Chinese Indie Animation Superstar Busifan on His Annecy Competition Player ‘The Storm’
variety.comHolly Jones China’s unwitting creative phenom Yang Zhigang, known as Busifan, presents an imaginative, heartwarming and gleefully chaotic animated journey in his latest feature, “The Storm,” selected to screen in main competition at this year’s Annecy Festival.
The auteur previously worked in telecommunications and never formally studied filmmaking, yet emerged as a self-taught cult figure on China’s animation circuit via its Flash scene in 2004 with “The Black Bird,” a seven-act episodic that craftily followed a wary warrior and his avian aide.
With his brutal and defiant debut feature, 2017’s “The Guardian” (“Dahufa”), Busifan disconnected from the rules imposed by the commercial market as he sussed out his inner turmoil for the script.
This solidified him as a boundary-breaking artist, and the film’s simmering success served to bolster the region’s independent movement and further out-of-the-box concepts.
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