After his fiance’s botched plastic surgery, Xiao Zhang decides to take drastic measures to help her correct it and steals a case containing over a million yuan ($150,000 in US dollars) belonging to his boss, a local mobster. Word about the missing case reaches the mobster, Uncle Liu, and off we go on a heart-pounding race to get the money back. This turns out to be easier said than done when Xiao Zhang himself gets robbed!
Director Liu Jian gives us a tour of China’s underworld and the odd characters that inhabited it in this edgy, vividly drawn animated thriller. Xiao Zhang’s descent into the worst night of his life is starkly rendered into a modern noir via animation, which is filled with suspicious characters who find themselves caught in absurdity rather than looking for a road beyond the darkness.
Chinese animator and film director Liu Jian began his career in 1995, and has since become a well-known name in the industry, eventually going on to found the Le-joy Animation Studio in 2007. Based in Nanjing, his first turn as a director was in 2010 with the film Piercing I.