Film · 1998 · Films · 1990s
Chûgoku no chôjin
Scored from 28 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Chugoku no chojin, released abroad as The Bird People in China, is a Takashi Miike drama about Wada, a mild Tokyo salaryman sent to a remote corner of Yunnan province to appraise a jade deposit. He is shadowed by Ujiie, a yakuza whose syndicate holds the debts of Wada's firm and who intends to see that nobody is cheated. Their guide takes them by truck, by raft and finally on foot into a mountain valley sealed off from modern China, where the villagers teach children to fly with handmade wings and a young woman sings a song in a language no one can place. As the two wait out delays, the valley works on them differently, and the gangster grows more interested in protecting it than in the jade.
Released in 1998, Chûgoku no chôjin is an adventure, comedy and drama film. The runtime is 118 minutes. It was made in Japan. Its listed language is Japanese.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them. Only 28 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 29 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Chûgoku no chôjin lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1990s (4,082 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 28.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
