When painter-turned-director Liu Jian’s Have A Nice Day bowed in competition at the Berlinale in 2017, it was seen as the dawn of a new era for Chinese animation movies, which up until then had been dominated by family-friendly entertainment. The film’s jet-black humour, fatalist narrative and vividly realist images have led to much anticipation about what beckons onwards for Liu and his peers. With his latest film, however, that distant moment of hope seemed to have sadly passed.
A snapshot of how a group of young painters and musicians contend with the uncertainty posed by their country’s lurch towards the West and the free-market dogma it entailed, Art College 1994 veers away from the bigger picture and instead zeroes in on the trifling emotional convulsions of a very small coterie of stock characters. Offering middlebrow melodrama that lacks the irreverent bite of yore, Liu’s third feature resembles a more animated version of the youthful rite-of-passage dramas which have been four-a-penny in mainstream mainland Chinese cinema.
Beyond the odd exchange about art and its value in such turbulent times, the film pivots quickly towards the apolitical loves and lives of its young characters. Not that these sentiments don’t exist – and many an aspiring artist has no doubt experienced such confusion in their youth – but the critical historical juncture on which the film was set is simply too important to be ignored.
We will never know whether this is down to Liu (who graduated from art school himself in 1993) going all autobiographical and nostalgic, or because of external factors forced him and co-screenwriter Lin Shan to make the social backdrop more opaque. Pointing to the latter scenario are several title cards slapped on at the end of the film which state the happy-ever-after endings of the characters (they were not translated into English or German at the Berlin screening).
Boasting a voice cast of A-list actors, stellar influencers and even a cameo from the award-winning filmmaker Jia Zhangke, Art College 1994 seems shaped to appeal to a broader church (in terms of age and demographics) than Liu’s previous festival-oriented arthouse fare. Chinese middle-aged audiences who grew up during those watershed years of the 1990s will appreciate revisiting those wistful, youthful days. Meanwhile, festival bookings will come on the back of its high-profile appearance in Berlin, but its appeal outside the country may be limited to a small strata of art-school graduates who happened to have gone through similar experiences during their youth.
At first, Art College 1994 seems to begin where Liu left off in his previous film. After an onscreen quote from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man – which was the film’s title when it was doing the rounds among festival programmers last year – there are acerbic conversations between two wannabe painters about the worth of art in the world. One balks at their obligation to submit their work for a year-end competition as vulgar in the extreme. The other rebuts, “Screw the prize, I’ll take the money,” as he ponders whether he should name his new painting “Untitled, No. 1” to make it sound more important.
The more po-faced of the two young men is Xiaojun (voiced by Dong Zhijian), a sulky, chain-smoking type with shoulder-length hair who is at once idealistic in his dreams and bleak about the possibility of actually achieving them. The jester in this odd couple is Zhifei (Ren Ke), whose chubby and bespectacled appearance and cynical worldview (Marcel Duchamp is a “controversialist”, he spits) make him look more like a budding entrepreneur than the painter he’s training himself to be.
Around them, changes are afoot: with more fortunes to be made elsewhere – or everywhere – some friends are dropping out, while others cash in on the opportunity to hook up with the outside world (literally, for one, as he returns to the dorm with an American girlfriend in tow). These are the days when Rambo posters still adorn walls, and earnest young men lament geniuses who die young (in this case, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who died in 1994).
As the boys cast their gaze abroad for inspiration and throw one-liners about aesthetics at each other, the girls seem much more inward-looking and talk very little about art among themselves. We don’t hear the mild-mannered pianist Lili (Zhou Dongyu) talk about Beethoven or Schumann, but is busy with thoughts about family and marriage, while Hong (“Papi” Jiang Yilei), an aspiring soprano, is preoccupied with her appearance and the fame and fortune that’s hers for the taking further down the line.
What follows is an account of their struggle to stay true to themselves as they confront dismissive pragmatists and self-agrandizing opportunists at every turn. But these villains are simply too caricatured to be resonate in a story which was supposed to be about the banalities of life for confused youngsters. Wouldn’t it be much better, say, for Liu to point out the absurdities of the everyday in 1994, when everything that was once solid and state-backed suddenly melts into air?
But maybe that’s the wrong question to ask. The right one, to quote the film’s protagonist Xiaojun, should be: “Did great pieces of art survive because of their greatness, or are they great because they survived?” The fact that Art College 1994 did finally arrive might itself be cause to celebrate.
Director, editor: Liu Jian
Screenwriters: Lin Shan, Liu Jian
Voice cast: Dong Zhijian, Zhou Dongyu, Ren Ke, Papi, Huang Bo
Producers: Yang Cheng, Shen Lihui, Gao Shiming
Executive producers: Wang Lynne
Animation: Li Jiajia
Music composers: David Wen-Wi Liang, Sun Yunfan, Cui Jian, Alex Liu, Chen Li
Sound designer: Li Danfeng, Gao Ruifeng
Production companies: Nezha Bros. Pictures, Modern Sky Entertainment, China Academy of Art, School of Animation and Game
World sales: Memento International
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Mandarin
118 minutes
