A swine-fever epidemic like China’s would enrage farmers elsewhere

UNTIL NOW links between social-realist cinema and “Peppa Pig”, a sweet British-made animated television series for children, have been hard to spot. Then came “What is Peppa?”, a beautifully crafted film about China’s rural-urban divide, family ties and the sadness of old age that has accumulated hundreds of millions of online views over the past few days.

Officially, the six-minute short is an advertising trailer for a children’s feature film made for the China market, “Peppa Pig Celebrates Chinese New Year”. It is timed to cash in on the festival: day one of a pig-year in the Chinese zodiac falls on February 5th. Yet many grown-ups felt a pang of recognition as they watched the trailer’s bittersweet, live-action depiction of Li Yubao, a gruff-but-loving Chinese villager striving to please his city-dwelling grandson, notably by puzzling out the toddler’s request for a Peppa-themed gift. Filmed in the village of Waijinggou, in the dusty, hardscrabble hills that encircle northern Beijing, the short film is rather honest about modern inequalities. The mystery of Peppa’s identity is solved by a village woman who worked in Beijing as a nanny. When grandfather and toddler meet, the child’s eyes show fear at this wild-haired, over-loud old man, as well as excitement.