UK sensation Peppa Pig goes viral in China, a year after it was banned
Within hours of its release, the five-minute video “What is Peppa Pig” was widely trending on China’s Twitter-like Weibo and the mobile smartphone platform, WeChat.
The UK-made children’s cartoon character Peppa Pig has made a comeback in China in a trailer of a forthcoming movie, less than a year after its memes were banned by authorities for apparently promoting a subversive lifestyle.
The trailer of the film ‘Peppa Celebrates Chinese New Year’ – to be released only in China – was viewed millions of times on Chinese social media ahead of its release next month during the Chinese New Year– the Year of the Pig.
“By Tuesday, the trailer’s Mandarin hashtag #WhatisPeppa had been viewed more than 1.45bn times on popular microblogging platform Sina Weibo and the official video had garnered hundreds of millions of views across various streaming platforms,” the Financial Times reported.
The movie’s story revolves around the theme of family bonds – a central motif in Chinese New Year celebrations – involving a poor Chinese grandfather who welds a Peppa Pig from the metal of a stove pipe.
Within hours of its release, the five-minute video “What is Peppa Pig” was widely trending on China’s Twitter-like Weibo and the mobile smartphone platform, WeChat.
“In just a few hours, it was trending on both Weibo and WeChat, the two most popular Chinese social media platforms with hundreds of thousands of forwards and likes,” official news agency, Xinhua reported.
The usually staid news agency – an official arm of the Chinese government – paid a complement to the movie’s theme.
“The story might exaggerate the popularity of the British animation, the urban-rural divide, and backwardness of rural communication in China, but the emotions are real and resonate well with the public,” the Xinhua report said.
The tabloid Global Times in its commentary said: “It is almost the new year. Come home. Your parents are waiting for you. Tell them ‘I love you!’”
“I am in tears,” one blogger was quoted as saying while another wrote: “It reminded me of a sheep toy my grandpa made for me”.
Zhang Dapeng, the film’s director, told the Beijing News that the promo was not cut from the film but something the crew shot in a village in Hebei province in northern China for two days with untrained villagers.
The Chinese New Year or Spring Festival holidays are a peak time for China’s massive movie box office, second only to the US. In 2018, movies made more than 5.7 billion yuan (823 million U.S. dollars) during the holiday, setting a record.
Crackdown on Peppa Pig
It has been quite a turnaround in the fortunes of Peppa Pig. Last year, censors deleted 30,000 Peppa Pig video clips from the social media platform Douyin.
The online popularity of the cartoon character had made it an unexpected cultural icon of the “shehuiren” subculture in China.
“Shehuiren literally means ‘society person’, but in the online context, it refers to people who run counter to the mainstream value and are usually poorly educated with no stable job. They are unruly slackers roaming around and the antithesis of the young generation the Party tries to cultivate,” a state media report had then said.