The director Raman Hui shot to stardom in China after his film “Monster Hunt”—a hybrid live-action/animated production—broke box-office records there. But will the movie find an audience in the West? Photograph Courtesy Edko Films

Raman Hui is a small, attentive man, with short, spiky black hair, and an over-all youthful appearance that gives the impression of someone in his early thirties even though he is fifty-two. This may be a function of a young heart: since the early nineties, Hui has been making animated films for children, among them “Antz,” the chapters of the “Shrek” franchise, and other products of the DreamWorks Animation studio. It is more than tempting to describe him as animated: his diminutive height, the mobility of his eyebrows (his colleagues at DreamWorks have used them as reference for facial expressions of characters in their films), and the glint of mischief beneath his geniality all make him kin to the computer-generated characters that he has devoted his career to bringing to life.

But Hui is no cartoon character. He is quiet and thoughtful, a tireless worker who modestly insists he is more suited to life out of the spotlight—a situation that changed precipitously last summer, when “Monster Hunt,” a hybrid live-action/animated, Chinese-language film that he had left the U.S. and gone to China to direct skyrocketed to success in mainland cinemas, earning the equivalent of three hundred and seventy-one million American dollars. This amount was a new record in the history of the Chinese film industry and made Hui an unlikely box-office king alongside such commercial heavyweights as Feng Xiaogang, Stephen Chow, and Xu Zheng. “Monster Hunt” opens in U.S. theatres today.

Wuba, a baby monster, one of the characters in “Monster Hunt.” Photograph Courtesy Edko Films Photograph Courtesy Edko Films

Hui’s movie is inspired by the “Shan Hai Jing,” or “Classic of Mountains and Seas,” a legendarily weird Han-dynasty text describing a world of fantastic creatures living among us. “Monster Hunt” concerns a hapless Chinese swordsman impregnated with the egg of a renegade monster queen, and who subsequently suffers labor and gives birth to Wuba, a super-cute baby monster prophesied to bring peace to the long-standing conflict between monsters and humans. (After that, the story gets crazy.)

Last fall, when I visited Hui in Hong Kong, he was still trying to adjust to the sudden success of a film whose convoluted gestation is nearly as improbable as that of the monster whose birth it depicts. Born and raised in the bustling Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon, Hui studied graphic design at the city’s Polytechnic University in the eighties (a program that also counts Wong Kar-wai among its graduates) and then moved to Canada, in 1989, for a three-month course in the burgeoning field of computer animation. A quick study, Hui was hired that year by the Silicon Valley pioneers Pacific Data Images and has been based in the U.S. ever since.

Hui’s achievements have been substantial: working his way up the ladder, he earned a reputation for character design and was accorded a co-director credit on “Shrek the Third,” as well as on subsequent “Shrek” and “Kung Fu Panda” shorts. In Hong Kong, where pride in local heroes is fierce, he is celebrated as the “Father of Shrek,” a credit that Hui is quick to point out sidesteps the monster’s creation, by William Steig, for a best-selling children’s book—“I’m really more like the Uncle of Shrek,” he said.

And though gratified to be making Hollywood films with worldwide appeal, Hui always dreamed of returning to produce something in China. In an interview last year, Hui told the South China Morning Post that, while overseeing sequences for the Gingerbread Man character in “Shrek,” he daydreamed about animating a character from a Hong Kong bakery, a Pineapple Bun Man.

A long dance with the Hong Kong producer Bill Kong, famous for commercial and artistic successes that include “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and Zhang Yimou’s “Hero_,” led to Hui’s teaming up with him for “Monster Hunt._” Though the script was finished in 2009, Kong harbored doubts about potential box office for a film whose digital effects would cost in the scores of millions. While designing the world of the film and its inhabitants, Hui stayed in California, continuing his work for DreamWorks. One of his “Monster Hunt” sketchbooks from 2011 bears a Chinese inscription on its cover, the title of a Cantopop record by Sally Yeh, “Autumn Comes and Goes,” a schmaltzy and melancholy song about waiting.

In 2012, when _“_Painted Skin 2” became the first film to earn the equivalent of more than a hundred million American dollars on the mainland, Kong recognized the time was ripe, and “Monster Hunt” was planned and shot the following year on a budget of forty million dollars—high-end in China, if a fraction of effects-laden Hollywood spectaculars. But then, in August, 2014, eight months after the film had wrapped production, one of its stars, the Taiwanese heartthrob Kai Ko, was arrested for smoking marijuana and subsequently banned by the Chinese State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television from public appearances as an entertainer. Faced with a movie that could be shelved indefinitely, Kong informed Hui he would have to recast the role and reshoot seventy per cent of the film. Camped out at a Beijing effects house, painstakingly integrating the titular computer-generated monsters into the film, Hui burst into tears.

But Jing Boran, a twenty-six-year-old mainland actor who had starred in one of Kong’s other recent films, was so eager to help Kong and Hui that he volunteered to take over Kai Ko’s role without collecting a salary. More than ninety per cent of the original crew returned for six weeks of reshoots, with many also working for free or at a reduced rate, and Hui seized the opportunity offered by other stars who called to pledge support, devising memorable cameo roles for the likes of Yao Chen, a sultry starlet who counts more than sixty-six million followers on the Twitter-like service Sina Weibo.

Jing Boran, one of the stars of “Monster Hunt,” plays a swordsman who gives birth to the baby monster Wuba. Photograph Courtesy Edko Films Photograph Courtesy Edko Films

And when the film finally opened, last July, it earned more than $27.5 million on opening day and, in early September, was reported to have overtaken “Furious 7” as the highest-grossing film ever released in China. (In a Chinese version of Hollywood accounting, this tally was subsequently shown to have included some nationalistic fudging in order to make up the few million dollars’ difference between the local favorite and the foreign invader.)

“It all still feels like a dream,” Hui told me. After the struggle to get “Monster Hunt” into theatres, Hui knew, the moment it proved commercially viable, that his first obligation was to commit to making a sequel, and his basic response to Hollywood heat seekers has been “talk to the 手,” until he’s done with “Monster Hunt 2” … or, in other words, until 2017. “I want to make sure everyone get paid,” he affirmed.

As Hui and I walked through Tsim Sha Tsui one morning, a woman in her mid-thirties begged his pardon. “Are you Hui Shing-ngai?” she asked, in Cantonese. When he said yes, she smiled and explained that she has a good friend whom everyone teases for his resemblance to Shrek. “I’ll show you,” she said, taking out her smartphone and scrolling through her pictures. “See?”

She asked Hui if he would pose with her for a selfie to send her friend, and he obliged. Watching them, I tried to imagine that level of street recognition accruing in the States to the directors of “Frozen,” Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, or John Lasseter, or basically any animator short of Walt Disney himself.