Sun Xun's 'Magic Atlas': Ten Years, 500 Art Students, Every Frame a Painting

Chinese painter Sun Xun spent ten years making Magic Atlas, a feature-length animation built from thousands of individually crafted artworks. The film won a Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival, where it screened on 27 and 29 October and 1 November.

Cinephiles sometimes describe beautiful films as "every frame a painting". In Sun's case the phrase is literal. He largely self-financed the project and, rather than hire professional animators, employed hundreds of art students—500 over the course of production, he said in one interview—in a supersized workshop model. Each frame carries a tactile quality, above all in the sequences made in woodcut. When a shaft of light streams through a high window into a dark room, the individual carving marks scored into the wood dance and shimmer across several dozen frames like the scales of a carp in a clear pond.

What is the film about?

Sun thinks like a visual artist, proceeding by association, symbolism and dream logic. The magic atlas of the title is a map to mystic realms traversed by an explorer in a steampunk flying contraption. After a kaleidoscopic opening overture, he spends most of the film in one such world: a coal-mining kingdom called Luocha, where he is imprisoned on the eve of a magic festival.

Maps are illegal in Luocha. So are memories. The emperor speaks of forced labour and industrial quotas in perhaps a Maoist register, but the power behind the throne is an Orwellian cabal of anthropomorphised talking animals who smoke cigars like colonial lords. Surveillance falls to an army of mosquitos with cameras for heads—a swarm, if not a flock. The authoritarian logic is clearly allegorical, though the allegory resists a single reading.

How does the film's form mirror its ideas?

Like the emerging Chinese mystic-virtuoso Bi Gan, Sun draws on Eastern spirituality's ideas about the oneness of all things, the many stories that are all one story. The film opens with a quote from the Avatamsaka Sutra invoking "the past, the present, the future lying in the present", and closes with a lengthy monologue, voiced by Sun himself, delivered by a hieroglyphic eagle.

Its ideas about the transmigration of souls are mirrored in the mix of animation styles:

• Luocha is rendered in monumental black-and-white woodcuts and illustrations reminiscent of Rockwell Kent
• Homages to Salvador Dalí and Pieter Bruegel the Elder
• A segment in riotous pastels with the Jazz Age voluptuousness of Reginald Marsh
• A segment animated in crayon and magic marker by Sun's Instagram followers during the Covid-19 pandemic
• Segments informed by Sun's research into Dunhuang murals, Song dynasty painting and multiple styles of calligraphy, as he explained in a post-screening interview

Where can audiences see it?

Exhibitions of Magic Atlas materials, including woodcuts and concept art, have shown at the Times Museum of Guangdong, and additional shows are planned in the United States, where Sean Kelly Gallery represents Sun.

He received initial seed funding from Judith Neilson, the Australian philanthropist and founder of the Asian-focused White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. Its current show, up through 15 November, includes Magic of Atlas – Luocha: An Infinite Journey, an 8ft-high, 52ft-long, 13-panel woodcut relief depicting images from the story—a scroll that viewers' eyes can stop and start, a static form of visual narrative traceable to antiquity, long before still and moving images diverged.

With a Tokyo prize secured and American exhibitions ahead, Sun's decade-long gamble on handmade animation now enters the gallery world that first nurtured it.