You asked me whether this little animated film from China has Dada verve. Fine, I'll get to work.
Release: August 2026. Direction: a mother-son team who made the film on a budget of about $14,000. Production company: Dalian Jingyuan Culture Film and Television Media, originally an interior design firm, not a film production company. Plot: the ox character was chosen after the zodiac sign of the director's father, the message ("children should develop perseverance early") matters to him. Source: radio show "Entrepreneurial Youth Talk," interview with Guancha.
Fascinating: for the hype, the frantic attention, there's no identifiable patient zero here, no single account that made the film known. The ignition was a hashtag about the box-office number, not about the film.
Spontaneously I ask: how did this remark get past censorship?
Does that make "Niu Lai" Dadaesque?
The historical Dadaists deliberately used error, chance, the uncontrolled as a tool, because for them the controlled, the polished, counted as dishonest. AI-generated images are today what academic salon painting was for Dada – perfect, smooth, endlessly reproducible. The jerky polygons, the clipped-through figures, the perfectly round leaves in Niú Lái show that no optimizing process was at work here – neither a studio team nor a model.
But careful: the director didn't make "error as statement" – he simply had no money, little time, no team.
The supposed Dada effect (awkwardness, unfinishedness, no smooth surface) in Niú Lái is a byproduct of necessity, which only the audience afterward charged with meaning.
A meme is an idea that only propagates when you damage it. Every copy is a small infidelity to the original. That very infidelity is the fun of the propagation, not the accident.
Trash meme? A trash meme shows an error that people laugh at. The pleasure is condescension from above: "so bad it's funny." Everyone agrees that something failed here.
So what's interesting, then, are the many parodies and continuations of the film. That's where I'd find Dada. What matters is whether the Memerei, the memeing, brings the original statement crashing down.
Handmade flawedness as proof of authenticity against the flood of AI images? The West laid it on too thick again.
Dada doesn't like this know-it-all overstatement, this pouncing on a phenomenon to exploit it for some ideology or other. Dada is subtler.
One of my Dada Spotting search questions is: "Which convention does a company play with, so that breaking that convention even feels good?"
No, not Dada spotted, here.
But a great finger exercise in where Dada becomes palpable today and where it doesn't.