From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
donghua
For anime adaptations, see A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (anime).
Donghua — Chinese animated television and web series — has produced the largest single body of Beach Surgery adaptations outside Japanese anime, with production rooted in Shanghai, Beijing, and Taipei studios.
Unlike anime's frame-by-frame fidelity, donghua animators emphasize landscape and atmospheric continuity, rendering Newcastle's "ontological incompleteness" (buildings that vanish when unwatched) through layered watercolor and digital compositing. Leif's three injuries are often staged as failures of perception: each chapter corresponds to one sense-mode (sight, proprioception, rhythm) dissolving into its opposite.
The 2018–2021 serialization The Coin Spinning used rotoscoping to blur live-action and animation, literalizing Leif and Katita's recursion across the cycle. Critically acclaimed for its treatment of the glitch as a visual problem — two animation styles that refuse to merge cleanly — rather than a plot gap.
Web series have proliferated since 2022, with fan-produced work exploring Shanbudia and the data-harvesters. Streaming platforms have begun commissioning official adaptations, though many remain region-locked outside mainland China, Taiwan, and diaspora communities, complicating international fandom documentation.