The three minutes of Niu Lai that nobody makes fun of
People who spent 86 minutes laughing tend to describe the same thing happening when the credits start.
Last updated
The end-credits song is 雨后轻风有香, roughly "after the rain the light breeze carries a scent". Sun Lifang wrote it, composed it and sang it. She is the film's screenwriter and the director's mother, and one of only two people credited on the entire production. It is the single most consistently praised element of a film that was otherwise being torn apart nationwide.
Why this particular part survived
Every complaint about Niu Lai traces back to production capacity: low-polygon models, crude textures, stiff movement, geometry passing through itself, camera choices that read as accidents. Those things need compute, software, time and hands, and this film had two people and a few thousand yuan. Every second of the image is testimony about the budget.
Singing needs none of that. Sun Lifang's voice enters the film without passing through a single stage that could expose what the production could not afford. The closing song is the only element in the film decoupled from resources, so it gets judged on one question: can this person write and sing.
The answer turned out to be yes. The melody is not complicated and the arrangement is not elaborate, but the thing is whole. When everything else in a film is visibly collapsing and one element simply stands up, the effect is amplified well past its own merit.
Audiences describe the same sequence: an hour of laughing, credits roll, the song starts, and the laughing stops. On Bilibili and Zhihu there are people who went back specifically to find the song, and those comment sections read nothing like the ones under the film itself.
The name has two spellings
Searching for it produces a small snag. 轻风 (light breeze) and 清风 (clear breeze) are homophones in Mandarin, and both spellings circulate. The Zhihu discussion thread uses 清风, and most Facebook reposts do too. The credited music video on YouTube uses 輕風 in traditional characters. These are all the same song.
This page uses 轻风 because the credited video does. If your source says 清风, you have not found a different track.
Who Sun Lifang is
Screenwriter, one of the two voice actors, and the writer, composer and performer of the closing song. Her son, Xin Yumeng, directed and animated the film. Between them they are the entire credited crew, and the work took more than five years.
The production company, Dalian Jingyuan Culture Film and Television Media, was a home-renovation contractor called Dalian Jingyuan Decoration Engineering until it converted to a media company in July 2021. Assembled together, these details do not describe a film industry story. They describe a mother and son finishing something over five years.
The film is about that too, which most viewers only register once the song is playing. In the story, a calf learns in a dream to face the world alone and his mother dies covering his escape. Outside the story, the mother's voice is what holds up the last three minutes. Same structure, told twice.
Where the anti-AI framing comes from
Once the film broke internationally, one word kept surfacing in Chinese-language reposts: 手搓, hand-cranked, meaning every frame was made by a person and nothing was generated. That claim carries unusual weight in 2026, when any image or voice can be produced on demand, and the generated version would look considerably better than what Niu Lai put on screen.
Which produced a genuinely counterintuitive verdict. Because the film fails in ways that are specific, irregular and obviously accumulated by hand, those failures started reading as evidence of authorship. Gizmodo ran the anti-AI framing in its headline. The closing song is the hardest part of that argument to dispute: three minutes a mother wrote and sang, with no industrial polish anywhere on it, is still something a machine has trouble counterfeiting.
Where to hear it
A credited music video circulates on YouTube, reuploads exist on Bilibili, and someone has recorded a male-vocal cover. There is no official release on any music platform. The film itself has no legal streaming version either; where to watch Niu Lai covers that in full.
This page does not host audio links. Searching the song name surfaces them immediately.
The title is also a market pun
牛来 reads as "the bull market is here", which is why Chinese investors adopted the film as a charm in mid-August. Asking the god of wealth directly is the older method. Online, free.
Draw a fortune stick kaucim.ai · Wong Tai Sin fortune sticks · make a wish, get an answerQuestions people actually ask
Has the song been officially released?
No formal digital release or music-platform listing has surfaced. What circulates is the music video and fan reuploads.
Is there other original music in the film?
This is the only piece that appears in public reporting with a clear credit. All character voices in the film were performed by Sun Lifang and Xin Yumeng.
Are there English subtitles or a translation of the lyrics?
No official translation exists. Fan-made subtitles appear on some reuploads and vary in quality, so treat any lyric translation you find as approximate.
Is the song genuinely good, or is it just the contrast?
Both, and it is worth knowing that before pressing play. Judged against pop music generally it is unremarkable. Judged inside this film it is the one element with normal completion, and that gap is doing a large share of the emotional work in most people's reaction.