Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s our slate:

• 1) On the Xiao Xiao Flash series.

• 2) Animation newsbits.

A quick note before we start. The newsletter recently passed 60,000 subscribers — a number we can’t believe. Huge thanks to everyone who’s chosen to come along as we look into animation from all over the world.

With that, let’s go!

1 – Stick fights

Before YouTube, TikTok or social media as a whole, there was Flash.

It changed the internet. The Shockwave Flash (.SWF) file format allowed animation and even games to run on dial-up connections. It’s all been retired now — but, in its heyday, web designers everywhere used Flash to make sites feel slick.

There was another group that took to Flash, too: amateur animators. The program was easy to use, and creations with it were easy to share. This caused the first online animation boom. A solo artist with only a home computer could reach millions.

That was a big deal in the United States — but it was, in some ways, a bigger deal in China. Flash arrived there in the late ‘90s, and it became era-defining. The so-called “Flashers” (闪客) spoke with the bold, new voice of the younger generation. Their work fascinated the press and public alike.

“Chinese underground films and rock ‘n’ roll music were once the expression of rebellious passions in the pursuit of ... new cultural dimensions,” scholar Weihua Wu once wrote, “but today these passions are expressed through the channels of Flash.”1

China’s internet cafes were packed with Flash-watchers by the early 2000s.2 And one of their favorites was Xiao Xiao (2000–2002), a violent action series about stick figures. It was simple, utterly of its time and copied to infinity. Quickly, it outgrew China and became a phenomenon around the world.

For people of a certain age, who grew up online, Xiao Xiao and its clones were part of life. The series isn’t deep and has little to say: it’s just kung fu, firefights, blood and chaos. But it was the height of cool to its (mostly young) audience. It was also a gateway to Flash animation for many.

That was true inside and outside China. Xiao Xiao was a hit