CHI-CHIAN

Voltaire

The story of Chi-Chian has lived in the mind of Voltaire for many years. “I was at an outdoor cafe in Harajuku, Tokyo in 1989, when suddenly Chi-Chian jumped out of a near-by skyscraper and landed in my head.” Says Voltaire. As he scribbled on the tablecloth in front of him, a young, gentle Japanese Goth girl took form; Chi-Chian was born. As Voltaire developed her character and created a complex history around her, he realized he had to find a way tell her story in a longer, more cohesive form.

Over the next 8 years, Chi-Chian appeared in an ID spot for SCIFI Channel as a stop motion character that electrocutes a giant robot with several thousand volts of electricity. She also appeared in a six-issue comic book series published by Sirius Entertainment. This series was released between 1997 and 1999 and found a small but fiercely loyal following in lovers of dark science fiction, organic technology and rich, emotional story telling. Three years after her television debut in that classic station ID, Chi-Chian has found her way back home to SCI FI Channel in an animated, online series at http://www.scifi.com/chichian/.

When first approached to create this animated series using Flash, Voltaire, who had been directing television commercials and station IDs for 15 years, wanted to utilize his experience as a stop-motion animator. So instead of using hand-drawn, vector images, Chi-Chian uses photographic, bitmap images of actual stop-motion animation models and sets. This animation style, reminiscent of the minimalist motion seen in Japanese Anime, turns the limitations of Flash technology into a strength. In essence what’s been created is a Japanese, animated film shot with stop-motion models! When asked to describe the series in a sentence Voltaire said, “Tim Burton and H. R Giger get together with Ray Harryhausen to create a Japanese Anime.”

Chi-Chian the series follows a young, Japanese, Betty Boop-esque Goth girl, who is certainly not your everyday sci-fi heroine. Living in a dark, future Manhattan (destroyed in the New York/New Jersey War that we all knew was bound to happen), Chi-Chian is a gentle soul who respects all living things. But when her friends—a race of six-foot-tall cockroaches—become the target of villainous creeps, she must take up arms to protect the ones she loves. Peppered with sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek humor and a disturbingly original vision of the future, Chi-Chian is at its core a story of innocence lost as a child searches for the answer to the age old question, “Why can’t people just be nice?” In the process, she experiences first hand the darkness of the human soul.

Chi-Chian was conceived and created by Voltaire. Film star Bai Ling (Anna and the King,Wild,Wild West) voiced the character of Chi-Chian. Michael Lee of Brooklyn, New York, and Daniel Govar of Baltimore, Maryland animated the series. Voltaire managed a crew who did everything from model building to photo retouching.The SCIFI.COM team included Lead Producer Alissa Gordon as well as Laurissa James, Sean Redlitz and Rachel Gibbs.