Chinese Painter Sun Xun Brings Ten Years of Work to a Feature-Length Animation

Chinese painter Sun Xun has completed a feature-length animated film, and he paid for much of it himself. The film is called Magic Atlas, and it took him about ten years, on and off, to make.

The film blends many visual styles. Its look ranges from woodcuts, a printing method that uses a carved block of wood, to soft pastel drawings and the ink painting of China's Song dynasty, which ran from 960 to 1279. The Art Newspaper reported on the film's design and production.

Most of the story is set in a coal-mining kingdom called Luocha. Sun draws it in black-and-white woodcuts, so the world of the film looks like a series of carved prints brought to life.

Animation usually means a team of professional animators. Sun went another way. Over the course of production he employed 500 art students, who drew the individual frames, the still images that play one after another to create movement. Each student contributed to the look of the film, rather than working on a standard animation line.

The film's work has already been recognised on the festival circuit. Magic Atlas received a Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival, an award chosen by the festival's judging panel and separate from its top prize.

For anyone who has ever wondered how a film gets made, the story is a useful one. Ten years, hundreds of hands and a largely self-funded budget add up to a long road from a single idea to a finished screen. Audiences who want to see how a painter's style can become moving pictures will have the chance to judge the result for themselves.