Television cinematographer and director Lin Fu-ching (林福清) didn’t take the easy way out when it came to his debut feature Jumping Boy (不倒翁的奇幻旅程), a life-affirming children’s film that marries live action and animation. Though not the most exciting of movies, Jumping Boy deserves credit for combining real actors with animated elements while venturing into the territory of children’s cinema, a genre little visited by local filmmakers. Another merit is a lively cast led by eminent thespian Chin Shih-chieh (金士傑).
Chin plays Tian Bian, a celebrated children’s book author who rocketed to fame with his first published story, Roly-poly. But few people know that 20 years previously, the then-aspiring writer was repeatedly turned down by publishing houses and couldn’t sell any of the stories he wrote for his son, who was his most dedicated fan. One day, a friend of his son told Tian Bian a tale about a roly-poly doll. The writer took the story and passed it off as his own. Roly-poly became a best-selling book that brought Tian Bian fame and fortune, but the writer was never able to regain his son’s trust after the incident.
Back in the present day, Tian Bian decides to go back to his hometown in Tainan to find the boy he stole from and make amends. But instead of the boy, the aging writer meets Ka (Mai Hao-wei, 買皓瑋), an elementary school student who lost a leg to bone cancer. A friendship quickly develops between the two as they explore the pastoral town together and find strength in each other’s company along the way.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
Director Lin reportedly invested three years and a personal bank loan worth NT$20 million in the work, which was inspired by a documentary he made in 2007 about a group of young children living with from bone cancer. Most of the movie takes place in the director’s hometown of Zuojhen (左鎮), Greater Tainan, where the mountainous, rugged landscape serves as a surreal backdrop for the film as it swings between reality and the fantasies told by Chin’s character.
Content-wise, the film is more about one man’s efforts to come to terms with his past than an imaginative portrait of the world as seen through the eyes of children. The story’s structure is a loose thread and risks losing the audience’s attention with its slow approach to storytelling. The already thin material is stretched even more in the middle of the movie.
The film’s five animated segments, totaling 25 minutes in length, are attention-grabbing. Beautifully realized by artist and professor Jack Shih (史明輝) and his team of student animators, each piece shows a distinctive style and can be appreciated as an individual work in its own right. Three of the five animated works have since entered the international film circuit and have been screened at showcases including the International Festival of Animated Films AniFest in the Czech Republic, Sapporo Short Film Festival in Japan and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in Germany.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS