# Mr. Donkey (驴得水)
**Mr. Donkey** (驴得水) is a 2016 Chinese black-comedy film directed and written by [Zhou Shen](https://www.edgepedia.org/zhou-shen) (周申) and Liu Lu (刘露), adapted from their own 2012 stage play of the same name and produced by Mahua FunAge (开心麻花) as the company's second feature film.[1](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1026/c22219-28807773.html) Set in a Republic-era village school in 1942, it follows teachers who register their water-carrying donkey as a fictitious English teacher, "Lü Deshui," to draw an extra salary, and who must improvise ever larger lies when a Ministry of Education inspector arrives.[1](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1026/c22219-28807773.html) Made without stars for a cost under 10 million yuan, it earned about 172 million yuan at the Chinese box office and a 476 percent return rate, the highest of any 2016 release.[2](https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2017-01-05/1067672.html) • [3](https://wyb.chinawriter.com.cn/attachment/201303/18/a4d477b0-edc5-4f89-b432-a6f3952ce59e.pdf)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Directors and writers | Zhou Shen and Liu Lu, both graduates of the directing department of the Central Academy of Drama[1](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1026/c22219-28807773.html) • [4](https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1548884) |
| Source | Adapted from the 2012 small-theater stage play of the same name by the same two directors[1](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1026/c22219-28807773.html) |
| Release | October 28, 2016 in China; runtime 1 hour 53 minutes; limited North American release the same day through China Lion Film Distribution[5](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mr_donkey) |
| Cast | Ren Suxi, Da Li, Liu Shuailiang, Pei Kuishan and others; three lead actors came from the original stage cast and no well-known stars were used[1](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1026/c22219-28807773.html) • [4](https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1548884) |
| Box office | First week 60.52 million yuan; final total about 1.72–1.73 hundred million yuan (172–173 million)[6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1101/c40606-28823241.html) • [7](https://pdf.dfcfw.com/pdf/H3_AP201708210818176633_01.pdf) |
| Return on investment | 476 percent, the highest box-office return rate of any Chinese film released in 2016[2](https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2017-01-05/1067672.html) |
| Reception | Douban rating 8.3/10 from about 985,000 users (as of August 2025); Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 84 percent from two reviews[8](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E9%A9%B4%E5%BE%97%E6%B0%B4/14800544?fromModule=lemma_inlink) • [5](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mr_donkey) |
## Spoilers
### Plot and setting
The story is set in 1942, in the Republican era, at the "Sanmin Primary School" in a remote, water-scarce village. Four university-educated teachers with dreams of rural education, led by headmaster Sun Henghai, have founded the school to combat what they see as the Chinese peasantry's poverty, ignorance, weakness, and selfishness. Because funding is severely short, the headmaster has the school's water-carrying donkey, named Deshui, registered with the Ministry of Education as an English teacher called "Lü Deshui," so the school collects one extra salary.[1](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1026/c22219-28807773.html) • [9](https://www.infzm.com/contents/120772?source=124&source_1=124220)
When a ministry inspector arrives to hear "Mr. Lü" teach, the staff hurriedly pass off a dialect-speaking coppersmith as the teacher. The improvised deception succeeds, but the lie keeps growing: the bogus teacher is even nominated as an exemplary educator eligible for American philanthropic funding, and when the donor himself visits, the school needs more lies and more people to sustain the first one.[1](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1026/c22219-28807773.html) • [10](https://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2016-11-03/doc-ifxxnety7230604.shtml?from=wap) As pressure mounts, each character's choices under fear, greed, and coercion strip away their ideals, and the comedy turns tragic.[11](https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2016-10-26/1048044.html)
## Origin: a dinner-table anecdote
The story began in 2009, when Zhou Shen heard an anecdote over dinner from a friend who had taught in a private school in Gansu. In the telling, the school lacked money to keep a donkey for hauling water, so when a teacher left, the headmaster registered the donkey as a teacher to collect the salary. Zhou Shen could not verify whether the story was true; it circulated locally as a joke. Within what he describes as two seconds, a chain of dramatic consequences occurred to him: what if superiors came to inspect, what excuses would follow, and would the fictitious teacher be promoted into a model educator who then had to be impersonated?[9](https://www.infzm.com/contents/120772?source=124&source_1=124220) • [12](https://www.sohu.com/a/117548008_508306)
In 2010 Zhou Shen wrote the story as a film outline and registered its text copyright. In late 2011 he discovered that someone who had seen the outline had borrowed about a quarter of it for a microfilm also titled "Lü Deshui." Zhou Shen and Liu Lu pursued the infringement and decided they had to establish their own version quickly; since film financing was out of reach for two first-time directors, they staged the story as a play instead, premiering it at the end of 2012 after about two months of rehearsal.[13](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1123/c22219-28888416.html) • [9](https://www.infzm.com/contents/120772?source=124&source_1=124220) The play became a hit, toured dozens of cities with sold-out runs for four years, was praised as a near "zero-negative-review" work, and was staged by student troupes at close to a hundred universities in China and abroad, including Cambridge and Princeton.[13](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1123/c22219-28888416.html) • [6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1101/c40606-28823241.html)
## From stage to screen
Zhou Shen and Liu Lu had always intended the story as a film; the play was, in their words, a detour to make the project real. After the play succeeded, film preparation resumed in 2013, and the connection to Mahua FunAge came in 2014, after the company's first film *Goodbye Mr. Loser* became a 1.4-billion-yuan hit.[4](https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1548884) • [6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1101/c40606-28823241.html) Unlike *Goodbye Mr. Loser*, which came from Mahua's own repertoire, the stage rights to *Mr. Donkey* originally belonged to the theater producer Zhilehui, with Mahua joining as film producer.[14](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1107/c22219-28839709.html)
The adaptation changed more than half of the play's plot. The directors cut symbolic stage gags that would not read as real on film, such as the coppersmith kneeling at the sight of an official's cap, and added passages exploring the characters' inner lives. They kept three lead actors from the stage cast, Ren Suxi, Pei Kuishan, and Wang Kun, and cast the remaining roles by resemblance to the characters rather than by star power.[15](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1021/c14677-28797166.html) • [4](https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1548884) Production followed the stage method: one month of rehearsal with the full cast, one month of location test shooting and blocking, then two months of actual shooting, filmed in sequence. The location was a ruined village at the border of Shanxi and [Inner Mongolia](https://www.edgepedia.org/inner-mongolia), chosen after a month of driving through water-scarce northwestern regions.[6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1101/c40606-28823241.html) • [15](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1021/c14677-28797166.html)
The directors set the story in the Republican period not to evade censorship but to give it the feel of a fable. They reported that censorship produced a single revision note: the Mongolian dialogue needed Chinese subtitles.[16](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1014/c40606-28777475.html)
## Reception and box office
Before release, the distributors held about 1,000 preview screenings in 50 cities on October 22, 2016, supported by Mahua's word-of-mouth roadshow strategy; the previews generated strong reviews but only 2.149 million yuan in ticket sales, far below the 11.09 million that *Goodbye Mr. Loser* had taken in previews.[11](https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2016-10-26/1048044.html) The film opened on October 28 with a first-week gross of 60.52 million yuan, well below its predecessor's opening, but its ratings kept climbing: it reached a Douban score of 8.4 during its run, overtook the Hollywood thriller *Inferno* in its second week, and finished at about 1.72 to 1.73 hundred million yuan.[6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1101/c40606-28823241.html) • [17](https://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2016-11-09/doc-ifxxsfip4269105.shtml) • [7](https://pdf.dfcfw.com/pdf/H3_AP201708210818176633_01.pdf) With a production cost under 10 million yuan, its 476 percent return rate made it the most profitable Chinese film of 2016 by that measure, ahead of releases that grossed over a billion yuan.[2](https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2017-01-05/1067672.html) • [3](https://wyb.chinawriter.com.cn/attachment/201303/18/a4d477b0-edc5-4f89-b432-a6f3952ce59e.pdf)
Ren Suxi, who played the free-spirited teacher Zhang Yiman, won the Year's New Actress award at the 12th Chinese Young Generation Film Forum in 2017 and was nominated for Best Actress at the 17th Chinese Film Media Awards; the film itself was named one of the ten best Chinese-language films of 2016 by the Shanghai Film Critics Society.[8](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E9%A9%B4%E5%BE%97%E6%B0%B4/14800544?fromModule=lemma_inlink) Critics abroad were mixed to positive: *The New York Times*' Andy Webster called it "a cynical, piercing parable about China's past and perhaps its present," while the *Los Angeles Times* found it "deeply flawed but also fascinating."[5](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mr_donkey)
## Themes and criticism
Zhou Shen has described the theme as a question of bottom lines: one must not do wrong things for a good purpose, and a good intention does not license crossing moral limits. He added a second, deeper layer: people need a conviction of some kind, because without one there is nothing to hold the line with.[18](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1207/c1013-28932308.html) • [6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1101/c40606-28823241.html) The film's promotional tagline, "Let me tell you a joke, don't cry," captures the design in which each laugh lands on a darker truth.[19](https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_25184174)
Academic and critical readings differ. One 2023 study argues the film's outlook is postmodern black humor and satire of marginalized intellectuals rather than Republican-era enlightenment ideals, and that its male characters hold all the narrative power while the women lack genuine agency.[20](https://www.sciscanpub.com/index/journals/ainfo/fttr/5305.html) Other commentators praised its female characters as unusually independent for Chinese commercial comedy, and read the scarce water of the title as a symbol running through the whole fable.[21](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0406/c411992-29193519.html) Recurring criticisms concern craft rather than theme: reviewers noted heavy stage mannerisms, dialogue-driven scenes, and an abrupt turn from comedy to tragedy in the second half.[22](https://ient.ifeng.com/42713238/news.shtml) • [23](https://www.bfa.edu.cn/cfer/images/48d2245374271b5d186604.pdf) Zhou Shen's response was that a film can be like a play just as a film can be like a poem, and that the intense, theatrical-sounding arguments are how people actually behave.[4](https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1548884) • [13](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1123/c22219-28888416.html)
The film's success also established a production model that Mahua and its partners reused: refine a property on stage for years, then carry the polished script and cast to the screen, with the ticketing platform Maoyan taking its first lead producing-and-distribution credit on *Mr. Donkey* before scaling up to larger releases.[11](https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2016-10-26/1048044.html) • [24](https://www.jiemian.com/article/2450976.html)
## References
1. [开心麻花推出第二部电影《驴得水》仍走话剧范儿, 北京日报 via 人民网 (2016)](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1026/c22219-28807773.html)
2. [票房收益率476% 小成本电影《驴得水》成2016年度"赚钱王", 每日经济新闻 (2017)](https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2017-01-05/1067672.html)
3. [《驴得水》以不到1000万的成本投入拿下近2亿的票房, 辽沈晚报 (2019)](https://wyb.chinawriter.com.cn/attachment/201303/18/a4d477b0-edc5-4f89-b432-a6f3952ce59e.pdf)
4. [专访｜《驴得水》导演：创作者就像厨子，营养和好吃要兼备, 澎湃新闻 (2016)](https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1548884)
5. [Mr. Donkey, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mr_donkey)
6. ["驴得水"很不"夏洛特烦恼" 口碑好难复制票房奇迹, 北京晚报 via 人民网 (2016)](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1101/c40606-28823241.html)
7. [表2：2016年第4季度猫眼电影投资与发行情况, 东方财富研报](https://pdf.dfcfw.com/pdf/H3_AP201708210818176633_01.pdf)
8. [驴得水（2016年周申、刘露执导的喜剧电影）, 百度百科](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E9%A9%B4%E5%BE%97%E6%B0%B4/14800544?fromModule=lemma_inlink)
9. [导演周申详解《驴得水》, 南方周末 (2016)](https://www.infzm.com/contents/120772?source=124&source_1=124220)
10. [内地票房：机械师2夺冠 驴得水叫好叫座, 新浪娱乐 (2016)](https://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2016-11-03/doc-ifxxnety7230604.shtml?from=wap)
11. [《驴得水》想靠点映博得关注，能赢么？, 每日经济新闻 (2016)](https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2016-10-26/1048044.html)
12. [《驴得水》导演专访：话剧是丰满剧本的最佳途径, 搜狐 (2016)](https://www.sohu.com/a/117548008_508306)
13. [《驴得水》是不妥协的胜利, 北京日报 via 人民网 (2016)](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1123/c22219-28888416.html)
14. [《驴得水》热映 话剧电影化笑着闹着最容易挣钱？, 信息时报 via 人民网 (2016)](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1107/c22219-28839709.html)
15. [主创揭"驴得水"拍摄趣事, 羊城晚报 via 人民网 (2016)](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1021/c14677-28797166.html)
16. [《驴得水》为口碑改档, 羊城晚报 via 人民网 (2016)](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1014/c40606-28777475.html)
17. [内地票房：奇异博士夺冠 驴得水不跌反涨, 新浪娱乐 (2016)](https://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2016-11-09/doc-ifxxsfip4269105.shtml)
18. [《驴得水》主创做客人民网 任素汐：好故事力大无穷, 人民网 (2016)](https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2016/1207/c1013-28932308.html)
19. [锐评 | 扎尔达·恩特马克：《驴得水》：黑色幽默下的审视, 澎湃新闻 (2023)](https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_25184174)
20. [韩冷．《驴得水》的后现代色彩辨析, 影视戏剧评论 (2023)](https://www.sciscanpub.com/index/journals/ainfo/fttr/5305.html)
21. [《驴得水》：悲喜交织的寓言佳作, 今传媒 via 人民网 (2017)](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0406/c411992-29193519.html)
22. [《驴得水》影评：好的喜剧，骨子里都是悲剧, 新京报 (2016)](https://ient.ifeng.com/42713238/news.shtml)
23. [中国电影教育研究中心学术动向, 北京电影学院](https://www.bfa.edu.cn/cfer/images/48d2245374271b5d186604.pdf)
24. [再看猫眼招股书：高投入换来增长，盈利遥遥无期, 界面新闻 (2018)](https://www.jiemian.com/article/2450976.html)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1998 to 2024*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license