The Wooden Toy’s Return

One challenge in communicating intangible cultural heritage is that high cultural value does not necessarily mean that young people will naturally want to learn about it.

After encountering wooden spinning toys, I was instead drawn to their everyday quality. They are not distant or monumental cultural symbols. They were once simply small toys kept at home and held in children’s hands.

Precisely because they were so ordinary, they carried highly specific memories of everyday life—play, companionship, childhood, and the daily experiences of an earlier generation.

This led me to ask:

Perhaps understanding traditional culture does not always have to begin with “culture” itself. It can begin with an ordinary object close to us.

Therefore, rather than directly explaining the history and craftsmanship of wooden toys, I chose to make the toy itself the protagonist.

Through anthropomorphism and adventure storytelling, I transformed a static cultural heritage object into a character with a goal, actions, and emotions. As the audience follows its journey, they gradually discover that behind an seemingly ordinary toy lies a craft, a childhood, and a way of life that is slowly disappearing.

For me, “making culture younger” does not simply mean adding internet language or using brighter visuals. It means finding a way for younger audiences to willingly enter the story.

When intangible cultural heritage is no longer presented merely as knowledge that needs to be learned, but instead becomes an engaging story or a small adventure, the distance between traditional culture and contemporary audiences can naturally be reduced.

Starting from research into the cultural background, visual characteristics, and traditional production methods of wooden spinning toys, I first extracted their distinctive visual elements and developed the narrative premise that the toy itself possesses a life of its own.

Inspired by the toy-centered perspective of Toy Story, I constructed the narrative from the toy’s point of view. I also contacted an intangible cultural heritage inheritor in Tancheng, Linyi, Shandong, and obtained the real wooden toy that served as the visual prototype for the character.

In developing the story, I structured the narrative around a clear line of action:

creating a plan to reconnect with its owner → finding old photographs → recreating scenes from the past → awakening the owner’s childhood memories.

Through this structure, cultural information is no longer delivered as direct exposition, but gradually unfolds through the character’s actions.

After completing the script, I developed the characters, environments, props, and storyboard before entering the AIGC visual generation stage.

One of the greatest challenges during production was maintaining spatial continuity, subject proportions, and consistency across multiple perspectives and shots.

For a character that needs to move continuously through a story, producing a visually appealing individual image is not enough to make the narrative work. The character’s position across different shots, the spatial relationships between environments, and the variety of camera angles all directly affect the audience’s understanding of the story.

I therefore repeatedly tested different models and tools, adjusting prompts, selecting generated images, correcting visual inconsistencies, and refining shot choices to gradually establish continuity between characters and environments.

I also used RunningHub workflows to generate multiple perspectives of environments and establish the furniture layout of the main interior spaces, providing a relatively stable spatial foundation for different shots.

Finally, I reorganized the generated materials through animation generation and post-production editing, using pacing and emotional progression to connect individual AI-generated images into continuous narrative sequences.

Tools: GPT Image 2, Nano Banana, Jimeng, Kling, Hailuo, RunningHub

This project allowed me to reconsider the relationship between everyday objects and cultural memory.

When I first encountered the wooden spinning toy, I saw an unfamiliar form of intangible cultural heritage. But when I placed it back into the more everyday context of a “toy,” its meaning suddenly became much more concrete.

A small wooden toy can connect a person with their childhood, but it can also connect us with a way of life that has gradually disappeared.

This made me realize that traditional culture does not necessarily have to enter contemporary life through grand narratives. Sometimes, an overlooked everyday object and a small, engaging story can become an entry point for people to reconnect with culture.

I therefore began to reconsider what “making culture younger” actually means:

It is not about making traditional culture trendier, but about giving it a story that contemporary audiences are willing to enter.

At the same time, this project was also an in-depth exploration of AIGC’s potential for continuous visual storytelling.

It made me realize that, compared with pursuing the visual sophistication of a single image, I am increasingly concerned with whether each AI-generated image can connect with the next and collectively serve a story.

Ultimately, technology still needs to return to storytelling itself. Only when generated materials begin to serve the characters, spaces, and emotions of a narrative—rather than existing merely as individually “beautiful images”—can AIGC truly become part of the creative process.