HONG KONG — Taiwan's crack animation team, Next Media Animation, is justly famous for rapidly turning around high-quality satires of news events that are actually funny.
Apart from their tendency to depict China as giant, angry pandas and America as waddling, fat people, one of the most remarkable things about NMA is they have earned a wide following in America and around the world. They are perhaps the only native Mandarin YouTube videos that regularly gain that distinction. If the People's Republic of China really wanted to learn how to win "soft power" — i.e., cultural admiration — they have to look no further than across the Taiwan Strait for inspiration.
As their founder Hong Kong tabloid tycoon Jimmy Lai told Wired magazine, “There’s no better sensation than image. It’s so in your face!”
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