Year of the Fish

Year of the Fish is a 2007 American animated film based on Ye Xian, a ninth-century Chinese variant of the fairy tale Cinderella, starring Tsai Chin, Randall Duk Kim, Ken Leung and An Nguyen. Written and directed by David Kaplan, the film is set in a massage parlor in modern-day New York's Chinatown. The film was executive produced by Janet Yang and produced by Rocco Caruso.[citation needed] Kaplan's screenplay was developed at the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs and was the recipient of a 2005 Leonore Annenberg Fellowship. Year of the Fish had its world premiere at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.[citation needed] The film was shot entirely on location in New York City’s Chinatown using live actors and then animated in post-production via rotoscoping, the process of tracing over live-action footage to create an animation; in this case, a painterly, watercolor effect. Some of the make-up on the strange-looking characters were removed by the rotoscoping.