When the eight-episode animated collection YAO-Chinese Folktales premiered in 2023, it felt like a revelation. A joint production between director Chen Liaoyu, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS), and video streaming platform BiliBili, each episode was distinct in its storytelling techniques and animation styles, together breathing new life into SAFS’s nearly 70-year heritage. A bold, experimental reimagination of traditional Chinese folktales, the anthology also captured the nation’s zeitgeist, exploring its unique cultural heritage and artistic sensibilities while allowing modern expressions that prioritize entertainment and broad appeal.

Its sequel, the recently debuted YAO-Chinese Folktales 2, therefore arrived under the shadow of its predecessor’s success. While the first collection is heralded for its narrative punch, the second leans toward a more contemplative, at times perplexing exploration of the human psyche.

Mastery of the “Neo-Chinese” visual language remains the series’ foundation. The individual creators do not limit themselves to simply replicating the well-trodden mediums of ink-wash or paper-cut animation, but find ways to translate these traditions into a modern cinematic language. Episode one, “How to Become Three Loongs,” for example, opens with the parched, cracked earth of a drought-stricken land. However, rather than being rendered with generic digital textures, the animators employed fine “cun (皴, layered ink)” strokes, primarily used to depict cracks, fissures, and the tactile quality of landscapes in classical Chinese paintings. Elsewhere, the choice of animation material becomes inseparable from the story itself. “Light Snow” is a poignant stop-motion piece crafted entirely from maozhan (毛毡, wool and felt) dolls. The wool’s inherent softness and warmth physically embody the film’s tender, aching theme of a mother’s struggle to let go of control over her son while readjusting her sense of balance in life. Such a conscious choice of medium, combining technique with narrative, helps build a humanistic core that transcends pastiche.

Whereas the first season used folklore to hold a mirror to societal structures, the storytelling in Folktales 2 turns sharply inward. The most compelling example is “Man in the Ear,” a spiritual successor to the first season’s “Goose Mountain,” a supernatural fable about a fox spirit’s attempts to lure a mountain porter via a labyrinth of lovers. Adapted from the foundational Qing dynasty (1616 – 1911) story collection Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (《聊斋志异》), “Man in the Ear” follows a scholar who, obsessed with the pursuit of immortality, is suddenly granted preternatural hearing. With this newfound ability, he begins eavesdropping on the conversations of two neighboring girls. Just as he is lost in delight, a human voice suddenly emerges from inside his ear. After returning home, he discovers that a monster has taken up residence there. Unable to drive it out, the scholar eventually resorts to luring it out with a puppet resembling the neighboring girl.

The episode’s sound design acts as a character in itself, layering mundane noise, amplified whispers, and a haunting soundscape to map the protagonist’s descent into aural—and psychological—chaos. This time, the nefarious creature he must evade is not an external monster but a manifestation of his own repressed desires and insecurities. This internalization of the fantastical is arguably the season’s most significant evolution, seeking resonance not in broad social allegory but in the intimate struggles of identity and perception.

This renewed focus on the individual shifts the anthology from portraying archetypes to portraying specific individuals, a significant step forward in the series’ character development. The first season’s characters, for all their charm, often served as clear allegorical vessels. Folktales 2, on the other hand, grapples with more complex, flawed, and unpredictable personas. In “Light Snow,” the protagonist Cheng Xiaoxue is initially defined solely by the suffocating role of an anxious single mother. She desperately tries to “cure” her son’s strange condition—his nonstop somersaulting—turning to Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture. Only after a crisis, a moment of vulnerability where her son saves her from drowning, does she begin to untangle her identity from motherhood and find her personal calling as an orchestral flautist. The episode depicts a woman reclaiming herself, not through a grand narrative of rebellion, but by the simple, redemptive act of nurturing her own soul. It is arguably one of the most authentic and progressive portraits of female subjectivity in recent Chinese animation.

However, the episode’s strength also highlights a limitation in the second season’s portrayal of women. The anthology focuses mainly on family life and domestic spaces, which, while meaningful, often overlooks the broader social conditions and systemic pressures that shape women’s lives beyond household settings. In “Today’s Zoo,” even the anthropomorphized animals are cast in maternal roles.

This is a missed opportunity, especially when you consider the first season’s standout episode, “Fool And God,” which, through the lens of rural modernization and folklore’s disappearance, poignantly hints at displaced village women whose lives are quietly being sidelined by urban progress. Season 2 lacks a comparable exploration of how working-class women, rural migrants, or individuals facing hardships operate in a rapidly changing China. In “Man in the Ear,” female characters are even reduced to the male protagonist’s fantasy, serving merely as a symbol of desire and temptation.

Folktales 2’s ambitious self-reflective turn is also a double-edged sword, and it is here that the season’s most consistent critiques take root. In their pursuit of psychological depth and metaphorical richness, several stories succumb to a kind of narrative opacity where meaning becomes unmoored from emotional engagement. In “Big Bird,” a dark, visually stunning fable brimming with potent imagery—feathers, gramophones, mysterious ducks—its symbolic lexicon is so densely packed and its narrative so elliptical that it feels more like a puzzle to be solved rather than a story to be felt. As some viewers have noted, when the audience’s debate fixates on deciphering historical references or iconography instead of connecting with a character’s fate, the storytelling mechanism has faltered.

Likewise, “Sanlang” ambitiously mashes wuxia-style aesthetics with a sci-fi mirrored world, but sacrifices narrative coherence for conceptual ambition. Its core—a swordsman’s quest for glory, his confrontation with a mirrored self, and his eventual rejection of vanity—is buried under overwrought metaphors and under-explained elements, including a jarring tonal shift into surreal sci-fi and a climax hinging on the baffling power of “the world’s best lamb leg.” The result feels less like a resonant story than an illustrated treatise, asking the audience to decipher dense symbolism rather than connect with the character’s journey.

As a result, Folktales 2 risks presenting a relatively privileged experience of selfhood as universal. Themes such as “finding oneself” or “rejecting vanity,” explored across several episodes, are meaningful, but they assume a level of personal freedom and security that not everyone experiences. A more expansive take on modern Chinese folktales could apply the series’ psychological depth and visual innovation to stories that reflect the more varied, difficult, and resilient lives of people, both men and women, in contemporary Chinese society. Including such a perspective would not only broaden the anthology’s social canvas but also deepen its claim to capturing the multifaceted spirit of the times it seeks to reflect.

Ultimately, Folktales 2 feels like a necessary, if occasionally faltering, step in the anthology’s evolution. It consolidates the technical and stylistic prowess of its predecessor while courageously steering its narrative concerns toward the complexities of modern life. It is less concerned with being universally accessible and more with exploring specific, sometimes difficult, emotional and philosophical terrain—a fact reflected in its less enthused reception on Douban, China’s top ratings platform, scoring a 7.8 compared with the acclaimed 8.7 of its predecessor. The result is a collection that is arguably more artistically consistent in its ambition but more variable in its execution.

Nevertheless, the series remains a vital laboratory for Chinese animation, one determined to explore not just the outer boundaries of cutting-edge techniques, but also the inner landscapes of the human condition.