Film Show 037: Lei Lei
An interview with the Chinese animator and filmmaker about the evolution of his work, learning about himself through talking with his parents, and his newest film 'That Day, on the River'
Lei Lei
Lei Lei (b. 1985) is a Chinese animator and filmmaker born in Nanchang and based in Beijing. After studying animation at Tsinghua University, he released a series of jubilant and colorful short films including This Is LOVE (2010) and Big hands oh big hands, let it be bigger and bigger (2013). In 2013 he collaborated with the French editor Thomas Sauvin on Recycled (2013), a film that compiled 3000 images taken from a recycling zone outside of Beijing. From then on, his works have become increasingly interested in personal and national history, often featuring conversations with his parents. His mother’s words appear in Breathless Animals (2019) and A Bright Summer Diary (2020), while his father’s appear in Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish (2022) and That Day, on the River (2023), which premiered at this year’s Berlinale. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked on February 13th, 2023 via Zoom to discuss his family, the difference between Nanchang and Beijing, and the evolution of his filmmaking.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: You were born in Nanchang. Can you describe what it was like growing up there? What sort of memories do you have of your family, friends, the environment?
Lei Lei: Right now I live and work in Beijing and I have for the past three years. Nanchang’s my home town. I always go back to Nanchang each year to see my friends and family members there. For me, it’s a very small town in the south of China, not so modern. But the good thing is, I think the relationship between people in the small town in China is very interesting. We can have dinner with some friends and after that we can go to karaoke and sing. That’s very fun. And we can have fireworks and then get some massages. We check the time, it’s 1 a.m., then I’ll have another round of food, a lot of local delicious food (laughter). At the same time, if you walk down a street in Nanchang, you can find a coffee shop on the left side, and on the right you will see a noodle restaurant that’s very traditional Chinese food. So you can find Western culture and the very local Chinese culture together in this small town.
How would you compare it, then, to Beijing?
Beijing is a big city, so you worry and you’re busy every day. There’s a lot on the schedule. It’s not so fun to meet with friends because to schedule something you need to make sure it’s 6 p.m.or 7 p.m. In Nanchang, in the restaurant, people come and go and it’s so free. But on the other hand, I think if you do film production or contemporary art exhibitions, these kinds of things, you need to go to Beijing or Shanghai to show them to the right people. I don’t think there are contemporary art gallery spaces in Nanchang. Though for me it’s okay because I do a lot of my work in my studio.
When did you first decide that you wanted to get into animation? Did you draw comics a lot when you were a kid?
As kids or teenagers, we watched a lot of animated TV programs every day. When I graduated from university, animation was like a language for young people. At that time I had a lot of friends who skateboarded or played rock music, and I think that independent animation and independent film was part of that. Young people always do dangerous, energetic, and exciting things. My animation at that moment was not industry animation or industrial film. I just did what I liked and I submitted to different animation festivals. For me, animation is a bridge to connect people from different cultural backgrounds. And then, after years, having been to many festivals with so many different kinds of films, I felt like, wow, there’s so many different concepts for moving image artworks. So I tried to develop myself, to be not only funny. I always hoped I could have some concepts in my films. So I started to work on my animation in feature films or in the museum space, to do more like a video installation.
Are there any specific animators or teachers you had that you feel like were really important?
When I was studying in Tsinghua University, I studied a lot about book design, not animation. What inspired me a lot more was skateboarding, rock music, and independent music in Beijing. When I worked on my early animation films, I think the energy was more from indie music or underground acts, those kinds of things. When I do feature films, I watch a lot of Taiwanese New Wave or French New Wave. The concept is the same because people who made films during the Taiwanese New Wave, they wanted to do something against that industrial or official cinema work. They wanted to do something very special and personal.
Do you feel your studies in book design helped you approach animation?
Yeah, because my father was a book designer. So when I think of my memories of childhood, I always remember my father doing a lot of cut-outs, and this was before the digital design generation. He could finish a book design using only his hands, and this also influenced me a lot. When I work with my animations, I use a lot of digital cut-out techniques, which makes things very bright and colorful. But at the same time, I also worry about that kind of colorful design in the cinema because it looks very flat sometimes, and not like a cinematic language. It looks more like a postcard, or like book design. So when I work with storytelling or when I work with my feature film, I try to keep my colorful collage-art style while bringing some cinematic language to build in the architectural space of the cinema. I’m happy I have this book design background as it makes it easy for me to design the pictures in my film.
In a lot of your early shorts, you can see how much you’re developing your style and how you also like to fold in music. For example, there’s the rapper J-fever on This Is LOVE (2010). Recycled (2013) was a collaboration and it feels like a very significant film for you because you were using archival images. Can you talk about your process with that film? There are three different screens, too—did you feel like this was a form of collage?
My animation work uses a lot of colorful patterns but these are also from old magazines or books that I cut out to make the collages. It’s not only the color but the material. I’m interested in old magazines, old pictures. I started to work with my artworks based on family history. I collected a lot of family photos, and then I met my collaborator, Thomas Sauvin, and he said, “I collect a lot of old photos in my studio. Would you like to come to my studio and see my project?” At that moment, Thomas already had half a million photos. He showed me part of it and I thought it was very interesting and amazing. Then I was thinking that I could make a film based on this big archive.
You mentioned my early animations have a very strong personal style. It’s good for animation festivals because people will recognize, “Oh, that’s Lei Lei’s style.” But I also think I limited myself in this way. How about doing something without a story or without a cut-out design? So then I tried to challenge myself. I worked with Thomas Sauvin, to work with an archive, to work with the Recycled project. I think this was a very successful challenge because after Recycled, I wasn’t only working with that kind of colorful cut-out style, I also started working with archives, older photos, more abstract storytelling, and Recycled was not only screening in the cinema, but also in museums and galleries in the white box.
After Recycled I finished A Bright Summer Diary (2020) and also That Day, on the River (2023), short films based on collections and archives. I’m very happy to do something that always challenges me to do something for myself. How would I say that in English? It’s like I closed the door, but opened another window. So I hope I can continue to challenge myself to do something different.
You mentioned how there’s things that you show in the cinema versus a museum or installation space. How do you approach your works knowing that they’re going to appear in these different spaces? Does that affect the way you make your project?
It’s a very interesting process because I don’t think I’m a very professional contemporary artist or filmmaker because I have no gallery to represent my work. On the other hand, I’m not doing industrial film in the cinema. I don’t think I’m a professional, but I like to be unprofessional because I can always try something different or interesting. When I work in the gallery space or museum space I always try to bring cinematic language to them, to the museum. I like to think about how to bring in ideas from my exhibitions for the cinema too. I also like Tsai Ming-liang from Taiwan or Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand and they do both. So I try to do both and learn new ideas from different spaces, which makes me more flexible.
I love how important sound is to your films. In the beginning you would have collaborators input specific sounds or you’d have a specific musician, but with your new film, That Day, on the River (2023), you have skipping and loops that help to capture a specific time period. Are you always thinking about sound when you’re making and compiling the archival footage?
It’s very hard to say if it’s good to do all the sound and the music by myself, because I’m not a very professional musician or sound designer (laughter). But I think the more important thing is if you do everything by yourself, you save money. I can do the editing and work with animation, and then sound and music design all by myself too. That’s very cheap when I don’t need anyone to help me. But I think I love both. At the very beginning, with my early films, I had a very close relationship with my sound collaborator, Li Xingyu. We lived together in one apartment. When I finished a rough cut, I would just give my rough cut to him and he helped me to do some crazy music. And also we have the band, we do some rap, some freestyles. So I like that kind of process. We have similar lifestyles, so that’s why we can work together.
But when I worked on A Bright Summer Diary and Breathless Animals (2019), these were kind of experimental. I understand what I need much better than anybody else, especially for ambient sounds and white noise in the film. I think if I can try a lot to make some effects with my own program, that’s easier than cooperating with others. That’s why originally I just did a lot of sound design and music by myself. In my studio I have a lot of tape and wire recorders. I use a lot of different kinds of techniques and equipment to make different kinds of sounds, and I can have a lot of material that I can then put in my program to try different things. That’s very exciting and is part of filmmaking. So for me, during the filmmaking process, I think the sound materials and the image materials are the same.
But then on a film like Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish (2022), we had a musician from the Netherlands who did very, very great. In that project I totally understood that, I’m not a good sound designer and I’m not a good musician, and they can do much better than me and it’ll sound very nice in the cinema. In the 5.1 system it sounds so beautiful. I can only do what I can. I’m very open to cooperating with different artists and I hope I can meet very talented musicians in the future for my next project.
With your recent films, Breathless Animals, Bright Summer Diary, Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish, and That Day, on the River, you’re dealing with both personal histories and also, in some sense, a history of China from decades past. What specific things do you feel like you learned, about yourself or about China from having made these films?
It’s interesting because, for myself, when I worked on Breathless Animals I just worked with pictures or moving images at the beginning, and then I had voiceover dialogue with my mom and we talked about China and its history. For her generation that’s a more serious topic. But more important in the film is the concept of how to build the space between the sound and the image. At the same time we needed stories and text in the film to help audiences understand the picture, to have a dialogue with the audience.
I think this happened because I’ve always had questions about identity in my projects. In my early films, they’re so colorful and there’s a lot of happy imagery, comics, those kinds of ideas. I tried to find out who I was recently. Where is my energy and how do I find love in that moment? But then I found out, maybe it’s not enough to find an identity in my generation. I need to understand who my father was, I need to understand my parents’ generation, my grandparents’ generation so I could understand myself better. So starting from Breathless Animals, this comes from the dialogue with my mother, and Bright Summer Diary comes from the dialogue with my mother too. But the other two films, Silver Bird and That Day, on the River, come from dialogue with my father.
From those projects I try to understand the generations in my family tree, my parents and grandparents, how they influenced me and why my identity is like this. If in the future any film festival program puts all my films together they will find out about different generations, respectively, in my projects. I see my early film as being about my generation, and the other films are about my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. If the audience watches all of my films, they’ll find out what a young Chinese artist looks like. They’re influenced by a very traditional Chinese cultural background but when they grow up they are influenced by a lot of pop art, computers, a lot of modernist information.
It’s cool that you have these two films where you talk with your mom and then two films where you talk with your dad. How did you feel like they each shaped those different films?
Interesting question. It’s hard for me to answer. I think I’m too close to my mom and too close to my dad so I can’t say. Maybe the audience could answer this question better than me. In film, I think it’s more interesting to keep distance with the characters. If you watch Bright Summer Diary or Breathless Animals, I cut out dialogue a lot. Sometimes when my mom tries to answer some question, I just cut out her answer. An audience will be very confused as to where the answer is, and they need to have the imagination to try to find out the answer during the film screening.
The film is not like a live action or documentary film, it’s very experimental. I think of my mom’s answer or the dialogue more like materials, same as the picture. My mom and dad feel more like the space between the image and the sound design. I don’t know if that makes sense. It’s the sketch or the concept behind the moving image that’s stronger than the character. That could help the audience to understand that this personal memory is part of the memory of a larger group, of everyone in this country.
And if the film is screened in different countries, people will understand that China has a similar cultural background as we have. I remember when I screened Breathless Animals in Korea, a lot of audience members said, “Oh China has a similar architectural style” or “Oh China has a similar modernist generation that we have.” They found a similar culture in other Asian countries. That’s very interesting for me, to help the audience not only focus on the character in the film, but also to understand the big concepts.
It’s funny how you mention, with the films with your mom, that you may cut out her response so there’s space for us to imagine what it is. In Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish, you have this process of making something with clay and it eventually shows up in the actual film. I feel like that feature was emblematic of this process of ongoing discovery. How was it working with that material, and how did you decide how to use it?
I don’t want the audience to sit there in the cinema feeling like they are receiving some result or some correct answer. I would like to bring the process of discussion into the cinema. That’s why when my mom tried to answer the question, I cut it. There are no right answers, it’s totally open. That’s very important. If I bring this kind of family discussion to the cinema, it feels dangerous because it might bore the audience. Everyone has conversations with their parents and has this kind of family story. Why does the audience need to understand my family story? That makes me think that maybe the story is not important, or rather the answers are not that important. I think the process, how we understand each other, is important. So if I cut out the right answer or cut out the result in the cinema, the audience will bring their own memory, their own story, their own cultural background to the cinema to have a conversation with the film.
That Day, on the River seems more straightforward because you have these stories with your dad, and a lot of that doesn’t get cut out. I’m curious about how these ideas you mention come through in that film, because it feels very intimate, like you’re inviting us to understand your dad.
That’s interesting because I was just saying that maybe I don’t want the audience to understand what my mom or my father looks like in the film. But as you mentioned, in That Day, on the River I tried to introduce my father to the audience. I think because I worked on my feature film Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish for a very long time, I did a lot of research and interviews, and I had so much material, but Silver Bird only showed part of that to the audience. With animation and some moving-image techniques, people can’t see how my father looks. So then I tried to do another work to look at my father from another angle.
It’s a very interesting dialogue between me and my father. He’s not a traditional Asian father in the family. In a lot of Asian families, the father is always very powerful, but my father always feels, I wouldn’t say weak, but he is always very honest with me and says, “I’m not good at this and I’m not good at that.” I’m very interested in those answers. Why does this happen? Why does he feel weak in all the art formats? He’s not good at dance, music, everything. He’s just not interested. So I just continued to develop the background stories. And I don’t know if I found the right answer, but I think it’s interesting.
I love That Day, on the River because I feel like your dad is being very honest. That’s not something I usually hear from Asian males of their generation. He said his nickname as a kid was “the pale-skinned nerd.” That’s something an Asian father would never admit.
Totally. It’s very interesting to bring this kind of father to the international cinema, to a global cinema. It’s quite different from the traditional Asian male in our minds.
Obviously you have a lot of archival footage that you’re using to get an understanding of the time that your dad is talking about. You’ve been working with archival footage since Recycled, how do you feel you’ve changed in this past decade?
This is important. Very good question. I think that in Recycled, it’s short films and at a very high speed. When you watch Recycled it looks like artists want to show audiences, “Look at me, I have a lot of interesting materials and I would like to tell you what I feel from the materials right now.” (laughter). If we’re screening Recycled in the cinema, it looks like a show and the audience has no rights. They just sit down and they enjoy these big pictures and the interesting process.
So after Recycled, I wanted not only the filmmaker to have the power, I wanted everyone in the cinema to have a right to to understand the picture, to have the right to describe the picture. Not like the filmmakers saying, “I have interesting materials.” It should be the filmmaker showing some materials, and everyone having the right to understand the material or to describe the material. That’s very important for me in contemporary cinema.
I started to read some books and watch films from the French New Wave. I found that cinema is not the place to do a kind of creepy show. Cinema is more a space to put a shadow on the wall, and the audience could have the right to imagine or dialogue with the filmmaker. I think that’s more important. Breathless Animals and That Day, on the River were my new projects. I put a lot of still images in, and the speed is very slow in the cinema, and sometimes I don’t have the right answers to the questions in the film. It’s quite open. It’s not like Recycled where I pushed some ideas to the audience. I can’t say I grew up, but my ideas with the archive and my cinematic language have changed.
I don’t have any other questions, but is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn’t talk about today?
I can talk a little about sound design and music. As I mentioned, I just use different kinds of equipment to work with music. But I also really go to my home town, Nanchang. We record a lot of amazing sound in the countryside—we have a lot of good ambient sound. This kind of process makes me very happy. It’s very different from animation work, because when I work with animation, I sit down in my studio and work for 15 hours each day. I have no time to work outside. So when I worked on Breathless Animals or my new film That Day, on the River, I can do a lot of traveling and recording and I really meet people and talk with them, I record the ambient sounds in the forest. I think that process makes me feel more natural in my filmmaking and makes me understand the cinematic feeling better in my films. I’m very happy I can also do the music and the sound design for my own project. I save money and it pushes me to go outside to the forest (laughter).
You mentioned earlier that you grew up watching cartoons. Are there any favorite cartoons that you remember really liking?
Of course. The old films from Shanghai Animation Studio. Monkey King, these kinds of films I liked very much. And of course some Japanese manga like Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, and Doraemon.
There’s one question I always end my interviews with: can you share one thing that you love about yourself?
I love my daughter’s drawings. When she was only five years old, her drawings were very good. Maybe I could do a new animation or new film project based on my kids’ drawings.
Do you spend a lot of time doing art with your kids?
Not these two weeks. I’m so busy getting ready for the Berlinale. But during the winter we spend a lot of time together because kindergarten closed in China recently. So my kids always stay at home and we have very nice days together.
More information about Lei Lei’s works can be found at his website.
Thank you for reading the 37th issue of Film Show. Shout out to my niece and nephews who always demand that I play Lei Lei’s Big hands oh big hands, let it be bigger and bigger (2013) for them.
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