I Am What I Am 2

I Am What I Am 2 (2024)

雄狮少年2

Gyun, an unknown person who came to Shanghai to work, agreed to represent the declining Chuanwu Boxing Gym to participate in the "Shanghai Fight Night" martial arts competition in order to earn money to treat his father's illness. To do so, he must overcome all the experts, prejudices, and himself.

Date of release
2024-12-07
TMDB
7.8 / 10 (35)
Runtime
2h 13m
Genres
Animation, Action, Comedy
Director
Sun Haipeng
Collection
I Am What I Am Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

I Am What I Am 2, also known as The Kung Fu Kid internationally, is a 2024 Chinese animated martial arts comedy-drama film directed by Sun Haipeng. It is the sequel to I Am What I Am (2021).

Production

Director Sun Haipeng had not initially planned on creating a sequel to I Am What I Am, but following positive reception after its release, he began development on the second film in March 2022.

Although Shanghai was initially chosen merely to take Gyun out of familiar territory, Sun later realized that it had a "strong martial tradition, despite its modern veneer [...] demonstrated by its association with figures like kung fu master Huo Yuanjia". The Guangdong-based creative team visited Shanghai seven times through all four seasons, photographing textures and details to accurately recreate its atmosphere.

The team took visual cues from landmarks such as the City God Temple, the Oriental Pearl Tower, Waibaidu Bridge, and Nanjing Road. Places the characters live in were based on traditional Shanghainese shikumen architecture from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and "Workers' New Villages" (Chinese: 工人新村), public housing built by the Shanghai municipal government from the 1950s onwards.

According to Sun, the script development process was challenging, undergoing three major revisions over a six-month period. A key difficulty lay in illustrating the relationship between the characters Gyun and Xiaoyu, and depicting their motivations for their involvement in martial arts.

Production started by the end of 2022, with the crew being allowed greater creative freedom compared to the first film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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