Huaning Wang

MONSTER

2D animation.By: Huaning Wang; Cindy Zhang; Arthur Zhang.

“Monster is an animation that aims at revealing the pressure of modern fast-paced society and the workplace, as well as the influence of long-term psychological stress on health. This narrative story mainly follows a day in the life of the main character, who is an ordinary office worker, and encounters many difficult and exhausting situations during work, such as being bullied by colleagues, working from morning till night, and still having to work overtime. In the middle of the plot, we inserted the protagonist's connection with The Classic of Mountains and Seas, and the shadow of his childhood as a secondary line and theme. The images and the designs of monsters are based on the beasts in The Classic of Mountains and Seas, which embodies the fantastic and grotesque imagination of our ancestors. We chose to conduct research on this Chinese classic text and involve these in our animation of these monster elements owing to our common interest in Chinese culture and legends. The animation is inspired by the serious social situation of high involution and “Lie-down culture” within the modern Chinese social atmosphere. Through the animation, we want to appeal to the public to draw attention to the stress and diseases caused by stressful environments in our modern lives.””