On Happiness Road

Chi studied in Taiwan, moved to America and built a life there. When her grandmother dies she goes back to the house on Happiness Road, to the neighbourhood she grew up in. Meeting old friends and relatives again, and all the sentences nobody ever finished, sends her back through her own childhood and through the country that childhood happened in. Sung Hsin-Yin's animation tells forty years of Taiwan through one woman's life: which language you were allowed to speak at school, the silences inside a family, emigration, political change. The drawing is soft and childlike and a good deal of what it depicts is not. It won best animated feature at the Golden Horse Awards and the grand prize at the Tokyo Anime Awards.