On Happiness Road: Taiwanese animation tells ‘cruel and dark’ story of country’s contemporary history despite enchanting style
Sung Hsin-yin drew on inspiration from her own childhood for her directorial debut ‘On Happiness Road’, but her film speaks to the collective memory of Taiwanese society, documenting its changes and questioning its values
Sung Hsin-yin used to think that fiction was just made-up stories – until she had to write a script for the first time as a student. The best stories, she learned, are based on personal experience.
Instead of conjuring something out of their imaginations for material, Sung’s teacher at the Columbia College of Chicago, where she was studying film directing and screenwriting, urged the students to dig into their own lives.
In the beginning, however, Sung was uncertain how she might proceed. Her backstory and upbringing paled in comparison to the colourful lives of her classmates, or so she thought. One classmate’s mother was a marine, so he had travelled to harbours around the world growing up, and had been married three times. Another classmate grew up in a ghetto and had been shot as a child.
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But as she looked back at her life, Sung recalled the street in Taiwan where she grew up and the intriguing juxtaposition between its name – Happiness Road – and the reality of life in the neighbourhood. Despite its cheery name, at the end of the road was a large, dirty trench, which made headlines in 1997 when kidnappers dumped the body of a Taiwanese actress’ 16-year-old daughter in it.
On Happiness Road became the title of her homework, and eventually became a hand-drawn animated film that hit cinema screens in Taiwan last year.
Despite it grossing a disappointing 12.9 million New Taiwan dollars (US$430,000) at the domestic box office, the film won the grand prize at the 5th Tokyo Anime Award Festival in March, as well as the AniMovie Award at the 25th Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film in Germany.
