Then My TA Gave Me a Cow
The surprising appeal of Niu Lai, and what it says about the attention economy
I had just finished a lecture on the attention economy when Teacher’s Day supplied an unexpected teaching aid. The lecture had treated attention in the customary way, as a scarce resource that platforms compete to capture and that analysts count in views, shares, and purchases.
My teaching assistant gave me a small figurine inspired by Niu Lai, the animated film usually rendered in English as Here Comes the Cow. She explained it first through a cheerful association: a bull market was coming. The name lends itself to that reading. In Mandarin the title echoes the phrase for a bull market arriving, and the Chinese financial press has reported investors adopting the film as a playful wish for rising prices. I had received a cultural reference and an optimistic financial outlook in one small object.
My students, who had sent warm wishes, filled me in on the film and its unexpected popularity. One of them was intrigued by how it had captured so much attention. I understood her question as being partly about its rough animation and apparently modest resources, though I would not put too much weight on my translation of her words.
Her question stayed with me. How does a film so much less polished than a major animated release become something everyone wants to discuss? And how does it then become a gift?
Reports of the film’s release help explain her surprise. The film opened in early August with no trailer and no marketing, and sold a few hundred tickets in its first ten days. Then clips of its simple computer models and awkward animation began to circulate. Early ridicule helped bring it to wider notice, and within weeks the box office had reached tens of millions of yuan.
Its budget is less clear. Published estimates vary, so I would hesitate to repeat any particular figure. More revealing is the director’s own account of the production: five years of work, hardware he could afford only secondhand, software written for architects rather than animators, and technical problems he had to solve himself. His mother, with no formal training, taught herself enough music to compose the score. The largest investment he describes is time.
Calling such a project “low cost” therefore needs some care. A modest cash outlay can sit alongside an enormous personal commitment. Five years does not become inexpensive because nobody submitted a timesheet.
Effort cannot settle the question of quality, of course. Teachers know this distinction well. “I worked very hard on it” deserves acknowledgment. Paragraph three may still need rewriting.
But knowing about the effort can change how we respond. An awkward scene might first seem funny because it falls short of what we expect in a cinema. Once we learn something about its making, we may also see the difficulty of attempting a feature film with so little. The scene has not changed. What we bring to it has.
That may explain some of the affection surrounding the film. Some viewers enjoy the absurdity. Others want to understand the jokes their friends are sharing. A single viewer can have several reasons to buy a ticket, and the popular story that “the internet mocked it, then fell in love” flattens all of this. The internet contains a great many people. Those who arrived to support the film were not necessarily the ones who first laughed at it. Mockery and affection can also coexist in the same person; anyone who has received a birthday card from a close friend will recognize the arrangement.
The film has also prompted discussion about AI. The director has said that no AI was used at any stage, and several commentators have taken the film’s roughness as evidence of that, a visible mark of human labor at a moment when polished images can be generated in seconds. I would not build too much on a single case. But it sits comfortably beside a point I have made elsewhere, that AI makes execution cheap while judgment stays expensive. As polish becomes easier to produce, it becomes a less reliable signal of skill or effort. Knowing how a work was made may then matter more to some viewers.
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I had explored related territory in an earlier article, The Imperfect Appeal: Is China’s Labubu Heralding a Shift in Global Consumer Psychology?, where Labubu’s unconventional appearance offered a way to think about characters that depart from familiar ideas of beauty and cuteness. So the comparison came naturally. Here was another unusual creature that had become a shared reference, and an object whose significance might need explaining to anyone meeting it for the first time.
My students saw differences, and their response made me pause. “People like imperfect things” is a convenient explanation. It is also broad enough to hide quite different experiences.
Labubu’s oddness belongs to its design. Its teeth and expression are features of an imagined character, and an unconventional appearance can be executed with considerable skill. The film’s roughness is of another kind. Viewers are responding to limits in execution as well as to the character itself. Deliberately designing a strange creature and struggling to animate one are different creative situations. Both can produce affection, but we should not assume they do so for the same reasons.
The ways people encounter the two also differ. Collecting is central to Labubu’s appeal, with blind boxes, scarcity, resale prices, and the display of a new acquisition. Much of the cow’s appeal has developed through clips, reviews, jokes, and the story of its making. Both depend on conversation and commercial activity, but the emphasis differs. Calling both “imperfect” tells us little about those differences.
My TA’s gift brings the two together. The figurine on my desk is neatly made, yet it carries associations with the film’s roughness, the conversation around it, and the wish attached to its name. That helps answer my second question. My TA had found an object that let us share the joke and gave her good wishes a tangible form.
What does all this add to a lecture on the attention economy?
It reminds me that the things we count do not fully explain the experiences behind them. A view might register admiration or disbelief. A share might mean “this is wonderful,” “this is ridiculous,” or “you need to see this so we can discuss it.” A purchase might satisfy curiosity, support a creator, or make someone else smile.
A student of mine, asked to look into the film’s reception, began by asking two chatbots what people thought of it. The answers were fluent and plausible, but they were summaries of summaries. She had done what more of us now do, which is to send a machine to pay attention on our behalf, and it returned a tidy account with the disbelief, the affection, and the mixed motives pressed flat. To learn what audiences actually said, there was no substitute for reading what they wrote.
These distinctions matter because attention alone cannot tell us what people value. They also explain why technical polish is an incomplete guide to cultural success. People encounter a film through friends, clips, commentary, and stories about its makers, and they can enjoy the conversation as much as the work.
None of this makes roughness a dependable recipe. We hear about the unlikely production that becomes a sensation; many others remain obscure. Deliberately making something worse would be a poor lesson to take into either filmmaking or the classroom. What the cow offers instead is a reason to stay curious about what audiences find in a work, including things its makers never anticipated.
That curiosity seems fitting on Teacher’s Day. Teaching involves explaining, assessing, and occasionally persuading people that the reading is shorter than it looks. It should also include moments when a student’s question unsettles an explanation we thought was adequate. My student supplied such a question. The students’ wishes gave the occasion its warmth. My TA gave me something tangible to remember it by, along with a hopeful reading of its name.
Whether the craze lasts another month or grows into a lasting market for collectibles, I will remember the exchange with my TA and students whenever I see the figurine. The internet can move on. It will still be the cow my TA gave me, shortly after I thought I had finished explaining attention.
Dr. Nicos Rossides is a CEO, educator, and author whose work spans management, education, and artificial intelligence. He is Co-Founder and Chairman of the Advisory Board of listening247, a global insights firm, and Professor of Management at Minjiang University’s International Digital Economy College. His Routledge titles include Engaging the Workforce (2022), Employee Engagement in Startups (2025), and AI-Powered Insight (2026, with Michalis A. Michael).
