Today we’d like to introduce you to Zhen Li.
Hi Zhen, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started out studying architecture at UPenn and practicing it for a few years before I decided to pursue my passion for filmmaking. I’ve then worked as a line producer in independent live-action films in China as I honed in on animation as a more fitting medium for all my endeavors. With some self-teaching, it was a pretty sharp turn after I started making my first animation in 2020; the process flowed so smoothly for me, and I enjoyed every bit of it. Shortly after, I got into the Experimental Animation MFA program at CalArts, where I felt enlightened to explore what it really means to be an animator and found a niche in hand-drawn animation on paper to make my first-year short film “Fur.” From the end of 2022 to now, the film has circulated in 60+ festivals, including Sundance, Annecy, Zagreb, and DOK Leipzig, and won several awards, including a Grand Jury prize at the Seattle International Film Festival that made it an Oscar-qualified film. I didn’t expect it to go this far, but I was greatly strengthened by this result to trust myself more in my future creative pursuits. I’m currently working on my thesis film at CalArts, which is a story about a pregnant woman and a disappearing hometown, with an expected completion date in 2024.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely was an adventurous ride, having found my way here from architecture and live-action. The decisions I’ve made along the way surely brought a lot of pressure and pain to endure in the process, but I believe I’ve seen some valuable truths in those difficult times and had my intuition trained to an acute degree, which is what I rely on to make my work and lead my life.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a filmmaker, and my medium is animation. My most immediate method of work is 2D hand-drawn on paper, in which I like to draw these motion charts to plan out the action before I animate, and they’ve slowly become sort of an identifier of my hand-drawn practice. At the same time, I tend to do a visceral mix of my 2D with stop motion and occasional live action. My works often ruminate over themes of intimacy and misalignment and are influenced by a heavy spatial instinct. I’m most proud of my distinctive background in architecture and live-action, which act as such rich soil for me to experiment and melt into my animation practice. Having crossed multiple fields, I find myself more aware of the interconnectivity of all things, less held back by boundaries, and more prone to try all that resonate.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between fiction and nonfiction. In a very rough way and perhaps more aesthetically, I see the realm of live-action evolving more towards a nonfiction direction while the realm of animation is growing more to define fiction in the upcoming years. It’s essentially about the relationship we have with reality, which I see becoming more blurred with live-action and more recreated in animation while both maturing in their own ways to portray a perceived truth.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: nakatalii
- Other: https://vimeo.com/zhenlizhen
Image Credits
Zhen Li
