"Bro'Town" creator Ant Sang bringing kung fu short film to life

 

Graphic artist Ant Sang taught himself how to bring drawings to life via online tutorials and has had a project gathering dust for over a decade.

Ant Sang

Graphic artist Ant Sang made a name for himself as head designer of the hit animated series Bro'Town in the early 2000s.

 But he’s never tackled animation and always felt “like a bit of a faker”, he told RNZ’s Culture 101.

 “People meet me and they assume that I can do the magic of bringing drawings to life by making them move and I've never been able to,” he says.

So, he decided to bring a project that had been gathering dust for years to animated life, after teaching himself via online tutorials.

“I had this film that we'd started 13 years ago, which is a long story, but it had been in limbo and I thought I'll just start trying to do the exercises by just animating some of the scenes of the short film and I'll see if I can pull it off.”

After he had built the confidence to make more complex animated scenes he realised he’d need funding to complete the film.

Now thanks to a Booster campaign he has the funds to finish the job, he says.

The film is Wing Chun about a young woman called Yim Wing Chun.

“She was being harassed by a either a tyrant or a warlord type guy, someone you don't want to mess with. He wanted to marry her and she really didn't want to marry him.”

A Shaolin nun that lived near her village promises to teach her this new style of Kung Fu called Wing Chun, he says.

“I'll teach it to you and then challenge this guy to a fight. And if you beat him you don't have to marry him, but if you lose you will have to go through with that.”

Sang is rendering the film in a traditional 2D frame by frame animation method.

 “It's the old school style. So if you think about the Disney films of old, where every frame was drawn on paper and usually like 12 frames per second drawn and then it's all put together and it flashes in front of your eyes and it looks like it's moving and it comes to life - it's magical.”

 A lover of old-school animation, he wasn’t tempted to go down the AI route, he says.

 “For me, part of doing art is the struggling through it. You've got this idea and you're trying to think, how am I going to pull this off?

 “It's really painstaking doing animation, but there's a satisfaction in doing the process and doing the hard work that I don't think I would get from AI.”

 He’s always admired animators and mysterious processes involved in bringing drawings to life, he says.

“I could see it happening on Bro’Town, looking over people's shoulders and seeing what they're doing. There's little time codes and squiggles that they're doing in the corner of the paper.

 “I've always respected them, but now having started learning, once you start something, you can see actually how much you don't know, and how actually amazing professional and experienced animators are.”

RNZ

20 April 2026