The Chinese philosophers go digital

Lin Kwei-yu (林奎佑), better known by his pen name Yufu (魚夫), is a cartoonist, a political commentator, a writer, a TV/radio show host and the owner of a restaurant. And now he is about to add another title to his name.

He is the owner of Jamar Idea Production, (甲馬創意), a digital animation production company.

Sitting in his new office in Chungho, Yufu is surrounded by other high-tech companies. He works rapidly with his mouse, moving pictures around his screen.

"See, I can quickly create a picture of Chen Shui-bian kissing Annette Lu. I just take this picture from the database and then make a small change here, add the background of the presidential palace. I have finished a cartoon in just five minutes," Yufu says, explaining his new computerized technique for creating political cartoons.

Yufu began his career as a political satirist. He still contributes cartoons to more than 20 magazines and newspapers everyday, including the Chinese-language Liberty Times, and the English-language Taiwan News.

"Compared with the traditional method of using pen, paper and ink, I've gained a lot of time for myself," he said. "It used to take one or two hours to draw a picture. Now it's a matter of minutes."

One year ago, Yufu left his position as creative director of Sanlih TV Corporation (三立電視台), giving up an annual income of NT$7 million in order to set up his own company for creating digital content.

He did this when Taiwan was on an economic ebb tide that had hit Internet-related industries particularly hard. Many people thought he was crazy.

Yufu's face used to be on TV every evening for the primetime call-in show Eight O'clock Talk (八點大小聲). In the period before Jamar opened he disappeared from public view. He says he has only recently emerged from a thousand-day stint eating lunchboxes and focusing on his ideas for Jamar.

Now he's back -- but with a new look. He is now very much the businessman and hangs out with software makers, game producers and animators. Last November, Yufu took his product Chuang Tzu (莊子) to the first Taiwan Award for Digital Content(台灣優質數位內容產品獎) offered by the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). And he didn't come away empty handed either.

One of Jamar's early products is a cartoon animation called Between Confusion and Enlightenment (迷悟之間) which aired last July on the Buddhist satellite channel Ren-Jian TV. Based on a collection of talks by Buddhist master Hsing Yun (星雲法師), the animation ran for 46 episodes.

Each episode features two characters, a Buddhist master and an acolyte, who spend a couple of minutes discussing everyday philosophy and illustrating the tenets of Buddhism. It was the first cartoon based on Buddhism to use film animation production processing.

The technique combines 3D and 2D animation. The former makes the figures look more vivid and lifelike, while the 2D drawing style is intended to convey the simplicity of Zen.

Combining 3D and 2D techniques may not be original -- it has been used most recently in the Hollywood studio animations Stallion and Ice Age -- but Yufu has a few tricks of his own. He is the first to incorporate Chinese ink-wash painting into digital animation.

The 3D techniques makes the figures and their movements more detailed. These figures are then transposed into 2D, to create the unique effects seen in the award-winning Chuang Tzu.