Deep Sea (film)

Did You Know?

• The film's score was composed by Dou Peng over three years and recorded by a 100-piece symphony orchestra, with cellist Wang Jian providing featured solos.
• The musical interlude 'Little White Boat' is a traditional Korean children's song; the creative team spent a year securing international copyright clearances for its use.

Plot

After her parents' divorce, a young girl named Shenxiu joins her new family on a sea voyage. Still haunted by her mother's absence, she follows a humming sound that reminds her of a lullaby her mother used to sing. This leads her into the Deep Sea Restaurant, a chaotic underwater eatery run by Nanhe, a frantic chef obsessed with gold, and staffed by sea animals that serve humanoid fish. In the real world, a violent storm has struck, and Shenxiu believes she hears her mother calling from the ocean. Nanhe initially treats Shenxiu coldly because her sadness summons the Red Phantom, a suffocating, shroud-like creature that destroys everything it touches. But when he discovers that Shenxiu can produce a magical soup ingredient, he agrees to guide her to the Deep Sea Eye to find her mother, in exchange for her help in the kitchen. During their journey, the two grow close. Nanhe, despite his rough and greedy manner, is revealed to be a fellow outcast who hides his own pain behind jokes and bravado. He urges Shenxiu to resist her depression and find the strength to smile through hardship. When they finally reach the Deep Sea Eye, the Red Phantom attacks with full force. Nanhe sacrifices himself, using all his magic to tear open the Eye so Shenxiu can enter. The underwater world then dissolves into a hallucination. In reality, Shenxiu fell overboard during the storm, and Nanhe—a struggling street performer selling books on the cruise ship—jumped in to save her. They drifted for hours in freezing water, clinging to a life buoy, as Nanhe told her the fantastical stories that shaped her dream. In a white void between life and death, Shenxiu meets Nanhe one last time. Though she begs to stay, he pushes her back toward the light, telling her to live. When rescuers pull them from the water, Nanhe has died from the cold. Shenxiu wakes in a hospital, surrounded by her family.

Behind the scenes

Tian Xiaopeng spent seven years developing Deep Sea, conceiving it as a personal exploration of an ordinary, vulnerable protagonist rather than relying on traditional Chinese mythological intellectual properties. Shenxiu was designed to capture the inner struggle of individuals dealing with loneliness, depression, and a people-pleasing personality, while Nanhe represents ordinary, unsung heroes. Voice actors were required to match the ages of their characters; vocal recording and facial expression mapping took five years using a recording-during-performance methodology. When the original young actress for Shenxiu underwent voice changes during puberty, open auditions were held to recast the role. The film is the first in Chinese animation history to develop and utilize ink-wash particle technology, which took two years of research and development and maps billions of digital particles to replicate traditional Chinese ink-wash painting in 3D space. Animators used mirrors to monitor their own facial muscles for reference. The production involved over a thousand special effects shots, making up nearly 70% of the runtime; the splitting-the-sea sequence alone required over a hundred layered particle effects and took 15 months. Production was delayed by severe regional torrential rains that flooded the studio's mainframes. The character Youcai, the cashier feline, was modeled after one of 87 stray cats cared for by the production staff. The film features over 80 fluffy sea otters; crew members recorded themselves performing physical prompts as spatial references for the animation rigs.

Box office

Deep Sea hit theaters on January 22, 2023, and its opening was underwhelming, earning only 31.84 million RMB on its second day and landing in fifth place. The film’s focus on depression and family conflict split holiday audiences, sparking mixed early feedback on Sina Weibo. However, strong critical praise turned things around, and by the third week ticket sales climbed, pushing its final domestic total to 920 million RMB. That made it the 13th highest-grossing animated film ever released in China. In France, the movie played on 324 screens through Eurozoom, one of the widest releases for a Chinese film there. It drew over 150,000 admissions in its first three weeks, setting a three-year record for Chinese cinema in the country.

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes, 88% of 26 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.5/10. Domestically, critical reception focused on the film's technological advancements and dark narrative themes. The jury of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival praised its breathtaking, unprecedented visuals and ambitious narrative. A review from the 1905 Film Network lauded the innovative particle ink-wash style as an industry milestone. Conversely, some critics argued that the heavy focus on technological spectacle came at the expense of structural coherence; Associate Professor Du Xiaojie, writing for the Journal of Nanning Normal University, argued that the film suffered from narrative emptiness, stating that the script indulged in emotional venting rather than offering a rigorous exploration of its realistic psychological themes.