Escaping Puppet
Escaping Puppet is a stop-motion animation that tells the quiet tragedy of 万历Wanli, a Ming emperor who retreated from public life and refused to govern for the last two decades of his reign.
Trapped by a system of hollow ritual and paralyzing hypocrisy, he chose withdrawal over confrontation. Drawn to the emotional terrain behind historical events, I imagined Wanli not in the court, but in the solitude that followed—his inner world. This work does not redeem him. Nor does it condemn. Instead, it lingers in the space of emotional impasse—where lucidity meets futility, and where “escaping” becomes, in itself, a kind of survival.
This animation offers a fiction: a space where those who cannot leave may still drift inward, where escape is not an act, but a feeling of being human.
Escaping Puppet
2020
Stop-motion animation
Duration: 2.35 mins