4. Analysis of On the Happiness Road
4.1 Creation of On the Happiness Road
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Chapter 4. Analysis of On the Happiness Road
4.1 Creation of On the Happiness Road
On the Happiness Road is produced by the director Sung Hsin-yin as a partly autobiographical animated film. Thus, it is essential to look into her life before discussing this film. Sung was born in 1974 and grew up in Xinzhuang District, New Taipei City. Both of her parents were in the working-class. She studied at Taipei First Girls High School and determined to be a doctor. When she was sixteen, she got ill and went to the doctor frequently. Then, she realized that her emotions were easily influenced by facing the death of other people. Thus, she gave up her thought to be a doctor and turned down the expectation of her family. After this first rebellion, she graduated from the department of political science at National Taiwan University (Formosa TV Taiwan Lecture Hall, 2019).41
Sung became the reporter in the entertainment section of the Liberty Times after graduation. At that time, she participated in the Cannes Film Festival and finished her reports. It made her acquainted with many directors, actors or creators and started to be interested in creation. Therefore, she went to Kyoto University in Japan for studying cinema. Later, she got her master degree of School of the Art in Columbia College, Chicago and got married in the U.S. During her study at Columbia College, Chicago, the professor gave her the assignment to answer the question of who she is and where she came from with the reason that a good story always came from the personal
41 民視台灣學堂（2019.04.08）。＜走上「幸福路上」【民視台灣學堂】台製日常 ─ 莊佳穎 X 特別來賓：宋欣穎＞。
取自「民視台灣學堂」網頁https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKGoRHDdGuc
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experience. It became the opportunity for her to look back on her life experience and inspired her to create On the Happiness Road. She surprisingly received the compliment and encouragement from her classmates and professor to finish this story.
She learned to embrace herself in writing this story (Pan, 2018).42
She went back to Taiwan and quested for the production team. Although Sung was not majoring in animation, she still chose animation as the form to present this story. She considered that animation was more suitable to present the fantasy scene of the characters as well as the long time-span of the film. Also, she was inspired by Persepolis and decided to throw back her childhood from the adult’s point of view (Pan, 2018).
At first, Sung produced a twelve-minute short animated film and would like to develop it as animation series like Chibi Maruko Chan (櫻桃小丸子). However, even though she received recognition in Taipei Golden Horse Film Project Promotion, the cost was still too high. She turned to produce it as a feature film so that it would be easier to look out for funds (Huang, 2018).43 There were lots of people suggested her not to produce an original animated film in Taiwan and told her it was too risky. She still believed that it is meaningful to record the Taiwanese story no matter it created profits or not at the
42 潘乃欣（2018.01.26）。＜《幸福路上》導演宋欣穎：想成為理想中的大人？你得先釐清「理想」的意義＞。取自
「Cheers 快樂工作人雜誌」網頁https://www.cheers.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5087858
43 黃衍方（2018.01.06）。＜專訪《幸福路上》導演宋欣穎（下）：我們應該共同記得一些事情＞。取自「上報」網頁
https://www.upmedia.mg/news_info.php?SerialNo=32864
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end (Lin, 2018).44 It referred to the difficult situation on the making of animation in Taiwan which mentioned in Chapter 2.2. Sung further stated that the title ‘On the Happiness Road’ indicated the story of Chi’s family living on the Happiness Road in Xinzhuang and she further gave the double meaning of on the way to find happiness. It is not only the process of Chi to find herself, but also the process of whole Taiwanese society to find its own identity (Formosa TV Taiwan Lecture Hall, 2019).
In the process of creating the character design, Sung and her production team faced with the problem of finding their painting style. Due to the long-term OEM in the Taiwanese animation industry, as indicated in Chapter 2, some of the animators were more used to American or Japanese painting style. In order to make the audience feel intimacy with the characters in On the Happiness Road, she hoped to create own painting style for Taiwanese. Therefore, they collected many pictures of local Taiwanese mothers as reference materials. After continuous trying for one year, they finally figured a suitable image for the characters (Tsai, 2017).45
44 林侑青（2018.01.26）。＜宋欣穎，你對自己誠實了嗎？＞。取自「美麗佳人 Marie Claire」網頁
https://www.marieclaire.com.tw/celebrity/story/34193?atcr=ce14b3
45 蔡雨辰（2017.11.29）。＜從人物、造型到配音，動畫片《幸福路上》如何磨出「台味」？─專訪導演宋欣穎＞。取
自「博客來閱讀生活誌」網頁https://okapi.books.com.tw/article/10386