非常暴躁的小波

Overall, the soaring box office of Niu Lai is essentially a form of behavioral value, not the film itself. People normally spend 30 yuan to watch a good movie. But spending 30 yuan on Niu Lai is for the curiosity, the laughs, to witness this event, and to take part in a nationwide carnival. Of course, the most important reason Niu Lai could become such a nationwide carnival is that it is extremely, extremely bad. With most bad movies, you need to watch for a while before realizing how bad they are. But with Niu Lai, just one single frame is enough to blow your mind. This level of badness can make you curious from just one screenshot. So why did it explode globally? Why can Western film fans say: “If you watch this movie, you’ll waste 80 minutes. If you don’t watch it, you’ll waste your entire life!” I believe there are three reasons: First: It perfectly fits the Western “so bad it’s good” cult bad-movie culture. The West already has a tradition of bad movies going viral, like The Room, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. These films are technically terrible, but once they reach a certain level of terribleness, audiences gather to watch them together, roast them together, memorize the awful lines together, and eventually the films transcend themselves to become a subculture recreated by audience behavior. Niu Lai has almost no dialogue to begin with, and its plot is extremely childish and completely illogical, so foreigners don’t need to understand the story at all. Just show them the cow and tell them this is the movie currently competing at the box office with The Odyssey in theaters — and the humor lands instantly! Many Chinese films have high barriers to entry. For example, with Ne Zha, understanding the mythological framework is already difficult for foreigners. But Niu Lai has zero barriers — it’s just the story of a cow, just an animal. Many Chinese internet memes die when they reach the West because they require explaining language and social context. Niu Lai needs none of that. The stiff movements, bizarre compositions, amateur dubbing, and constant clipping errors — every single frame is pure comedy. Moreover, the badness of Niu Lai is a retro kind of bad! The main problem with Niu Lai is its extremely crude visuals, but these visuals actually remind many Western audiences of the cartoons they watched as kids. For example, the 2002 film Believe in Santa Claus also features extremely rough modeling and abnormally abstract characters — yet it actually aired on television, and many children at the time watched it. So Niu Lai awakens their childhood memories. It looks ugly, but it feels familiar. Second: Anti-AI. In the cross-national survey cited by Stanford’s AI Index, the proportion of people who believe “the benefits of AI products outweigh the harms” reaches 83% in China, but only 39% in the United States. China ranks among the most optimistic countries toward AI in the world, while the US, Canada, and Western Europe rank among the most cautious. Anti-AI sentiment in the West is far stronger than in China. Chinese audiences mostly go to see Niu Lai for the laughs, the absurdity, and the lively atmosphere. But Western audiences appreciate that it is pure handmade work without AI! If Niu Lai had come out in 2016, it would have been just an ordinary bad movie. But in 2026, when people scroll through endless gorgeous AI-generated videos every day — any AI version of Niu Lai on social media looks 100 times better than the original — this mother-and-son five-year pure handmade animation takes on an entirely different meaning. The director could easily have spent one week learning AI and produced something 100 times better in quality. Yet he deliberately refused the easy route and insisted on creating it through an almost ascetic handmade process. This deliberate handicraft in the technological age is highly valued in Western public discourse; Western audiences see it as true art. So Niu Lai perfectly hits the anti-AI sentiment in the West — and that is extremely powerful! Third: Anti-elite narrative. Niu Lai was purely handmade by a mother and son over five years, and they also found every possible way to get it into theaters. At first the box office was terrible and it nearly got pulled, but then it suddenly exploded. Based on the current trajectory, they are very likely to take home 100 million RMB. This story itself is a textbook underdog rise: no company, no stars, no team, no background — just a mother and son who finished the film and somehow got it into cinemas, and ended up making money. Many Western audiences first consume this story, and only then encounter the film. One could say this underdog story is already film-worthy in itself and is more than enough to move a lot of people. America loves underdog stories the most — the little guy challenging the giants, the amateur defeating the professionals — so the off-screen story alone can go viral! The most impressive thing about this director is that he was determined to get it done no matter what. He believed that no matter how bad it was, it had to be released — the act of releasing it mattered more than anything. He didn’t care about quality; he cared about finishing it. He cared about getting the thing done, even if he couldn’t judge whether it was done well. This is a Forrest Gump-style success. Overall: I believe a vibrant cultural environment allows rough, strange, and even works whose existence is hard to explain to survive. The fact that Niu Lai, as an epoch-making bad movie, has been turned into memes by millions of people, discussed by the BBC and Reuters, and even become part of Western cult culture, is itself fascinating. The true mark of a powerful culture is precisely that it can produce anything: the great, the vulgar, the elegant, the absurd — even the kind of bad that makes the whole world laugh together. So its greatest strength is not how much money it eventually made, but that it proved one thing: culture doesn’t necessarily have to go global in the most dignified way. It can be extremely bad, even mocked all the way, yet it still crosses language, aesthetics, and geography, until people from completely different cultural backgrounds sit together watching the same cow and burst out laughing. That in itself is a form of greatness.