General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Big Fish & Begonia (大鱼海棠)

Big Fish & Begonia (大鱼海棠; also known as Da Hai or Big Fish & Chinese Flowering Crabapple) is a 2016 Chinese animated fantasy film directed by Liang Xuan (梁旋) and Zhang Chun (张春), about a girl from a mythical undersea world who tries to revive a human boy who died saving her. Produced by the Beijing studio B&T (彼岸天) with Enlight Media, it took twelve years to move from a seven-minute student short to a 105-minute feature, and its release became one of the most discussed events in recent Chinese animation.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	8 July 2016, mainland China; 105 minutes; Mandarin; directors Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun¹
Origin	A 7-minute animated short made in 2004 from Liang Xuan's dream, which drew wide attention online²
Production span	12 years from short to feature, including repeated delays that earned it the nickname of a legendary "pit" among Chinese animation fans³
Crowdfunding	June 2013: about 1.58 million yuan raised from nearly 4,000 online backers, then the largest crowdfunded project in China²
Box office	Opening day 69.84 million yuan, then a record for a domestic animated film; first weekend 223 million yuan; total about 565 million yuan⁴^•⁵
Reception	Polarized: praised for visuals and Chinese-style design, criticized for a weak story; the Douban score fell from around 8 to the mid-6s within weeks⁶
Literary sources	Draws on Zhuangzi's "Free and Easy Wandering" (《逍遥游》), the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》), and other classical texts¹
Afterlife	Re-released on 19 June 2026 with a new IMAX 2D version; a sequel, Big Fish & Begonia 2, is in production⁷

Spoilers

Story and setting

The film is set in a world parallel to the human one, populated by the "Others" (其他人), beings who are neither gods nor humans and who work for the gods, running the laws of the natural world and keeping human souls. Their sky connects to the sea of the human world. On her sixteenth birthday, Chun (椿, voiced by Ji Guanlin), a girl of the Chun clan who tends the flowering begonia, transforms into a dolphin and travels to the human world as a rite of passage. Trapped in a fishing net, she is freed by a human boy who drowns in the attempt. To repay him and bring him back to life, Chun trades half of her own lifespan to the spirit keeper Ling Po for the boy's soul, which appears as a fish the size of a thumb, and must nurture it until it grows larger than a whale and can return to the sea. A boy named Qiu (湫, voiced by Su Shangqing), who loves Chun, helps her through the ordeal; the human boy's soul is named Kun (鲲, voiced by Xu Weizhou).⁸^•⁹

The premise comes from a passage of Zhuangzi quoted by the filmmakers: "In the Northern Ocean there is a fish, its name is Kun, so large none know how many thousand li it measures," together with the line about the great Chun tree whose eight thousand years count as one spring. The design also incorporates figures from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the In Search of the Supernatural, and myths such as Nüwa mending the sky.¹^•¹⁰ The visual world is built from Chinese landmarks and motifs: the round earthen tulou of Fujian serve as the "God's Walled Village," alongside sea-of-clouds scenery of Mount Hua, southwestern terraced fields, the Chaka salt lake, and objects such as lotus lanterns, oil-paper umbrellas, and stone lions.⁹

From a dream to a feature

The short film. In 2004 Liang Xuan, then a student in thermal engineering at Tsinghua University, dreamed of a small fish that kept growing until no container could hold it and had to be returned to the sea, where it wanted instead to fly into the sky. He and Zhang Chun, a painting student from the Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts, turned the dream into a seven-minute animated short and posted it online, where it became one of the most-viewed short works of the period and gathered the project's first fans.¹¹^•² In 2005 the two founded the studio B&T, and Liang Xuan, then 21, dropped out of Tsinghua to work on animation full time.²

Script and sample reel. After a 2007 grant allowed preliminary work to begin, the pair spent about three years writing the feature script, making repeated research trips to the Fujian tulou; Liang Xuan said the study of tulou architecture nearly made him a half-expert. A 20-minute sample reel financed with their own funds and equity investment won seven awards in South Korea and circulated widely online.¹¹ Financing then stalled: an exclusivity agreement with Shanghai Media Group collapsed after that company's 2010 restructuring, and the market of the time, in which the top-grossing animated films earned only tens of millions of yuan, could not support a production budget above ten million.¹¹^•¹²

Crowdfunding and Enlight. In June 2013 Liang Xuan published a long Weibo post asking for help, and nearly 4,000 backers contributed about 1.58 million yuan, at the time the largest sum raised by a Chinese crowdfunding project.² The campaign also caught the attention of Wang Changtian, president of Enlight Media, who decided in November 2013 to invest. With Enlight's backing, reported at 5 million US dollars, production proper began and the film was completed in about two and a half years.¹¹^•¹²^•¹³ Spending on the animation itself was put by the directors at more than 30 million yuan; an industry table later listed the production cost at 65 million yuan.¹⁴^•⁵ The directors attributed the long schedule partly to a shortage of experienced animation production talent in China, which Liang Xuan called a serious generational gap in the industry.³

Release and box office

The film was dated at a "Twelve Years, One Dream" press conference in April 2016 and opened on 8 July 2016.¹⁴ Its first day earned 69.84 million yuan, surpassing the previous domestic-animation opening record set by Monkey King: Hero Is Back earlier the same year, and the first weekend brought the total to 223 million yuan; five days after release the total stood near 300 million yuan.⁴^•¹⁵ The final mainland total was about 565 million yuan, with a later Enlight investor table giving 573 million yuan.⁵^•¹⁶ Merchandise sales reached 50 million yuan within two weeks of release, exceeding the 30 million yuan production cost cited in the same industry analysis.¹⁷

Reception

A polarized domestic response. The film opened to the highest expectations of any Chinese animated feature of its year, and the response split sharply. Supporters praised the finished visuals and the film's Chinese aesthetic; critics attacked the story's logic, its character writing, and what many saw as a conventional love triangle dressed in mythological material, with one widely repeated verdict being that twelve years of waiting had produced a love-triangle plot.⁶^•¹⁸ The Douban score fell steadily after release, from 8.5 to 6.9 in one account, from 8.1 to 6.6 in the director interview, and from 8 to 6.8 in a third; across accounts the drop was from around 8 to the mid-6s within the first weeks.⁶^•⁴^•¹⁵ Some viewers also alleged that the visual style borrowed from Japanese animation, a comparison the directors rejected, arguing that Japanese culture itself draws heavily on ancient Chinese sources in dress, architecture, and etiquette.⁶^•¹²

The directors answered the criticism in interviews: Liang Xuan said the plain-spoken dialogue was written deliberately for the film's core audience of roughly 16-to-25-year-olds, and both directors argued that reading the film as a love triangle was narrow, describing it instead as a fable about guardianship, self-redemption, and the cycle of life.¹⁹ Commentators drew a broader lesson from the split reception: Chinese animation had reached a high level of technical finish, but storytelling remained the weak link, and Tsinghua media scholar Yin Hong read the controversy as the meeting of two attitudes toward Chinese animation, loving it too deeply and blaming it too eagerly.¹⁸

Abroad. The film also received a theatrical release outside China. On Metacritic, ten critics gave it eight positive and two mixed reviews, for an average score of 72 out of 100, and animation reviewers abroad singled out its distinctive characters and imagery.²⁰

Recognition and afterlife

The film was nominated for Original Film Song at the 2016 Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei.¹⁰ It competed in the official feature-film section of the 24th Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film¹ and, according to the film database of China Movie Channel, was later shown in the Centre Pompidou's exhibition program of fifty years of outstanding Asian animation.²¹

The property has remained active. Enlight Media's 2026 interim report records a tenth-anniversary campaign: a re-release on 19 June 2026 in a new IMAX 2D version, renewed merchandise and licensing programs, and a large fan event in Shanghai that July. The same report lists Big Fish & Begonia 2, directed by Zhang Chun, as in production, with a third film also on the company's project slate.⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026