Animation Failure
An original feature, Kuiba, started showing in cinemas recently, but cinema chains all over China were not enthusiastic about the movie even though it received good reviews online. There were simply not enough screenings, and most of them were during the day. The first weekend taking is under 2 million yuan.
According to the producer’s weibo comment, the film cost 35 million yuan to make and 20 million yuan to promote. So this movie is going to bomb - already. But the way the market treated Kuiba should be a wake-up call to animation professionals in the country to re-examine the relationship between the market and creativity. If that had happened, it would have been a success.
After viewing Kuiba, I think that its good points and inadequacies are equally pronounced. Its shortfalls are also the shortfalls of the animation industry in the country as a whole. Perhaps many people do not understand animation, but the creative industry is, by nature, even higher risk than live motion cinema in China.
If an animation feature is all original, and goes straight to the cinemas once it’s done, it will fail 99% of the time. And so far I haven’t seen the other 1%. For example, a few years ago, there was a 3D animation film called Moebius Ring that cost at least twice as much as Kuiba. It made less than 3 million yuan. And after that, dozens of national animation films repeated the process.
Based on my limited experience in cinema over the last few years, I will try to give a few suggestions to prospective animation professionals in the country.
First of all, animation films are still films and there is nothing more important than the plot and characters. Cinema is the art of storytelling, and no amount of technical excellence will replace the audience’s need for a story. To improve quality, animation film will have to start understanding the narrative.
Secondly, brand building has to be considered from the start. A completely original setting should be avoided as a breakout strategy. For example, two of the more successful animation features of recent year, Lotus Lantern and Storm Rider, are both based on existing works. Another example, Pleasant Goat, has been shown on television for years. These are necessary steps in marketing the industry.
Thirdly, if an original setting is to be considered, one must still be fully conscious of brand-building and marketing, and do things step by step. A completely original animation feature film, without any brand-building, plunged straight into the market is asking for trouble no matter how much money is thrown into promotion. In America and Japan, animated feature films are very high up on the enterprise chain. Consider the Japanese example. One usually starts with comics, then adds short web-animation, and finally television animation: a step-by-step approach to build up brand recognition, with animated features as a final step. This is an effective way of managing risk.
Lastly, the animation industry must involve more professionals from other fields, especially brand-building specialists. The creative industry is brand-name from start to finish, so if one wants to go far, the heart of the project can be ignorant in animation and cinema, but it cannot be ignorant of marketing and brand-management. Animation is a big enterprise, so one must be equally broad-minded in team-building.
What did Kuiba bring to the Chinese animation industry? A lot. Passion and technical competence after years of doing outsourced work, to name a couple. Equally, it can be said that it brought us nothing, as national animation feature films keep coming and going, like so many television series that stop after the first episode.