When Stick Figures Fought
A story about Flash, plus news.
Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s our slate:
1) On the Xiao Xiao Flash series.
2) Animation newsbits.
A quick note before we start. The newsletter recently passed 60,000 subscribers — a number we can’t believe. Huge thanks to everyone who’s chosen to come along as we look into animation from all over the world.
With that, let’s go!
1 – Stick fights
Before YouTube, TikTok or social media as a whole, there was Flash.
It changed the internet. The Shockwave Flash (.SWF) file format allowed animation and even games to run on dial-up connections. It’s all been retired now — but, in its heyday, web designers everywhere used Flash to make sites feel slick.
There was another group that took to Flash, too: amateur animators. The program was easy to use, and creations with it were easy to share. This caused the first online animation boom. A solo artist with only a home computer could reach millions.
That was a big deal in the United States — but it was, in some ways, a bigger deal in China. Flash arrived there in the late ‘90s, and it became era-defining. The so-called “Flashers” (闪客) spoke with the bold, new voice of the younger generation. Their work fascinated the press and public alike.
“Chinese underground films and rock ‘n’ roll music were once the expression of rebellious passions in the pursuit of ... new cultural dimensions,” scholar Weihua Wu once wrote, “but today these passions are expressed through the channels of Flash.”1
China’s internet cafes were packed with Flash-watchers by the early 2000s.2 And one of their favorites was Xiao Xiao (2000–2002), a violent action series about stick figures. It was simple, utterly of its time and copied to infinity. Quickly, it outgrew China and became a phenomenon around the world.
For people of a certain age, who grew up online, Xiao Xiao and its clones were part of life. The series isn’t deep and has little to say: it’s just kung fu, firefights, blood and chaos. But it was the height of cool to its (mostly young) audience. It was also a gateway to Flash animation for many.
That was true inside and outside China. Xiao Xiao was a hit on Western sites like Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep, which hosted Flash files. It did numbers across Taiwan, Korea, Japan and beyond. These brutal little stick figures — and their moves reminiscent of Hong Kong action movies and The Matrix — connected worldwide.
Still, the series is Chinese. Its creator, Zhu Zhiqiang, was a man in his mid-20s. And he was an unlikely star.
Zhu wasn’t trained in animation. Before he discovered Flash, he eked out a living as a graphic designer. He wasn’t tech-y, either. Zhu first encountered computers only in 1997, after his move from Jilin City (in the Northeast) to Beijing.
Those were hard years. Zhu had dropped out after junior high, and his first Beijing job paid 800 yuan per month — something like $181 after inflation. He was clocking endless overtime to make up the difference. In fact, for him, getting work at all could mean telling lies. He landed one job by claiming he’d graduated from a “technical secondary school” but hadn’t brought his diploma.3
Still, Zhu had a passion. He loved stick figures. He’d started animating them in 1989, at age 14 — drawing in the corners of book after book, flipping the pages to make his characters move. His inspirations were partly Jackie Chan films, partly his childhood love of Dragon Ball.
Around the turn of the century, Zhu revisited that passion through software.
A lot was happening when he made his first virtual stick-figure fight, Dugu Qiubai, in April 2000. The Flash scene was just taking off in China through sites like Flash Empire. A few months earlier, a violent Flash called Gangster’s Paradise got popular, launching a new era of ambition for Flashers.4 Its creator became Zhu’s “idol.”
Zhu animated Dugu Qiubai with Corel Painter, but he quickly switched to Flash. He basically started from zero. Not long before, he said, “I had no computer skills, my English was not good, I couldn’t program and my drawing [ability] was average.” He learned Flash mostly alone, using a mouse to create each frame. That became his process. In mid-2000, Zhu made a sequel to Dugu Qiubai called Xiao Xiao No. 2.5
These early projects were popular, and they got Zhu a web design job at Sohu, the Beijing company that hosted his work. As 2000 went on, the press noticed China’s Flash scene, and he was one of the artists they profiled.6 But all of this was only a tee-up for Xiao Xiao No. 3 — the project that made Zhu’s stick figures world-famous.
Zhu put seven months into Xiao Xiao No. 3. It was a hobby project, made in his spare time. The film is simply drawn, and there’s no plot or acting here: just a giant brawl, as a lone stickman takes down a small army. The cool factor was unprecedented for a Flash animation back then, though. It counted for a lot. There’s something a little mesmerizing even today about the movement of Zhu’s fighters.
When Xiao Xiao No. 3 appeared in April 2001, the reaction was immediate, even in the States. Forum users were calling it “mind blowing,” and getting their threads locked because so many people had already posted about it. A Nintendo fansite went off-script to show this “l33t animation” to its readers. Later in the year, it hit the Detroit Free Press:
Just when you thought you’d seen the most Flash animations could do online, along comes Xiao Xiao No. 3. Put simply, it’s a Jackie Chan-style gang-against-one martial arts fight among stick figures.
If that sounds silly, the choreography is truly Chan-worthy, with figures running up walls, doing 360-degree kicks and generally showing off the best that martial arts offer. ... Even the cinematography is inspiring: 3D shots, slow-motion and a Matrix-style camera wraparound that’ll have you asking for more.7
Zhu could tell that he’d hit upon something. He’d burned his email address into the video, and viewers used it to contact him. “The part that made the deepest impression,” Zhu recalled, “was on the third day, I received 1,200 emails in one day. There was no junk in them, and 80% of them were not written by Chinese people, but by people from all over the world.”
Even though the internet was small at the time, Xiao Xiao No. 3’s numbers remain impressive. By late 2001, it had 800,000-plus views on Flash Empire and more than half a million on Newgrounds, not counting the (many) other sites that hosted it. Over the years, the Newgrounds upload alone would climb upward of 5 million. A writer for Flash Empire noted, “I don’t know how the author made such a good work.”8
Without warning, Zhu had turned into an early e-celebrity. The Xiao Xiao series blew up just as Flash was taking over the mainland. Some called 2001 “the year of Chinese Flash,” and one magazine named Zhu the “Internet Person of the Year.”
Hearing all the buzz, Zhu’s father went to an internet cafe to see Xiao Xiao for himself. He was shocked. It was the same stuff, he realized, that Zhu had drawn in the corners of those books.
Zhu soon became a freelance animator — and he started to make money. Major brands (like Cityplaza in Hong Kong) wanted his stick figures in their ads. Just three months after Xiao Xiao No. 3, he made a deal with the company Barunson to host the series in Korea.9
By the end of 2001, Zhu was on TV with his fellow Flashers, and the press was visiting his home. Again, Zhu was an unlikely star. Reporters found that he slept on a couch, rarely went outside and woke up close to the afternoon. His limit as a cook was a simple potato-and-egg dish, so he ate out a lot — but only cheaply. Asked how long he worked each day, he said, “More than 8 hours.” Besides that, he mainly watched TV.10
As Beijing Today reported in early 2002, Zhu:
… is a quiet young man, easygoing and a little shy; he spoke very slowly and it takes him longer than others to put his ideas into words. But when it comes to design and Flash he resolutely sticks to his own ideas. … He stays at home most of the time and seldom goes out, except for some Flashmaker get-togethers and activities. All of his time is devoted to animation.
Zhu didn’t invent violent stickman animations. In the ‘90s, the Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its name implied. But Xiao Xiao, and its mix of Jackie Chan with Jet Li with The Matrix, perfected the idea. (Also, Zhu denied having seen the foreign stickman work beforehand — after all, he’d done these himself since age 14.)
Either way, it was Xiao Xiao that made “stick fights” massive online. Clones were rampant — even Stick Figure Death Theatre had them. As one paper reported in 2002:
The Web’s legions of part-time Flash animators have begun producing their own copies of Xiao Xiao — so many, in fact, that there’s a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder why Zhu doesn’t just give up.11
The competition didn’t shrink Xiao Xiao, though. As Zhu made new episodes through 2001 and 2002 (a shooting game here, a kung fu film there), his work still towered. And he was getting more ambitious. His code was better, and episodes seven and eight are full of 3D camerawork — done with the help of 3ds Max. Xiao Xiao remained totally style-over-substance, but that style continued to excite the internet.
A question hung over the Flashers, though. Where was all of this headed?
The Flash scene in China was defined by self-expression. As Zhu said, “TV is made for everyone to watch; Flash is made for oneself to watch.” That ethos made the scene bigger and bigger — by 2003, Flash Empire had its own show on television.12 Yet these artists needed to make money, too. Otherwise, it could only be a hobby.
Money was the hard problem. Getting hired to do Flash animation wasn’t a guarantee, and the rates for this work weren’t always the best. Zhu noted that “most Flashers have very difficult lives.”13 There was the problem of ownership, too. A lot of Flashers freely swiped copyrighted sound, music and characters. How could they ever charge?
Zhu tried to answer those questions. His “matchstick man,” the pitch-black stick figure that leads Xiao Xiao, was a recognizable character. Brands wanted to associate with it, and Zhu wanted to profit from it. He kept his work as original as possible, copyrighted his films and, in 2003, submitted a trademark application for the stickman.
By then, though, the Nike ads were already airing abroad.
In early 2003, Nike rolled out the “Stickman” campaign.14 It stars an animated stick figure much like the one in Xiao Xiao, and its flashy moves are, at times, suspiciously similar to Zhu’s ideas. When this campaign hit China, he contacted Nike about it. That went nowhere, so he sued.
Nike was defiant when the story hit the papers. “It is obvious that the plaintiff intended to promote himself and his Flash works by accusing a famous multi-national company,” said one Nike lawyer.
Meanwhile, Zhu said that the Stickman character was so similar to his own, people assumed he’d done the ads himself. Plus, he called stick figures like these a “perfect” fit for sports advertising — which meant trouble for him. “Once Nike uses [these characters], how is anyone going to come to me to make them?” he asked. Already, a publisher had backed out of his book project thanks to Nike’s ads, Zhu claimed.15
Although Zhu kept releasing a little Xiao Xiao-branded commercial work, there were no new episodes in 2003. “I’ll resume after the lawsuit is over,” he said.16 The case turned into a yearslong ordeal. He saw its outcome as critical to his future.
In early 2004, a Chinese outlet reported this:
Zhu Zhiqiang told reporters that he has already drawn up a bright “career blueprint” for “Matchstick Man,” but the most important thing right now is to win the lawsuit. After all, these bright prospects are all based on the confirmation of the copyright to “Matchstick Man.”
Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear. Zhu faced thousands of dollars in court fees.17
After this, he didn’t animate much. Motorola hired him to do another Xiao Xiao-inspired ad in 2007, but the series never returned. By 2008, Zhu worked as a coder. He and James Gao, the creator of Flash Empire, joined the creative agency VML and got involved in mobile games. Xiao Xiao was done.18
In many ways, Zhu’s art career was a casualty of the early internet. If the roadmap from viral success to solid income is faint today, it didn’t exist at all in 2003. Getting a Xiao Xiao-sized hit now would, most likely, give someone a shot at starting a business. Zhu had none of the tools necessary to do so.
The Stickman campaign was just another layer of the problem. It was the era when a major company could brush off the bad PR that comes with copying a major online artist. Is it believable that no one involved in the Nike ads had seen Xiao Xiao? Not really — it was popular with young people worldwide. Yet Zhu was new media at a time when old media ruled. What could he do?
All that said, the Xiao Xiao story isn’t one of failure, first and foremost. It has to be emphasized: this series was huge. It inspired people around the world. That happened in China (Bu Hua, the creator of Cat, was a big Xiao Xiao fan) and abroad.19
Xiao Xiao is definitely shallow, and its look isn’t adventurous. But that simplicity made it approachable. Any young person could watch it, get it and copy it. Other defining hits from China’s Flash scene — Big Fish & Chinese Flowering Crab Apple, The Black Bird and so on — could be too complex or specific to China for the world to imitate. Xiao Xiao wasn’t. Back then, anyone could understand a stick-figure fight.
Zhu may not have reaped the benefits of this series himself, but he absolutely paved the way for the Flash scene — which paved the way for what came next.
Chinese Flash, which Xiao Xiao helped to pioneer, trained a new generation of animators and filmmakers. Lots of key people started there, including Zhang Ping, whose Legend of Hei II made a serious dent in the box office this year. Flash artists abroad were no less impacted by the success of Zhu’s work.
A couple of years ago, an archivist named Ben Latimore put out an ebook. Since Adobe began the retirement of Flash in 2017, he’s been preserving .SWF files and the history around them. His book is a chronicle of the Flash era, which he sees as a lost golden age. On the final page, he wrote this about that time:
… intense creativity, easy-to-access software, notable but not crippling limitations, almost universal compatibility across the entire technological space of its time, widespread adoption by encouraging free consumption and sharing in an age where “going viral” actually meant something, all combining to influence the entire entertainment industry with one strike after another? That’s something that we’ll never be able to recreate, only remember fondly. All driven by a bunch of guys sitting in their bedrooms who watched too much Xiao Xiao.20
2 – Newsbits
We lost Fung Yuk Song (85), a veteran of Shanghai Animation Film Studio and other companies. He worked on One Night in an Art Gallery (1978), one of the films that marked the end of the Cultural Revolution.
The Night Boots, a beautiful pinscreen film from France, took the top prize at the Fredrikstad festival. It’s won a lot this year — with luck, an Oscar nomination is coming. (Note that the film is streaming for free via The Animation Showcase.)
In America, there’s a Los Angeles screening of Aya of Yop City and quite a few animated shorts happening on Monday (November 3), put together by the curators at Black Revivalist and Loose Frames.
In India, the director of RRR is preparing an animated feature called Baahubali: The Eternal War. An impressive teaser is already showing in theaters.
In Mexico, I Am Frankelda pulled in 13.3 million pesos during its first weekend, a top-six opening for a Mexican movie this year. After a week, its earnings passed 20 million pesos (approaching $1.1 million), and it drew 300,000-plus attendees.
The film anyone lived in a pretty how town premiered this week. It was narrated by the late Jane Goodall before her death last month. A Lithuanian studio, Meinart, handled its animation.
The Japanese film Black came out. We interviewed director Shinya Ohira about it, and his creative process in general, earlier this year.
A new report from Japan shows that anime became a $25 billion industry last year, thanks to its international spread. “The overseas market now far exceeds local revenues,” said the report’s editor, “and the gap will only widen.”
One more from Japan: outrage is growing in the anime industry over OpenAI’s blatant copyright infringement.
The Cinema Fund in Russia backed Alexander Petrov’s paint-on-glass feature The Prince — and Bulgakov, the latest from Stanislav Sokolov (Hoffmaniada).
In America, Paramount laid off 1,000 people this week. “Another 1,000 layoffs are expected,” notes The Hollywood Reporter.
Last of all: we wrote about stunning early animation from Germany.
Until next time!
From Wu’s book Chinese Animation, Creative Industries and Digital Culture, cited a few times today.
As noted in this brief history of the Chinese internet.
These details about Zhu come from Beijing Today (January 18, 2002), this interview with CCTV, a Q&A hosted by Sina, an article by Taiwan’s Business Today and a Q&A hosted by Sohu. We used all of these sources many times throughout the piece.
The detail that he used Painter comes from his old profile on TOM. For more about Gangster’s Paradise, see this article.
As explained by Wu in his book, the first major press coverage of the Flash scene was in Sanlian Lifeweek (September 2000). That article is online here, behind a paywall.
For the forum details, see this Ars Technica thread from April 2001. The fansite quote is Nintendo World Report that same month. See also the Detroit Free Press (August 19, 2001).
Stats from archive captures of Flash Empire and Newgrounds. The quote comes from this article.
Details about Zhu’s lifestyle come from articles by the Beijing Evening News and Beijing Youth Daily, both important today.
See the South China Morning Post (June 24, 2002).
Details about the TV show come from a 2003 press release.
See this article about the Stickman campaign.
For the back-and-forth about the Nike campaign, see articles from China View, CCTV and Xinmin Weekly.
See Flash Empire’s Q&A with Zhu in 2004.
From a China.org.cn article about the court loss.
Bu Hua spoke about her love of Xiao Xiao in a 2003 interview.
An earlier version of today’s lead story first ran in our newsletter, behind the paywall, on June 6, 2024.
I was working as a web designer and splash page illustrator/animator with Macromedia Flash and Director in 2000. It was such a fantastic time to be working in that space – so much creativity and excitement around a new medium. It was short-lived, sadly. Thank you for writing this fascinating profile about an artist who took the Internet by storm at the time. I never even knew his name until now.
Ahh, I didn't know the Nike ruling had been overturned, rip...
I was definitely one of many influenced by the flash scene. Lacking a copy of Flash, I spent most school lunchtimes animating my stick figures "frame by frame" in Powerpoint. Now I'm used to using decent animation tools, it's baffling to me that I could get anywhere with those limits, but it was comprehensible to me at the time.
While the old Flash scene may be dead, I hold on to some hope that a more resilient indie animation scene seems to be crystalising around more resilient tools like Blender and CSP. The technical demands to stand out are much higher these days, though!