Tongues of China 中国话
Role:
Creative Direction
Animation
Design
In everyday conversation, Chinese is often seen as a single, unified language. In reality, its linguistic diversity is so vast that some dialects sound like entirely different languages.
We are proud to have created the title sequence for Tongues of China (中国话), the first-ever documentary dedicated to Chinese languages. This 7-episode series premiered on China Central Television’s Documentary Channel during Chinese New Year 2023.
The greatest challenge that sprung was this: Language is such an abstract concept, how can we express it without being too symbolic or literal? How do we interpret the correlation between languages and people?
Eventually, we landed on a fundamental concept that it is people’s never-ending communication and migration that keeps languages evolving for thousands of years.
The documentary series begins with the tones and origins of Chinese languages and varieties. Chinese is a tonal language. For example, there are four tones in Mandarin: ā, á, ǎ and à.
We also start with a playful treatment of the tones: What if tones are the eaves of the traditional Chinese architectures? How abstract can we be to show enough of this concept?
