Shui-Bo Wang grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and became a painter who eventually left for Canada, and this animated autobiography traces that arc through his own artwork rather than straight archival footage. Original paintings, drawings, and family photographs blend with historical images to recreate his childhood, his years in the Red Guard era, and his slow break from belief in the system he was raised inside. Tiananmen Square anchors the film as the symbol his generation attached to a promised society built on equality and cooperation, and Wang uses it to measure the distance between that ideal and what he actually lived through, including the 1989 crackdown. The visual style does the narrating as much as any voiceover: hand-painted images stand in for memories the camera never recorded, giving the film a personal texture that conventional archival documentary can't match. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 1998. The film ends less with a verdict on China than with one man's account of sorting ideology from truth.