

Common questions about the people behind Niu Lai