Check out this breathtaking 12-minute marvel of Chinese animation

Chinese animation, or “donghua,” has steadily been on the rise in recent years. With films like Legend of Hei and Ne Zha 2 garnering international acclaim, the time is ripe for Chinese animators to seize on this opportunity and for global audiences to embrace what they have to bring to the medium. Ruthless Blade, an episode of the animated anthology series Capsules produced by Chinese broadcaster Bilibili, is an excellent example of donghua’s rising profile.

Directed by Bo Zhang, whose previous credits include concept art and art direction for 2019’s The Wandering Earth and 2012’s The Man with the Iron Fists, the 12-minute short centers on Eleven, an anthropomorphic white tiger swordsman, who ventures deep into the lair of a mysterious warrior known only as “Ruthless Blade” to rescue his comrades. As he clashes with this masked adversary, Eleven reawakens to long-dormant memories of his past, unearthing a stunning revelation about the true nature of his fight for survival.

The animation in Ruthless Blade is gobsmackingly gorgeous, to say nothing of the short’s character designs and art direction. Co-created by Nicolas Nemiri, a French comic artist known for his calligraphic draftsmanship, Ruthless Blade translates his signature style into exquisite balletic swordplay through a combination of 3D animation techniques and 2D textures.

Apart from being visually stunning, the short also manages to grapple with some surprisingly potent themes within its runtime. Ruthless Blade opens with an epigraph excerpt of Siegfried Sassoon’s “In Me, Past, Present, Future Meet,” a poem that ruminates over being torn between concerns for the past and future while attempting to live in the present. It’s only in the film’s final moments that the significance of the poem to both Eleven and Ruthless Blade is made clear.

Bilibili uploaded Ruthless Blade, along with the rest of the first two seasons of the Capsules anthology series, onto YouTube late last month. If Zhang and Nemiri’s film piques your interest, I highly recommend checking out the rest of the Capsule shorts while you’re at it.