The rough path by which I entered the “Liu Big Goose Cinematic Universe” was like this: I clicked into a short film on the front page where Director Xiao Ce collaborated with Phoenix Legend. In the bullet comments I felt the popularity of Liu Big Goose, the manager of Black Swan🦢 Square, and then I started “binge‑watching” through Director Xiao Ce’s uploads. The simple, unpretentious acting of the aunties and uncles, and the down‑to‑earth “classic adaptations,” had me genuinely addicted for an entire afternoon of home quarantine.
Some hazy thoughts kept drifting around in the process, so I’ll try to record them here.
The following comments come from random musing and casual sociology around me.
What Director Xiao Ce has brought to the “actors”
Huan Yin Liu Village is full of hidden dragons and crouching tigers—or rather, China’s countryside is packed with folk performing arts talents lying in wait. Director Xiao Ce is the one who woke them up. Aunt Cao, who has a Kunqu background, blew me away the moment she opened her mouth in the most recent award‑ceremony short. Sanpao, a young man with a Northeastern accent, is a “neighborhood grandpa” in real life with a strong desire to perform and a gift of gab, and he has successfully created a Liu Neng‑type character. Er Gou, who runs a hotpot restaurant and has the “dance idiot” persona, somehow brings an absurd sense of sophistication even when playing a gangster getting beaten up.
Director Xiao Ce and his new actors are mutually accomplishing one another. Director Xiao Ce enjoys being hailed as “Bilibili’s No.1 Director,” so what has he given his “actors” in return?
Online, things are easy to quantify. Online, they’re full‑fledged “big stars,” and have even spawned lots of derivative memes. A quick scan shows that the core figures of the “Liu Big Goose Universe,” Aunt Goose and Sanpao, each have 100k+ followers—a number many young people can only dream of.
What about offline? Off the top of my head:
- One more form of entertainment: aside from housework, farm work, mahjong, and chatting, they now have another kind of fun, whose spiritual value may be no less than those shiny numbers online.
- Revenue sharing that improves their lives. I can only guess about income, but I believe it shouldn’t be bad.
Beyond that, how do the “actors” feel about their own works? Objectively speaking, these pieces are aimed at young audiences. For some bits and memes, I think the “actors” have “difficulty” understanding them. Under those circumstances, are they able to fully enjoy the performance, or is it more like: I just read the lines as written, I don’t really get why the audience laughs, but since they like me, I’m happy?
A pot of congee🥣 elders cook for juniors
Hence this line of thought: it’s like how I like savory congee, and every time my grandma cooks it for me, I never really ask whether she likes it herself, or whether she’s just happy when I have an extra bowl. Even I feel I’m being melodramatic, but I still want to keep thinking it through.
Here’s an extreme and inappropriate analogy: it reminds me of monkey shows🐒…
The monkey doesn’t know what’s funny about its jumping up and down; it only feels the bustle around it. It listens to the old trainer and makes the prescribed moves, and the audience laughs. The “actors” may not fully understand the lines they’re speaking, but they enjoy the fact that their lines make people laugh. In this situation, does it really matter whether they themselves are enjoying the performance 100%?
This train of thought is really an extension of something else. I’ve watched the behind‑the‑scenes clips: Director Xiao Ce patiently explains various online memes to the “actors” on set. It’s just that I personally feel some internet memes are relatively hard for elders to grasp, which is where this bit of melodrama🤦♂️ comes from. But regardless of how the elders feel, the juniors truly love this pot of congee.
Scripts that are clever and crowd‑pleasing📒
For ten‑odd‑minute short dramas, Director Xiao Ce does a good job.
Several scripts follow a pattern: pick a movie that’s very familiar in youth circles and take its story framework; then drop the “original characters” (as created in this universe) into that framework, either unchanged or slightly adjusted; and let new plotlines emerge from the collisions between these characters and the original ones. For example, “Kai Zong Li Pai” mirrors “The Master,” and “Jiao Fu” uses multiple iconic scenes of Liu Huaqiang.
From this angle, I think the content of these shorts isn’t essentially different from Bilibili edits that remix classic scenes; they just take the form of a fully shot short film with a director, a script, and actors. In essence, what the audience is consuming is still the classic scenes from existing film and TV—the so‑called “iconic moments.” Viewers love this kind of short, sharp, and snappy content: no need to invest brainpower to get to know the characters; they only need to roughly map the new roles onto the old ones to understand the whole story. That’s what makes it crowd‑pleasing.
And the “cleverness” is easy to understand too. Because of both time constraints and the writer’s skill ceiling (not to deny the screenwriter—crafting an original story that hooks people in a short time is simply very hard), selecting a classic narrative framework and classic segments lets the audience quickly grasp the story. Once viewers match the short to the classic work, they get a little self‑satisfied feeling (“My viewing literacy is high; I spotted the connection”), which in turn lowers their expectations for the short’s own narrative strength.
Original storytelling is very difficult—that’s a limit of screenwriting skill—and telling that story well within ten‑odd minutes further tests the director’s ability. Clearly, this is relatively hard for Director Xiao Ce’s team right now. So for a few pieces, the only option is to be a bit “clever” at the script level: borrow classic stories and scenes so the audience can enter the story more easily, and so the demands on the director are reduced.
I don’t want to, and can’t, deny the value of these works. I hope that, amid all the praise, Director Xiao Ce can look his own team in the eye and recognize that, in these particular works, the team is taking a shortcut. Where that shortcut leads, and how far it can carry them, no one knows.
In a Southern Weekly interview with Director Xiao Ce, he mentioned that he left Zhu Yidan because he realized he could easily churn out a script by following a formula, and that he no longer felt the sense of creation. So, to me, Director Xiao Ce has artistic ambition; he won’t stay on the shortcut for too long.
I have no doubt at all that he and his team will go on to create more and better short films with original stories, at a level equal to or even beyond what we see now.