Yonfan Takes Trip Down ‘Cherry Lane’ to Discover Erotic Animation

Hong Kong director Yonfan says his late-life conversion to animation, with upcoming “No. 7 Cherry Lane,” brings him new artistic freedom. Including new ways to express the erotic.

“Strangely enough, I found it’s easier to deliver what I want to say in an animation. Drawings and paintings can give you more imagination than the real photos. The Mona Lisa still sits in the Louvre and can touch the heart of millions. That is what a good painting can do. In ‘No. 7 Cherry Lane,’ we have thousands of wonderful moments in images, each fully capable of conveying powerful emotion,” Yonfan told Variety. “The love scenes in ‘Cherry Lane’ can be much more evocative than any painting by Andy Warhol.”

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The story is something of a time capsule of the 1960s Hong Kong, when Yonfan was moved there by his family from mainland China and Taiwan. “Hong Kong was still a British Crown Colony. It is about people who I knew, about the fundamental human relationships that I learned, and about a lost era that I miss. It is a dedication to the high ideals that we once had, to the search of liberation we once demanded, and to a delicate relationship that we once treasured.”

The film is Yonfan’s first in nearly a decade, since 2009’s “Prince of Tears” and took five years of storyboarding in Taiwan, production in Beijing and post production in Hong Kong. “During those years I merely tried to refine and redefine myself while the whole cinematic world has gone wild. After all, I am still hopelessly in love with cinema,” he says.

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