It\u2019s weirdly funny to see a year mentioned in the title of \u201cArt College 1994,\u201d an animated Chinese college dorm rom-com about young people and their greatest loves, themselves. You could easily imagine this feature-length cartoon taking place in another time or place without losing much of either its specificity or universality. Swap out a Nirvana\u00a0poster or a multi-tiered tape-deck stereo, and you\u2019ll still have an unsentimental and quietly unsparing portrait of idealistic undergrads at a pivotal moment when they start to realize how small they are in the world that awaits them after graduation.<\/p>\n
Director\/co-writer Liu Jian\u2019s affection for his impulsive young characters adds a welcome variation to the usual pre-graduation coming-of-age story\u2019s concerns for life after college. It\u2019s funny because it\u2019s true, and not only to its young subjects\u2019 inconstant values. These art students, like most art students, take themselves too seriously and also live in a beautiful oasis that fosters tendencies that, to anyone else, must seem indulgent. \u201cArt College 1994\u201d is unassumingly sweet because it\u2019s about young people and their eternal quest for freedom and self-expression, mostly inside their own navels. <\/p>\n
\u201cArt College 1994\u201d is a time capsule about that shimmering moment in time when you think you know exactly what you\u2019re talking about without knowing much at all. Liu (\u201cHave a Nice Day\u201d) shows an unusual patience and fascination with his characters, whose overlapping stories tend to meander more than they progress. There\u2019s some intrigue about who will go where after school and who\u2019s dating whom, making fair weather partners out of musical students Hao Lili (Zhuo Dongyu) and Gao Hong (Papi) and fine arts majors Zhifei (Shaoxing) and Xiaojun (Dong Zijian). There\u2019s also a frequently rotated cast of supporting characters who receive and project their own ideas back at these four core main protagonists. <\/p>\n
Liu focuses more on his characters\u2019 academic setting since his blinkered twenty-somethings only think they know what they want and only on their own vaguely personal terms. Jokes about the art world and its young, impressionable supporters abound. Some are more amusing than laugh-aloud funny, though even that makes sense since most people in this movie don\u2019t seem to have an outdoor voice. <\/p>\n
A museum curator\u2019s \u201cmanifesto\u201d is greeted with shrugs\u2014\u201cI know every word here, but I don\u2019t understand a thing.\u201d A bemused student teases a well-traveled artist from Taiwan (renowned filmmaker Jia Zhangke) with a quasi-Daoist question\u2014\u201cIs the moon more beautiful abroad?\u201d\u2014and is instantly shut down by an embarrassed administrator: \u201cPlease don\u2019t bring up things unrelated to today\u2019s topic.\u201d Art is burned for freedom and portfolios\u2019 sake, and love matches are pursued and rescinded with startling regularity. Also, really, you\u2019re engaged to him<\/em>\u2014you, so soon?? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s weirdly funny to see a year mentioned in the title of \u201cArt College 1994,\u201d an animated Chinese college dorm rom-com about young people and their greatest loves, themselves. You could easily imagine this feature-length cartoon taking place in another time or place without losing much of either its specificity or universality. Swap out a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[34,33],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comedy-movies","tag-animation","tag-comedy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}