“Every time I watch Cat, my heart feels a kind of purification, and my soul is moved,” wrote one Chinese fan in 2003. It’s raw, yet that’s also the reason it’s so hard to look away. What mattered was that Cat did, and still does, make you feel. It’s a product of its time - as with the Flash scene itself, its cultural moment in China belongs to the 2000s. There’s beauty to the film, but parts of it are unpolished, even haphazard. By the end, the son has journeyed into Hell itself to save his mother. mother and son,” reads the film’s opening text, in English. Then she was on China’s national news.Ĭat is a story of love and death - the connection between a parent and child, and the pain of the parent’s passing. She made a five-minute Flash animation, Cat (猫), that brought hundreds of thousands of people to tears. Which happened, in late 2002, to a Beijing artist named Bu Hua. Young artists and amateurs made their personal feelings public in raw, unfiltered ways - often for the first time. Early Chinese Flash cartoons were the art of the internet, with all of the newfound freedom that entailed in China. That’s a bold comparison, but not baseless. As researcher Weihua Wu has argued, it was like the new rock and roll. It was like early YouTube before early YouTube. In the early 2000s, the Flash scene wasn’t just a niche for anarchy and weirdness in China - it was a massive, generation-defining creative outlet. It’s hard to explain Chinese Flash animation to the outside world. That country is China, where Flash meant something big from the minute it arrived in the late 1990s. In one country, it’s still being updated even now, as recently as June 14. Yet Flash didn’t truly die - not everywhere. Its disappearance caused a wave of nostalgic, even mournful op-eds on the English-language internet. All major browsers dropped support for it early last year.
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