Blending the magic of traditional glove puppetry with cutting-edge virtual reality, Hungry—a Taiwanese VR experience—has been officially selected for the VR works competition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
Directed by Yu-Shu Liu, Hungry draws from his personal childhood memories of Taiwanese glove puppetry. The story follows Xiao Guo, the son of a puppetry master. After his parents’ divorce, Xiao Guo is left without a stable home life or maternal care, accompanying his father backstage at outdoor performances. One day, a puppet beside him magically comes to life, attempting to take on the role of his absent mother.
“Glove puppetry has been popular across Taiwan for decades—everyone here knows it,” said Liu. In the film, he merges this deeply rooted art form with virtual reality and animation, creating a multi-sensory experience that reimagines traditional storytelling.
While Hungry is Liu’s first venture into VR, it’s not his first time exploring puppetry in immersive formats. In earlier projects, such as Light and Sound: Digital Immersion in the Spider’s Cave, Liu incorporated puppetry into live, headset-free immersive experiences. Audiences were placed in a 360-degree environment that merged Taiwan’s science-fiction temple culture with puppet theatre technology and digital art. “In this new world, audiences are no longer passive viewers—they step into a wild puppet theatre and experience a fully digital universe,” he explained.
Transitioning from live immersion to VR headsets brought both opportunities and challenges. “We saw growing interest in the experience once we added VR,” Liu said. “But we couldn’t really understand what worked until people tried it with the headset. So we held multiple test sessions, collected feedback, and kept refining the experience until we arrived at the final version.”
At Annecy, Hungry has been well received by international audiences. The main feedback? The English subtitles appeared too small, making it difficult to balance reading and watching the visual experience. Despite that, the response to the work’s creativity and cultural richness has been positive.
Previously showcased at temples, museums, and exhibitions across Taiwan, Hungry is now gaining global attention. “I’m grateful to bring my work to the world’s largest animation festival. It’s a story rooted in traditional Taiwanese culture, and I’m proud to share it with an international audience,” Liu said.
Hungry was supported by the Taiwan Creative Content Agency’s (TAICCA) 2023 Future Content Grant and was also selected for the 2024 FilmGate Interactive Media Festival in Miami. It is currently part of the Portals of Solitude: Virtual Experiences from Taiwan VR exhibition, co-organised by Taicca and the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in New York.
