On November 10, the 39th China Golden Rooster Awards ceremony was held in Xiamen, Fujian. The animated film Nobody, directed and written by Yu Shui, professor at Beihang University's School of New Media Art and Design, took home the best animated film award. The award highly recognizes the film's artistic achievement, and also marks another milestone in Beihang faculty's commitment to original artistic practice and to the creative transformation and innovative development of fine traditional Chinese culture.

In recent years, Yu Shui has dedicated himself to original Chinese animation, achieving a series of nationally influential achievements. Released in 2025, the animated film Nobody received widespread acclaim, with a cumulative box office of 1.719 billion yuan and over 47 million viewers, which set a box office record for 2D animated films in Chinese film history. The film has won multiple major honors, including Best Screenplay at the 21st China Changchun Film Festival, the 2025 Xia Yan Honor for Adapted Screenplay, and the 2025 Honorary Screenwriter from the China Film Directors' Guild.

Yu Shui interviewed by the Golden Rooster Awards

Nobody has also been released across overseas markets including North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Vietnam, and was selected for the official feature film competition of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, an A-list international film festival. Major media outlets including People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency, China Media Group, and Guangming Daily have highly praised the work. These achievements reflect the vitality of combining fine traditional Chinese culture with contemporary aesthetics, and demonstrate the promising prospects for Chinese original animation in international communication.

As a university teacher long engaged in animation creation, Yu Shui has always integrated artistic production with academic research. Over his 22-year teaching career at Beihang, he has worked as an animation director, screenwriter and researcher, producing more than 800 minutes of original animated content and accumulating creative experience spanning artistic experimentation and industrial practice. Amid profound changes brought by artificial intelligence to the animation and film industry, Yu Shui has actively promoted the cross-disciplinary integration of art and technology, exploring innovative applications of AI in animation creation.

Leveraging Beihang's strengths in multidisciplinary integration and the School's academic accumulation in digital animation, digital media art, visual communication design, and other fields, the School of New Media Art and Design will place greater emphasis on integrating artistic theory with creative practice, and prioritize real-project-driven, cross-disciplinary collaborative innovation, and professional practice training, enabling students to explore new possibilities at the intersection of artistic creation and technological innovation.

From The Summer of Little Monsters to Nobody, from traditional animation creation to AI image research, Yu Shui's practice and exploration vividly embody the School of New Media Art and Design's commitment to integrating art and technology and emphasizing original practice and talent cultivation. Looking ahead, Beihang will continue to ground itself in fine traditional Chinese culture, leverage its strengths in technological innovation and disciplinary integration, and actively explore a path of new media art education with Beihang characteristics, cultivating more high-level talent with cultural confidence, artistic creativity, and technological innovation capability for China's film, animation, and digital creative industries.

Editor: Liu Tingting