“At that time, the novel had not won a prize, and it was not as popular as it is now in China,” Shenyou said, referring to the 2015 Hugo Award that Liu won for the trilogy’s first installment. This inspiration can still be seen in the latest season, too, with the blockheaded cartoons resembling Minecraft characters. “We have the same crew and concepts, so we thought it wouldn’t be hard to get good reviews - but now this has exceeded our expectations.”Īs an animation enthusiast and a fan of the sci-fi trilogy, Shenyou said he started working on the series in 2014 using the Minecraft computer game, which allows users to build and populate their own worlds.

“We anticipated getting some praise, since the first two seasons were generally well-received, too,” he told Sixth Tone. He said they weren’t expecting it to be such a resounding success. The series’ director, who asked to be identified as Shenyou, and his team started production on the third season in 2018. The nine-episode series is adapted from “The Dark Forest,” the second of Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, and tells the story of Zhang Beihai, a Chinese naval officer who evades an alien civilization to preserve hope for the future of humanity.

“My Three Body, Legend of Zhang Beihai” has been well-received since it premiered in early January.

“The scenes are all there, built from words I could barely picture myself using my barren imagination.” “It has the flavor of the original work,” one Weibo user wrote, praising the series as the “pride” of China’s animation industry. The series has even scored 9.7 out of 10 on review platform Douban, in stark contrast to the initial skepticism over whether the trilogy could be visually rendered. Viewers have left glowing reviews on microblogging site Weibo and the host video-streaming site Bilibili, praising the plot, visual effects, and music. When animated and live-action versions of famed Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem” were announced last year, sci-fi fans wondered whether they would do justice to the beloved Hugo Award-winning novel.īut following Tuesday’s finale of the third season of a different, longer-running animated series, the answer is clear: Yes, it can.įans say “ My Three Body, Legend of Zhang Beihai” - the third season of the animated series based on the second book from Liu’s trilogy - has exceeded their expectations.

The three body problem 2016