In this week’s Sunday Times Magazine, Andrew Goldman has a smart interview with Jimmy Lai, the Chinese clothing retailer-cum-media mogul behind those insane (and insanely popular) animations of scandalous news stories. Lai’s explanation for what he does is honest and simple and blunt and a little depressing. An excerpt:

“You own magazines and newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan and have been called the Rupert Murdoch of Asia — and yet you’re best known here for your company’s very enjoyable and weird animated re-enactments of news events. The one you did for Tiger Woods’s Thanksgiving-weekend car accident got more than five million YouTube views. Why did you get into animation?

I started the animations because print media was going into a sunset business environment. It’s obvious that we have arrived at an era of images. I thought that if I could speed up the production of animation, I could make a big business out of recreating the amazing images of the news, because what we get on TV is always the last bit of image. What happened before that image is always missing.

You mean that all we ever see is the wreckage after the plane crash, not the crash itself?

Exactly. We don’t see the pilot flying the plane drunk and what happened in the cabin. If somebody jumped off a roof, we only see the body even though we know that eight months ago, the guy might have gone to Macau, lost a lot of money in a casino, was chased by a loan shark, so he got depressed and decided to jump off a roof.

So you envision these animations as a substitute for reading news?

Exactly. If I hold an image in front of you, you can right away assimilate a story that may take me 20 minutes to explain or take you 10 minutes to read.”

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