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2001·Early web, before YouTube·skill

Xiao Xiao

A Beijing animator's stick-figure fight scenes that reached the whole world in 2001 and taught it how to animate.

From the early web

This Moment began as a web animation, not as a video upload. Originally published on web.

The story

What this was

Black stick figures fight, in silhouette, against blank backgrounds — nunchaku, flying kicks, guns, wire-work, whole choreographed sequences with camera moves and weight. Zhu Zhiqiang made them in Beijing in Flash. Some episodes are interactive and playable rather than watched. Ten instalments were released between 2001 and 2002.

It first appeared in 2001, during early web, before YouTube.

It is the first thing made in China to become a genuine global internet phenomenon, and it arrived four years before YouTube. The technique mattered as much as the work: stick figures require no drawing ability, so the series was copied immediately and at scale, and an entire genre of amateur fight animation — still running today — descends directly from it. A great many working animators started by trying to redo Xiao Xiao.

The series ended in 2002 and Zhu did not become famous in the way a Western creator of the same thing would have. The Flash files depend on a plug-in that no longer exists. What survives is the genre it started, which outnumbers the original by many thousands of works.

The same internet

Early web, before YouTube

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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a web animation, not as a video upload. Originally published on web.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
Black stick figures fight, in silhouette, against blank backgrounds — nunchaku, flying kicks, guns, wire-work, whole choreographed sequences with camera moves and weight. Zhu Zhiqiang made them in Beijing in Flash. Some episodes are interactive and playable rather than watched. Ten instalments were released between 2001 and 2002.
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