In a futuristic retelling of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, director Chiu Li Wei tells a tale of a deceitful pursuit of a better life in his most experimental animation feature yet.
by Anyu Ching
See the NYC Premiere of feature-length animated film Pigsy on February 24 @9:10 PM at LOOK Cinemas (657 West 57th Street) as part of New York City’s 12th Annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival. Tickets now on sale!
Chiu Li Wei wants everyone to know that Pigsy is not a hero.
The Taiwanese animation film director, who is the recipient of numerous accolades including the coveted 60th Golden Horse Award for Best Animated Feature, depicts an unlikely protagonist in his cunning quest for a better life in Chiu’s second and most experimental feature yet.
The 95-minute film opens with the blinking of a Siamese cat’s third eye before pulling out to reveal a flurry of flying cars, jet packs, and gliding buses, all darting gracefully across invisible traffic lines in a futuristic chun yun—the annual Lunar New Year migration. Immediately, Chiu makes it clear that we are not in Kansas anymore, but a sci-fi world where anthropomorphic creatures and humans alike are divided into two distinct realms: Old Town and New World.
Old Town—an overcrowded, haphazard array of dilapidated structures that was once a vibrant city—is where we meet the film’s titular character Pigsy, a lazy and self-centered pig voiced by Taiwanese singer-actor Hsu Kuang Han (“Someday or One Day”). The film’s inciting incident occurs when megacorporation Nirvana Enterprise unveils the New World project: an austere and modern utopia that is advertised as possessing all of the infrastructure and advanced technology that Old Town lacks, including but not limited to the rejuvenation of aging skin.
As Old Town stands on the brink of abandonment, Pigsy hopes to migrate himself and his grandmother to New World but securing admittance is proving to be a harder task than he, and viewers, are prepared for.
Chiu first devised Pigsy while traveling on a subway car in Manhattan. The year was 2006, and the director had been staying in New York as part of an artist residency at Queen’s Flushing Town Hall. Chiu recalls glancing around at the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life and wondering if people who lived on the same planet centuries ago would have believed that fantastical things didn’t simply just exist in our imagination but were a part of our future. It was from there that Chiu thought of Wu Cheng En’s classic Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West, which tells the story of a monk’s pilgrimage to India to obtain Buddhist sutras. Contemplating this legendary tale, Chiu began to wonder: “Maybe [Wu Cheng En] is not writing about a fantastic world. Maybe he is writing about the future.”
To reimagine arguably the most famous piece of literature in East Asia is no small feat, and Chiu admits that staying true to the original tale was his biggest challenge. “Everyone knows the story,” Chiu tells me from the rooftop of his hotel in India. A staff member had told him it was the best spot for Wi-Fi in the entire building. Our conversation is sporadically interrupted by the sound of fireworks from a Hindu festival nearby. “Everyone already knows who is the bad guy and who is the good guy. There is no element of surprise.”
To combat this, Chiu’s film adopts the perspective of Pigsy, a character who is neither a hero nor a villain, who constantly toes the line between doing what’s right and succumbing to what’s wrong, and whose moral compass can be easily abandoned in favor of instant gratification. In other words, us.
“I wanted to create somebody like us,” Chiu says. “We work so hard to make money because more money will lead to a better life. I think that’s crazy. The rent of apartments is very, very high in Taipei, in Beijing, in Shanghai, in Tokyo. We earn money just so we can stay. Stay in the New World. To prove that we are not losers. But we actually have a choice. There’s no one path that we all must follow. I wanted to create a character that tells that story.”
Pigsy was produced by studio2, a Taiwanese animation lab where Chiu serves as director. The film combines both 2D and 3D animation techniques to create a unique visual style that is distinctive of Taiwan. Chiu details the grueling process of extracting different elements from American and Japanese animation styles to create something that looks entirely new. The reason behind this decision was due to financial constraints.
“Pigsy is a very, very independent animation,” Chiu explains. “When I say independent, I mean we have a very low budget. And since we didn’t have any money, we had to do things differently.” The production team had to work closely with Chiu to realize this vision, and it involved numerous late nights and re-editing.
One particular evening stands out in Chiu’s memory. They were in the final mixing stage, four weeks before the film was scheduled to be finished, and Chiu, alongside his producer, decided to re-edit the entire thing. “In animation, to re-edit something is a very big deal,” Chiu says, reminiscing with a smile. “It was a midnight decision.” And, ultimately, one Chiu would never grow to regret.
Chiu hopes that viewers of Pigsy will come away with a renewed sense of faith in themselves and their future, and teases the existence of hidden messages that eagle-eyed watchers of the film may uncover upon close analysis of the words, characters, and symbols scattered throughout.
Anyu Ching
Anyu Ching is a Singaporean journalist and writer based in New York City and Boston, Massachusetts. She is passionate about telling stories ranging from social justice to pop culture phenomena. In 2023, Anyu graduated from New York University with High Honors in Print Journalism following a year-long intensive research project about Singapore’s LGBTQ+ community. Her works have been featured in PAPER Magazine, Shoeleather Magazine, The Untitled Magazine, Washington Square News, and The SAS Eye.
About Winter Film Awards
New York City’s 12th Annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival runs February 21-25 2024 in New York City and includes 82 outstanding films, a diverse mixture of animated films, documentaries, comedies, romances, dramas, horror films, music videos and web series of all lengths. Our five-day event is jam-packed with screenings and Q&A sessions at NYC’s LOOK Cinemas, six Education sessions/workshops and a variety of filmmaker networking events all coming to a glittering close on February 25 with our red-carpet gala Awards Ceremony.
Winter Film Awards is dedicated to showcasing the amazing diversity of voices in indie film and our 2024 lineup is 58% made by women and half by or about people of color. Filmmakers come from 23 countries and 41% of our films were made in the New York City area. 13 films were made by students and 26 are works from first-time filmmakers.
Winter Film Awards programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Promotional support provided by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment.
Visit https://winterfilmawards.com/wfa2024/ for more information.
