Art College 1994

A memory-palace movie can be a tricky beast to execute artfully. It’s a subgenre where the temptation to lean on cheap nostalgia and hollow re-creation is often too much for a filmmaker to resist. Successfully conjuring the feeling of a time and place – those elusive qualia that are instantly recognizable to those who were there and irresistibly enticing to those who were not – is much more challenging. Or, to put it another way: Forgery is easy, vibes are not. Writer-director’s Liu Jian’s animated slice-of-student-life charmer, Art College 1994, absolutely nails the vibe of being a twenty-something wannabe artist with a head full of dreams and an empty bank account.

You don’t have to have been an art student in Nanjing, China, in the mid-1990s – or any kind of young creative – to appreciate Liu’s gentle, bittersweet feature, any more than you have to have been a Manhattan debutante in the late 1980s to carouse with the Ivy Leaguers in Metropolitan (1990) or a high-school kid in mid-1970s Austin to enjoying cruising with Dazed and Confused (1993). There is much earnest dorm-room discussion of art, love, and life in Liu’s film, but Art College 1994 isn’t really a philosophical film. Rather, it’s about the time when such sincere, meandering conversations with like-minded people seemed like the most important thing in the world.

The film follows a loose friend group of ambitious students, most of them enrolled at the same fine-arts college. (At the margins, the film suggests that the titular institution is respected but underfunded, the red-headed academic stepchild of a larger and more prestigious university.) Liu’s focal point is a laconic romantic named Xioajun (Dong Zijian), who idolizes Kurt Cobain and is striving to introduce some modernity into the medium of traditional Chinese ink-wash painting. He is joined at the hip with his roommate, Rabbit (Chizi), an affable oil painter whose cynical streak masks a lack of self-confidence. They are mirrored by a pair of music students: Hao Lili (Zhou Dongyu), a button-down classical pianist who seems to have a romantic spark with Xioajun, and Gao Hong (Papi Jiang), an outspoken, fun-loving vocalist who is currently the subject of Rabbit’s crush.

This foursome is joined by a colorful cast of strivers and oddballs that includes rival painter Weiguo (Bai Ke), who early on draws Xioajun and Rabbit’s wrath by destroying their collaborative project, and then later their envy when he begins dating a blond American girl. Luminaries of Chinese cinema like Jia Zhangke and Bi Gan lend their voices to the college’s variously eccentric and hard-nosed faculty. The Matthew McConaughey role is filled by Zhao Youcai (Huang Bo), a hairdresser and occasional performance artist who hangs around spouting his philosophy of life, despite the fact that he isn’t even a student. There’s an appealing specificity to the film’s details that speaks to a deft balance of memory and imagination, from the way that Xioajun’s shaggy haircut and ever-present Walkman headphones frame his intense face to the background gag of smutty European classic novels circulating among the student body.

The animation style of Art College is similar to that of Liu’s neo-noir Have a Nice Day (2017), featuring thin, precise lines that bound fields of washed-out, often unshaded color. However, the cartoonish, slightly psychedelic edge of his prior feature has been softened to create a scrupulous, hand-drawn realism that wouldn’t be out of place in a 2000s indie comic. Unlike Have a Nice Day, which was reportedly a years-long solitary pursuit for Liu, Art College is apparently the fruit of a collaborative effort involving the Animation and Game Development Department at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where the director teaches. All the more remarkable, then, that the film feels like such a strongly personal work of remembrance, one that eschews rosy-hued romanticism but still conveys a sentimental warmth.

Although Art College possesses its share of drama – the characters are, after all, a gaggle of young artists, bubbling with ideals and hormones but lacking in common sense – there is precious little plot. The film’s time frame might be an entire school year rather than a single weekend, but it’s every inch a languid hang-out movie. Xioajun and his peers sit around in their dorm rooms, on the campus green, and at noodle shops, shooting the shit about the meaning of art and their plans for the future. They listen attentively to high-minded lectures, stare quizzically at exhibition pieces, and sneak into the local cinema to see Hollywood classics. They also create and rehearse, sometimes in half-hearted frustration, sometimes in a frenzy of inspiration.

This all might sound somewhat sleepy in practice, and even a bit insufferable. No one is quite so excitedly pretentious as a 20-year-old who has just discovered Picasso or Voltaire. However, the film’s animated form lends the story just enough distance and abstraction that the cringe is alchemically converted into something cozy. Viewers who recall what it was once like to be young and hungry (and yet oh-so-stupid) will likely find themselves cracking a smile despite themselves. Such is the potency of Art College’s scruffily nostalgic aura and the meticulous magic of Liu’s visual craft. (Animated dumplings have rarely looked so delectable.) Characters who might have come off as rash, fickle, and arrogant – as many of us once were – instead feel like fondly remembered dormmates from a time when anything seemed possible.