Cast & crew · sourced from Douban and a Chinese-language interview
The two people who made Niu Lai
Every credit on Niu Lai (牛来) traces back to two people, a mother and
her son. Here's the full crew list, who they are, and — since Chinese audiences have had two and a half
weeks to actually watch and rate it — how the film has landed at home, straight from
Douban, the primary
Chinese-language film database and the closest thing this film has to an IMDb page.
Full crew, via Douban
Director
Xin Yumeng (信雨萌)
Producer
Xin Yumeng
Voice — Niu Lai (the calf)
Xin Yumeng
Writer
Sun Lifang (孙丽芳)
Voice — the mother cow / the lark
Sun Lifang
End-credits song "雨后轻风有香"
Written, composed and performed by Sun Lifang
Production company
Dalian Jingyuan Culture Film and Television Media
The only official artwork ever released
Douban's own credit
list groups some of these into a single line (e.g. "lyrics/composition/vocals" as one entry) — the
table above splits them out for clarity. Every credited role on the film belongs to Xin Yumeng or Sun
Lifang; there is no one else.
Who they are
Two bios, because that's the whole crew
Xin Yumeng (信雨萌) — director, animator, producer, and the voice of Niu Lai
34 years old as of August 2026, from Dalian. Studied landscape and environmental design, not
animation — a background he's said made the switch genuinely difficult, since "how you design a
landscape and how you design a film are two completely different ways of thinking." Conceived the
project in early 2021, greenlit it that December, and spent the next five years building it with
second-hand equipment bought secondhand online and SketchUp — architecture software, not an animation
suite — which is the direct cause of the film's stiff, geometric movement. In an August interview, he was
specific about doing the entire technical pipeline — modelling, rigging, rendering, editing — alone:
"frankly, it's just me doing this, I'm not a big studio." He also voices the title character.
More on why that isn't AI →
Sun Lifang (孙丽芳) — writer, and Xin Yumeng's mother
Credited as writer, voices two characters (the mother cow and the lark), and — per the same
interview — wrote, composed and performed the end-credits song, "雨后轻风有香" ("A Gentle Breeze
After Rain Carries Fragrance"), entirely self-taught; she'd never studied music before. Chinese
listeners noticed something in the lyrics that no English coverage has caught: the lines "什么时候雨
微风柔，什么时候萌芽破土" ("when will the rain turn to a gentle breeze, when will the sprout break
through the soil") quietly spell out 雨萌 — her son's given name — inside the verse itself.
Reception, at home
How Chinese audiences actually rated it
As of 24 August 2026: 6.0 / 10 on Douban, from
42,637 ratings — Douban's own comparison says that's "better than 55% of animated
films" on the platform. 45,878 users have logged it as watched; 12,239 more have it on their want-to-watch
list.
5★34.4%
4★9.0%
3★12.0%
2★9.9%
1★34.6%
The number that gets quoted — 6.0 —
hides the actual shape of this: it's not a mediocre film with mediocre reviews, it's a polarised
one. 5-star and 1-star together account for 69% of all ratings; the middle three stars barely
register. That split matches the "ironic praise vs. sincere contempt" pattern covered
on the why-it-blew-up page — most people who rated it either loved the bit or found the whole thing
genuinely dispiriting, and almost nobody landed in between.
In their own words
What Douban's top reviews actually say
The four most-upvoted short reviews on Douban as of 24 August 2026,
translated — chosen for range, not for agreement with each other.
"Memes are one thing, but if a movie like this can actually succeed,
that's the biggest tragedy in Chinese cinema."— Douban user bad英赛, 15 Aug 2026 · 9,444 found
this useful
"Shame it clashed with Wen Muye's and Nolan's releases — otherwise it
would've been a guaranteed smash, a piece of film history."— Douban user 2mlziv, 14 Aug 2026 ·
9,026 found this useful
"Do you people even understand what a cult film is?"— Douban user
tuobeiYe, 13 Aug 2026 · 3,914 found this useful
"This is the true bard of a twilight age."— Douban user 万里送行舟,
13 Aug 2026 · 7,008 found this useful
Douban also has 1,130+ full-length reviews,
some running to essay length with titles like "前无古人，后无牛者" ("unprecedented, and no cow will
ever surpass it") — read
them on Douban →. The platform's photo gallery for the film runs to 1,200+ images, mostly stills
and fan uploads; see it
there → rather than here — we don't have clear rights to rehost them.
