She has half a life left, enough to love and to weep.
On December 18, at video platform Bilibili’s Chinese animation showcase, Haoliners presented nine new projects: four original animated works, Vertical World, The Undying Me, Crosshairs and Devil Game: Purification Rules;1 three novel adaptations, The Daily Life of the Immortal King and Journal of the Mysterious Creatures; and two comic adaptations, God of Deception and The Furious Yama.2 These span several formats, including seasonal series and year-long runs. Haoliners was already well known for its prolific output and its work on productions such as Fox Spirit Matchmaker, Hitori no Shita: The Outcast and Spiritpact.
In the five years since its founding in 2013, Haoliners has achieved a good deal in the animation industry. This May, it also joined Bilibili in establishing the animation production team BeDream. Following To Be Hero and Flavors of Youth, more original works are entering Haoliners’ lineup. The four new projects at this showcase offer plenty to look forward to:
Vertical World—Vertical Animation
Among its new animation projects, Haoliners introduced Vertical World, its first vertical-format animation built primarily around short episodes. Bilibili’s list of forthcoming series schedules it for 2019. This is not the first screen production in a vertical format: last year, Japan’s Production I.G launched a vertical-animation project and released a series of animated shorts through its app. More recently, the vertical-format web series Ugh! Life! also premiered in China in mid-October. Even so, the possibilities of vertical animation are far from fully explored. The horizontal arrangement of our eyes has made animation in a horizontal format second nature to us. Vertical animation squeezes visual space, yet peering out like a frog at the bottom of a well can also open up the possibility of imagining the sky anew.
The promotional video for Vertical World, less than a minute and a half long, opens with a full view of a subway carriage. Within the vertical composition, the handrails and seats are arranged along vertical lines, giving the carriage a strong sense of depth and three-dimensionality. The subway route map naturally obscures the head of the character on the right, creating a mystery about who this figure is. As the heroine observes “the other person on the train,” the unusually narrow field of view leaves half the figure’s body outside the frame, lending them an air of uncertainty and mystery. Only as the shots change does the character’s full appearance emerge.
The vertical format has many other characteristics. It offers more room to depict height—from earth to sky, or from head to foot. With more close shots and close-ups, it tends to emphasize the foreground and diminish the background, concentrating the viewer’s attention at the center of the scene. In the promo, for instance, the limited amount of scenery visible through the train windows diminishes this “background layer.” Viewers tend not to register the train’s passage through a tunnel so much as the changes in the heroine’s expression.
The cramped train setting throughout the promo, and its smaller cast compared with other videos, also have to do with the vertical format. Generally, horizontal compositions can accommodate more people standing side by side, making them suitable for conversations involving several people and for group scenes. The limited horizontal space of vertical compositions makes portraying an ensemble difficult; they are better suited to individual monologues and finely observed exchanges among a few people.
Beyond the short-video gimmick and the practical benefit of sparing our necks, the theme of a “vertical world” gives us reason to look forward to an entirely new world, a different form of artistic expression.
Devil Game: Purification Rules—Games as Metaphor
The synopsis for Purification Rules reads: “The exceptionally intelligent Qi Fei hits rock bottom because of his arrogance and cannot get back on his feet. By chance, he comes across a game program developed by an AI—‘Purification Rules.’ The AI has designed the program to manage the city according to a new set of rules. It selects suitable people who can pass overlapping trials to become humanity’s leaders, and Qi Fei is one of the candidates … Ultimately, his reason overcomes his desires. He matures and uses ‘Purification Rules’ to bathe the city in the light of justice.”
Judging from the synopsis, Qi Fei, as one of the “candidates,” must distinguish himself through some kind of selection mechanism. This brings to mind the many works in the “battle royale” tradition. That tradition crosses national borders and screen genres: familiar titles such as Game of Despair (绝望游戏) and Animal World; Japanese anime and manga such as The Future Diary, Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning and ACMA: GAME; Qidian’s “unlimited-flow” web novels,3 and so on … The second part of the comic Uncharted Walker, whose Chinese animated adaptation premiered this spring, also presents a battle of wits, with games determining who makes the cut. In the promo, the male protagonist, Qi Fei, says, “I want to succeed. I want a chance.” When there is no real-world avenue for resolving the predicament (characters who may be his parents say, “We don’t have the money for him to repeat another year at school”), the game world opens up a third route out—one that is not a retreat. The narrative pattern is roughly this: winning or losing the game brings extreme consequences—either a plunge into the abyss of death or a turning point in one’s fate. The pleasure of watching comes from the gambling spirit on display, with life itself at stake.
In works of this kind, the game world is a metaphor for reality, and its rules generally have real-world counterparts. The three rules in Devil Game, for example—“Time is limited,” “Keep it secret,” “You can’t start over”—resemble a microcosm of life: time’s limits and irreversibility, being closed off from the outside world … Victory and defeat in the game represent the counterbalancing forces within human nature. It is not just an individual who wins, but also a certain “value that ought to prevail,” which the creator wishes to convey. Of course, good people do not necessarily win, but this does not prevent values from being conveyed. The tragedy of a “good” person’s defeat, or an “evil” person’s victory, likewise prompts reflection on human nature. The “Devil” (demon / Satan / wicked person) in the title and the game’s “Purification Rules” also represent a clash between two opposing sets of values. I am very eager to see how these take shape in the work itself.
Crosshairs and The Undying Me
Finally, a few words about Crosshairs and The Undying Me. Both are tentatively scheduled for release in 2021, leaving them considerable time to develop, and not much information has been released yet. The Undying Me takes place in an invented world that includes a group known as “word-power users.” Judging from the synopsis, it seems unable to escape the familiar themes of clashes between characters, youth and coming of age. The promo for Crosshairs is very appealing. The cuts between its three opening shots give an internal coherence to “outer space—science fiction,” “city—modernity” and “Zen temple (if that is what it is)—stillness.” People of different nationalities and identities share the same stage; the overly bright curls under the lights and the urban punk art give the whole promo a powerful visual tension. The project centers on “the secret of the ruby” and is pitched in terms of “hot-blooded” excitement and “combat”—a visual feast already glimpsed in the promo. As for the work’s precise narrative style and period setting, there is still something to look forward to.