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The Nantou Lantern Festival lighted up on January 14th. Nantou County Mayor Hsu ShuHua, accompanied by the Pisuke and Usagi mascot costumes (the characters in "Kanahei's Samll Animals"), appreciated the main light show (Rabbit Blessing) with the guests to kick off the event this year. The mayor pointed out confidently that the Nantou Lantern Festival gets more amazing year by year and surpasses Taiwan Lantern Festival with the lower budget. During her address, she expressed gratitude to the social enterprises, various community associations, temples, schools, and tourism operators for their effort and support, and also to the Tourism Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications for the subsidies. Furthermore, she also thanked former mayor Lin MingChen for holding the Nantou Lantern Festival with the support and assistance of enterprises, other organizations and the county council in the past 8 years, which earned recognition every year. The Nantou Lantern Festival took place in the Nantou County Expo Center, divided into 4 major themed display zones (Local Display Zone, Interaction Display Zone, Landscape Display Zone and IP Display Zone) and 13 special lantern display zones. Each was brilliant and eye-catching. On the opening day, people lined up to receive handheld lanterns. The lucky ones received a red envelope or commemorative coin from county mayor Hsu ShuHua. The laser engraved commemorative coin is adorable, jointly issued by the Nantou Lantern Festival and Kanahei's Small Animals. Combining Nantou’s tourism characteristics, the event presented a lantern festival that combines tradition, art, and technology, which started from January 14th to February 5th, except for Chinese New Year’s Eve when no lights turned on. Different exciting activities took place every day! During the day, there were flower sea, SUP experiencing, and 12 giant Kanahei's Small Animals balloon puppets. In the evening, there were lantern display, interaction display zone, New Year market, symphonic water dance, and performances in turn by many first-class local teams, internationally renowned performance teams, and heavyweight singers. In addition to the traditional lanterns, there were innovative lantern display zones. For the traditional lanterns, the main lantern “Rabbit Blessing” was designed by Huang WenQuan, an international lantern master. For the innovative ones, Kanahei's Small Animals IP was used to create "Pisuke and Usagi’s Lucky Power" for the first time. Besides, the "Shao Shao – the guardian spirit bird of Sun Moon Lake", the "Bamboo Art Nantou" display zone including the lanterns created by bamboo crafts, and the "Beautiful Rabbits" display zone co-created by local schoolchildren in Nantou were also very interesting and worth watching The grand finale of the opening day was "Symphonic Water Dance x Drone Show x 3D Firework Show". With the theme of "Nantou Infinity", the water dance show presented 3D water dance in infinity symbols on the Maoluo River with the accompaniment of symphony suite orchestrated by the world-class cellist Chang ChenChieh. After that, the drone show continued the critically acclaimed theme last year of Kanahei’s Small Animals. With the first script of "Kanahei's Small Animals - Nantou Products", the drones displayed the vivid and adorable graphics incorporating the characters and Nantou specialties of mushrooms, tea, etc. For the pyrotechnics (special shows), the rare "3D matrix fireworks" was adopted with a brand-new computer programming technology to break through the limitation of the previous firing angle to present rich 3D stereoscopic effects! The joint performances of symphonic water dance show, drone show, and firework show were available on 1/22-28 and 2/5, of which the firework shows on 1/24 and 1/28 were special shows of 3D matrix fireworks.