Art College 1994

          
Liu Jian's Art College 1994, from 2024, is an animated drama that looks at the intersecting lives of college students. The main characters are feckless art student Zhang Xiaojun and his best bud "Rabbit". Most of the film is taken up with ruminative BS sessions between the two in their dorm room and on the quad. The two indulge in navel gazing while they drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Zhang flirts with a shy piano student, but their furtive relationship eventually evaporates. Liu juggles over thirty speaking parts, some impersonated by noted figures in Chinese music and cinema like the director Bi Gan, to create a broad picture of academia that is both warm and mildly satiric. 

The only classroom lecture shown in the film, which the students largely ignore, lays out the twin poles of artistic influence that the students must individually confront. The shifting perspectives of Eastern art is contrasted with the single fixed point of view which the lecturer says categorizes Western art. The mise en scene of Art College 1994 reflects this bifurcation. Nearly all of the conversational scenes in the film resemble the rotoscoped animation used by Richard Linklater in A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. Art College 1994's hand drawn animation is cruder than those films, but captures their first person immediacy. Between these scenes of digressive dialogue are snippets that focus on nature: a butterfly floating above the quad, bugs and lizards negotiating rocks. These are the moments that reflect Asian art's influence upon Liu Jian, reminiscent of Eastern landscape painting and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Zhang Xiaojun ultimately rejects traditional Chinese painting and embraces Western experimentalism, bringing an end to his academic career.

The funny and frank dialogue redeems the more aimless sections of the film. It is hard to capture the puffed up bubble of academic life without indulging in the rabbit holes of digression. Art College 1994 often feels jejune, but it is true to the limited scope of its youthful characters.