Crowdfunding as a Catalyst for Contemporary Chinese Animation

Introduction

Since its decline after the last golden era between 1976 and 1980, the Chinese animation industry has generally been eclipsed by larger Japanese and American productions. The delicate balance between the politico-economic and socio-cultural dimensions of this industry had made it impossible throughout this period to create a sustainable and attractive business model that pushes domestic Chinese animation to a global audience.

In recent years, however, this decline is itself fading away as a consequence of the rapid socio-economic and political changes undergone by China. The progressive opening of markets, a fast consolidation of a mobile-oriented and internet society, the continuous economic growth of the country, the search for new market niches, as well as the increasing demand in the field of entertainment in China, have all been expeditiously encouraging the revival of Chinese animation in the last decade.

The speed necessary for the industry to achieve an optimal production level, in terms of quantity and quality, lies in the huge market at stake. The audience made up of nijigen (二次元), the term used to denote the fans of Japanese anime, manga and video games, exceeds 350 million followers in China (Research in China, 2019). Despite this wide target audience, which is even larger when other national and international animation styles and formats are taken into account, Chinese animation earned 174.7 billion yuan in 2018, representing approximately 10 per cent of the global share. The report points out the important growth of Chinese animation in recent years, but also indicates that the animation global market is headed by the US and Japan (followed by South Korea).

With a view to driving and protecting the national culture, animation has become a strategic sector for the Chinese government in its plan to export Chinese culture to the rest of the world (Xiaying and Schirato, 2015). In spite of the numerous subsidiary policies enacted by the government (Liu, 2016), other key factors to understanding the evolution of this cultural sector include: opting for productions that reach a broader spectrum of audience; exploring new exhibition windows, for instance Bilibili, Cartoon Tudou and, especially, Youyaoqi, which expand the visualization of the productions and enable the number of followers to be quantified; improving the promotional strategies in the animation sector (Wu, 2013); and, recently, using new methods of financing, by means of collaborative practices, such as crowdfunding.

All these factors are boosting the awakening of an industry, which, until recently, was mostly targeted at children (Chen, 2017), and only managed to carry out a few projects successfully (Fu and Zhang, 2016). The sector still has these limitations that are visible in some box office flops like Rock Dog (Ash Brannon, 2016), a computer-animated film based on the Chinese rock star Zheng Jun’s graphic novel Tibetan Rock Dog (2009) that, with a budget of 410 million yuan (the highest amount so far for a Chinese animation production), only managed to raise around 63 million yuan, even though it was a co-production with the US company Reel FX Creative Studios intended to succeed internationally.

Notwithstanding economic support from the Chinese government and the large amount of resources sustained by the big studios of this country, the small or medium-scale animation producers continue to have difficulties in materializing their projects. To resolve the problem, several animation studios are resorting to new forms of financing, namely crowdfunding, in order to be able to cover the cost of productions. Some examples of projects that have been produced by using this social finance system are Kuiba 4 (2020, dir. Chuan Wang) on the crowdfunding platform Zhongchouwang, 阿飞向前冲 (Afei Go Forward) (2015, dir. Jian Ma) on JD Finance or 咕噜咕噜美人鱼2 (Gulu Mermaid 2) (2017, dir. Yang Guangfu) on Yulebao.

Crowdfunding platforms are becoming more and more widespread in the audiovisual sector (Roig et al., 2012) and, according to these authors, are a form of collective financing initiated by an open call, mainly on the internet, intended to obtain economic funds necessary to implement projects launched by other individuals, companies or institutions through the provision of small investments made by groups of people in exchange for products, rewards or economic interests (p. 34).

On this basis, this article aims to explore the way crowdfunding is influencing the relaunch of Chinese film animation. To this end, three points of focus have been developed: (1) an overall review of the current state of the national animation cinema; (2) an exploration of crowdfunding practices in China from a cinematic perspective; (3) and a study of paradigmatic cases to analyse the impact of crowdfunding on the production, promotion and reception of Chinese film animations.

After being boosted by the collective online microfinancing, some high-quality works have marked a turning point in the Chinese animation industry. This research particularly focuses on the study of three cases from recent years: One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes (2014, dir. Lu Hengyu and Li Shujie), Monkey King: Hero Is Back (2015, dir. Tian Xiao Peng), and Big Fish & Begonia (2016, dir. Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun). The criteria that have been followed for the selection of study cases are animation projects from small and medium-sized animation studios that have relied on national crowdfunding platforms to raise funds, and achieved a huge and singular cultural and economic impact in China.

Since the repercussion of crowdfunding on Chinese animation is a scarcely investigated topic within film and media studies, this dynamic field of study has been addressed using an exploratory and descriptive methodology. The goals are to examine both areas from a convergence perspective and, by correlating the numerous selected cases, build a theoretical and analytical framework supported by a diversity of variables to serve as a basis for future research.

The contemporary Chinese animation industry

The year 2017 marked the 800th anniversary of the Jiading District, located in the north-western part of Shanghai, known for being the cradle of important academics from ancient China. In order to promote the anniversary and traditional culture of this country, 16 stories taken from legends and poems from this area were adapted as animated shorts, a format chosen to achieve a greater coverage on social networks (Xingjian, 2017) and improve contact with both adults and younger audiences. This unusual initiative and, in particular, the outstanding short film Love Sick based on the poem Love Pea by Wang Wei, can be considered as a demonstration of the current awakening potential and interest in animation as a form of artistic expression and status as culturally-informed media.

The animation sector is in the process of searching for an identity that enables the construction of reference models to compete with foreign productions. It is the case that some national productions, such as The Monkey King: Hero is Back (2015, dir. Tian Xiao Peng), Big Fish & Begonia (2016, dir. Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun), Little Door Gods (2016, dir. Gary Wang, Terrence Stone and Paulette Victor-Lifton), Ne Zha (2019, dir. Yu Yang) and some co-productions with American studios, for instance Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016, dir. Alessandro Carloni and Jennifer Yuh Nelson) and Abominable (2019, dir. Jill Culton and Todd Wilderman), have significantly attracted the huge Asian market and brought the industry of Chinese animation to the forefront. The positive reception of these films in China contrasts with this industry’s paradox, whereby original animated films swing between ‘sound reputation and poor box office performance’ (Chen, 2017: 157). Against this industrial background, the development and perspectives of this industry are comparable with the phenomenon of Chinese social media. According to Lei Lei, one of the most promising independent filmmakers in Chinese animation cinema:

Look at Weibo, Renren and Taobao. They started copying Twitter, Facebook and eBay and now they are huge and running themselves. I think animation could be the same. Now they copy manga or U.S. films but they have huge budgets and eventually they will find their own way. (cited in Colman, 2015)

An illustration of the opportunities for growth of this industry can be seen in the investments being made by the major internet companies in this cultural sector. Tencent has one of the biggest animation platforms in China (Tencent Animation and Comics), and its film division (Tencent Pictures) is exploring the cinematic possibilities with Tuzki 3D (2020), a 3D animated-live action film of the famous animated sticker from Wechat. ¹ Elsewhere, Alibaba, the giant e-commerce company in China, through Alibaba Pictures as part of its strategy for increasing its presence in the cultural industry, has started to work with Beijing Studio Light Chaser Animation, collaborating with the financing and distribution of Little Door Gods (2016, dir. Gary Wang, Terrence Stone and Paulette Victor-Lifton), as well as co-producing Ugly Dolls (2019, dir. Kelly Asbury) with the American company STX Entertainment.

Despite the continuous expansion and advancement of Chinese animation during the last decade (Lijun et al., 2017), it still has no solid and international franchises that enable a thorough exploration of the markets in pursuit of different types of audiences, and the creation of brands that bring about a broad diversification of the movies through other forms of commercial exploitation. Nor are there any animation studios with a long record of blockbusters like Pixar Animation Studios in the US and Studio Ghibli in Japan, or renowned directors with a long career behind them who have an important number of followers. So far, only certain franchises that are popular with children, for instance, Pleasant Goat ² and Bonnie Bears, which emerged from an animation TV series, or Roco Kingdom, Legend of the Moles and Seer based on video games, have succeeded in consolidating their positions in the domestic market.

On the periphery of this industry, the creation of modest and independent animation films, sometimes a long way away from the commercial requirements, is becoming increasingly visible thanks to the spread of Flash animation (Wu, 2017), which, due to its reduced costs, is a production tool that enables many creative people to access this sector. Also, the crystallization of video platforms on the internet, namely iQiyi, Youku, Tudou, Sohu, bilibili, Tencent Animation and Comics or AcFun, facilitates the transformation of popular little animation videos into more ambitious projects. Significant examples showing this tendency are the animation short film Miss Puff’s Goldfish Bowl by the famous independent animation artist Pi San, and the short film animation series based on the character Tofu, whose remarkable reception on the internet has served as a bridge for becoming Miss Puff, a web serial aired on Youku, and Legend of Tofu: A Bean from Ancient China (2017, dir. Zou Yi), a film that has taken more than a decade to be completed.

People who actively use the internet, also referred to as netizens (an acronym of internet and citizens), are emerging as an attractive target and tester audience, so some video platforms are opting to increase the quality of the movie productions. This ambitious objective is widely visible in iQiyi, the largest online video site in China, which offers more revenue for all those quality movies to ‘professionalize China’s online movie space’ (Brzeski, 2018). In this context, animation cinema arrived on these platforms with 星游记之风暴法米拉 (Rainbow Sea) (2017, dir. Hu Yibo), considered as the first animated film launched online (Zhou, 2017), specifically on iQiyi. In just three days, the film reached 20 million views, reflecting the potential of these platforms to boost Chinese animation by means of a new business model.

This distance from the system of traditional major studios enables a better approach to meet the preferences of the new generations and to animation experimentation. In this regard, Giesen (2015: 191) states that ‘new Chinese animation will not come from traditional studios. It will reflect the patterns of the Chinese society and have its roots in the new youth cultures.’ This statement has been reinforced in practice thanks to certain independent productions, three of which we will analyse, which are currently outlining the convergence of Chinese animation with the new economic and cultural online practices of this country.

Crowdfunding in China: A film perspective

China has the greatest number of internet users in the world, ³ is the second economic power at the global level and sustains a rapid growth rate, which constitutes an optimal context for the development of crowdfunding. This online collective financing form was introduced in the Asian market in 2011 through the creation of Demohour, a platform created for the micro-financing of creative projects related to the areas of cinema, music, design, or the publication of cultural texts. Since then, the number of crowdfunding platforms in China has regularly grown every year until 2016 (Chen et al., 2018).

The contemporary crowdfunding market in this country, considered to be the third largest in the world after the US and Europe (Blace and Grubisic, 2017), is boosting projects that, in opposition to mainstream productions, are often developed regardless of the cultural industries. Such projects are also forged on the basis of new logics of production and consumption, which see consumers as active players in the cultural product-building projects.

Since 2017, the Guangdong Animation Industry Association (2018) has noticed a slowdown in this fundraising model, identifying 834 platforms, of which 294 are operational in this country, although it also stresses that investments through crowdfunding remain stable in the animation sector. This data correlates with the strong interest that this funding formula has received from the Chinese animation industry (Li et al., 2015), which seeks to explore new economic, creative and communicative models. Animation projects have used this method to obtain finance and promotion, including 快递侠外传(Kuai D Man) (2016, dir. Xie Laoban), 大理寺日志 (Dali Temple Diary) (2019, dir. Huai Jiajia) or Kuiba 4 (2020, dir. Wang Chuan); or to develop and create tie-in merchandising, such as Mr. Nian (2016, dir. Zhang Yang), 罗小黑战记 (The Legend of Hei) (2019, dir. MTJJ Mutou) or Ne Zha (2019, dir. Yu Yang).

The use of crowdfunding is also linked to the enormous impact of the extensive number of mobile devices with internet access and the possibility of making all kinds of purchase payments with them, including, in many cases, donations to projects through the payment systems of, among others, Wechat, Baidu and Alipay. For example, it is common to use Wechat to share a link that leads to the project, either through the personal contacts of the person or through the section ‘My Moments’, so that the users of this application can make direct donations. Many crowdfunding platforms also create an official account in Wechat to publish their users’ projects and to obtain donations easily from their followers. By using workaday payment systems, campaigns are strategically configured in these platforms ‘as an opportunity for ordinary audiences to get involved in the glamour of movie making’ (Ma, 2017: 225).

Although collective online finance has currently been consolidated as an alternative funding method, it initially occupied a legal grey zone in China (Sun and Meng, 2015), and therefore in 2015 the government had to implement a series of regulations regarding internet finances in order to provide this practice with a clearer legal coverage. Together with these regulations, crowdfunding has also benefited from the Internet Plus programme, a state initiative that, according to Ma (2017: 11), ‘seeks to drive economic growth by integration of internet technologies with manufacturing and business’.

As a result of these transformations, the different types of crowdfunding are prospering in this country (Blace and Grubisic, 2017). Depending on the kind of benefit received by those who finance a project, Zachary Griffin (2013) distinguishes between those who become donors of a project without expecting to receive anything in return (donation-based crowdfunding); sponsors who make an economic contribution and expect to receive some type of non-monetary reward (reward-based crowdfunding); investors who provide a certain amount of money and become shareholders of a project (equity crowdfunding); or moneylenders who meet the economic demands of a project that needs economic support in exchange for subsequently receiving a percentage that has been previously agreed in the interest on the loan (lending-based crowdfunding).

For the purpose of harnessing the opportunities of this emerging market, some big online business conglomerates, such as Alibaba and Baidu, have respectively created Yulebao (reward-based) and Baifa Youxi (reward and lending-based), which are used to finance cinema projects and promote their premieres. In the field of animation, Yulebao has also served as a platform for financing some projects, including Kuiba 3 (2014, dir. Wang Chuan, Zhang Gang and Zhou Jie), McDull: Rise of the Rice Cooker (2016, dir. Brian Tse) or The Guardian Brothers (2016, dir. Gary Wang).

Such big companies consider crowdfunding not only as a way to involve the spectators in film projects, with a profitability of up to 7 per cent of the annual performance in their investments, but also as an early opportunity to establish a closer connection between creators and the public. Investors can interact during production, and such participation in certain projects through donations is mainly rewarded with a free pass to the premiere of the film, meetings with the actors, or visits to the film sets. Another alternative reward, still in an embryonic state, is the possibility of allowing investors to influence the choice of the directors or film heroes (Chunning in Horwitz, 2014), strengthening the involvement of microfunders in the production process.

The crowdfunding campaigns also encourage donors and, in particular, investors to get involved in spreading the word about the film since a favourable outcome will determine their economic benefits. In this process, the digital trace data left by investors can be used to measure the convening capacity of a project and to test the film before its release by measuring its impact through the participation of people.

Given the socio-economic flow that is being generated on the crowdfunding platforms, the technological conglomerates have seen in these spaces an opportunity to hybridize entertainment with the online financing tools available to users, boosting the transition of their cultural productions to an internet-thinking era. The group that best represents a fluid correlation of the industry value chain is Alibaba, which produces films through Alibaba Pictures. The company is able to obtain financing from fan-users in Yulebao through their own payment system Alipay, which rewards investors with free tickets in Tao Piao Piao, the largest online ticketing service in China and to sell, on Taobao, products derived from their productions. Apart from hybridizing this set of services, the films of Alibaba Pictures may promotionally benefit from Sina Weibo, ⁴ one of the main microblogging social networks of the country. Platforms like Yulebao are thus constituted as integrative spaces in the enterprise ecosystem of business clusters such as Alibaba.

The business dimension behind Yulebao, however, involves the subversion of the main objective of crowdfunding. While this company’s film productions do not encounter any financing problems, they are able to design crowdfunding strategies with a view to obtaining an audience base that, from a communicative perspective, benefits the project. This purely promotional objective, together with rewards and profit margins for investors, makes these types of platforms a kind of marketing bait.

As an alternative to these crowdfunding corporations, there is an emergence of small-scale platforms that specialize in particular sectors with the purpose of finding new market niches. Consequently, the projects can be directly addressed to a specific public who have the potential to become investors or donors themselves, with more capacity to assess the project and determine whether it has the potential for development, and the size of the risk in order to protect the interest of the investors (Yang and Niu, 2016). Along with certain platforms approaching all types of cultural projects, namely Demohour, ⁵ Coufenzi, Zhongchouwang, Modian or Dreamore, other platforms specialized in cinema have emerged, such as Tao Meng, through which the projects of amateur film directors are financed, and which is also where the personnel for these projects can be recruited; or Jumi Finance, a platform specialized in films and television created for the internet.

Less frequently, certain Chinese animation projects also seek investment through foreign crowdfunding platforms. For instance, the director Busifan used Kickstarter to successfully finance a Flash animation webtoon of two episodes The Black Peanut (2015), which subsequently became the film Dahufa (2017). Through the same platform, the director from Hong Kong, Kong Kee, has also raised the necessary funds to carry out the science fiction animation Dragon’s Delusion (2019).

All these national and international platforms highlight the current possibilities of Chinese animation in the search for emerging funding windows. The implementation of crowdfunding strategies thus constitutes an alternative scenario for invigorating and transforming this industry’s classic forms of fundraising.

Crowdfunding as the driving force of Chinese animation

The transformation of the Chinese animation industry is evidence of how crowdfunding constitutes an opening process for productions that enable the public to participate and get involved. The social capital injection through donations and investments enables the revival of animation projects arising on the fringes of this cultural industry, where there are risky and ambitious animated films with a wide leeway for experimenting in this field. ⁶ Productions not designed for a massive audience but able to collect a strong community of followers, mainly netizens, who actively follow and foster the project, may mutate into a high-impact product. Crowdfunding, as a catalyst for this industry, has brought to light three exceptional animation cases forged on the fringes, which have become benchmarks in Chinese animation.

One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes (2014): The beginning of a franchise

The movie One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes (OHTBJ, 2014, dir. Lu Hengyu and Li Shujie) is a parody created by the convergence of some contemporary and classic stories. This includes, among others, Western fairy-tale stories, such as Pinocchio and Snow White, Chinese cartoons such as the Calabash Brothers series (1986−1987, dir. Hu Jinqing, Ge Guiyun and Zhou Keqin) and the film Prince Nezha’s Triumph Against Dragon King (1979, dir. Yan Dingxian, Wang Shuchen and Xu Jingda), along with some characters from the Japanese comics and animation series, such as Ultraman and One Piece, and also original stories incorporating the current Chinese cultural expressions.

OHTBJ originally comes from a comic created by author Hanwu, published in 2010 on the online platform Youyaoqi, the largest Chinese website (u17.com) for creating and publishing comics, animation and, more recently, video games. The pastiche of stories used in this comic, along with the abundant doses of humour, was very well received by the audience of this platform and quickly became popular. According to Xiaying and Schirato (2015), the positive reception of this comic is linked to the use of different ludic intertextual references based on a collage of stories representing ridiculous and random situations. With the partnership of Youyaoqi, Hanwu later transformed OHTBJ into a web series with short animation videos that were broadcast exclusively online through video platforms, such as Youku, Iqiyi and Bilibili, reaching more than 2.4 billion visits.

In 2013, with the intention of promoting and bringing this story to the big screen, Youyaoqi launched the first crowdfunding campaign in Chinese film history (Zhao, 2018) in Demohour, ⁷ a reward-based platform, and raised around 1.4 million yuan from 5,534 users. The high number of investors reached by these projects may be related to the study by Bi et al. (2017), who state that the pre-existence of quality signals and a considerable electronic word of mouth, which existed in OHTBJ thanks to its previous substantial impact on multiple online platforms of content, favourably affect the investment decision of funders.

To generate interaction between creators and backers, considered a positive factor for successfully achieving the objectives in a crowdfunding campaign (Wang et al., 2018), the users who made donations received several emails inviting them to send videos, photographs or other material that could provide ideas for the creation of the story. Some of this material subsequently appeared in the film or in the credits, thus compensating for their participation in the film project and encouraging them to divulge and promote it among their circles.

Despite the fact that investors’ participation in the film’s creative proceedings is very limited, it brings OHTBJ closer to the concept of crowdsourcing. Unlike crowdfunding, whose goal is to obtain financial funds, crowdsourcing is based on ‘the opening of processes aimed at involving a group of agents located outside the formal logic of the traditional organizations’ (Roig et al., 2017: 240). The material supplied by investors generates an external value that, by integrating personal interests, to some extent socializes the production.

The aim to raise 1 million yuan for the film’s marketing campaign was easily surpassed on Demohour, but this amount covered less than half of the promotion costs, which reached 2.87 million yuan (He, 2015). The use of crowdfunding became a pretext to have great media coverage, which is one of the reasons why this film became an online phenomenon and collected almost 120 million yuan at the box office, a figure that had never been reached before in China by an animation film created for a young and adult public. OHTBJ consequently became the first webcomic that, after getting a solid community of followers on an online platform such as Youyaoqi, constituted a substantial business model by moving the story to other media. With a modest budget of 10 million yuan, its success has set a precedent in contemporary Chinese animation (Ye, 2015), showing the potential of subcultures to capture the attention of a wide spectrum of audiences and achieve good results at the box office.

The film turned into an appealing cultural production and won the award for the best adaptation of animation from the China Animation & Comic Competition Gold Dragon Award (中国动漫金龙奖) ⁸ in 2015. In that same year, OHTBJ became available on the main Chinese online video platforms (Sohu, Leshi, Bilibili, Iqiyi and Youku), reaching a larger audience (at present, OHTBJ accumulates almost 14 million views across all of these platforms). As a consequence of its positive sociocultural and economic impact, this intellectual property initiated the archetypical process of adaptation and expansion into other media (Harvey, 2015), such as books or a video game, and the announcement of the creation of a film sequel. Some important companies, such as Wanda Media and Tencent Pictures, had worked together in the production of the new film. The release of the sequel in August 2017 achieved 133 million yuan at the box office and consolidated OHTBJ as a diversified Chinese comic-animation brand.

OHTBJ is a symbol of contemporary Chinese animation rooted in an online subculture since it represents the transformation of a web product into a franchise in the field of entertainment. This industrialization process was also boosted thanks to a crowdfunding campaign that served as an essential catalyst for generating an online viral communication and gathering young and adult fans of this fictional world into an active community.

Monkey King: Hero is Back (2015): The reconstruction of a classic story

Throughout the history of Chinese animation, the 100-chapter book Journey to the West, one of the four masterpieces of Chinese classic literature attributed to Wu Cheng’en and published in the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644), has been adapted on numerous occasions. However, none of these adaptations have obtained as much socio-economic impact as the last one: Monkey King: Hero is Back (MKHIB, 2015, dir. Tian Xiao Peng), the first animation film based on this novel using 3D technology. The movie offers a new perspective of the story and redefines the main character, Sun Wukong, as an inexpressive and tragic hero aesthetically different from his animated predecessors, representing more accurately the character that appears in the original novel. In the animation field, this classic story has traditionally been oriented towards child audiences (see Havoc in Heaven, 1964, dir. Wan Laiming), Ren Shen Guo (1981, dir. Yan Ding Xian) or Fireball: Journey to the West (2005, dir. Wang Tong), signifying a break with MKHIB since this narrative and technically renovated version is also aimed at an adult audience.

The attractiveness of Journey to the West among the Chinese population did not prevent MKHIB from facing serious economic difficulties from the outset. Tian Xiaopeng, the creator of this film and founder of the small company October Animation Studio, took eight years to finish the production because of the technical issues involved in searching for high-quality animation and because of the difficulties in finding investors to support a major project. As the size of this studio did not meet the requirements established by the government, the grants received were not enough to meet the 60 million yuan budget of the production.

Using this inspiring background to build an engaging discourse, Lu Wei, the executive producer of the film, launched a crowdfunding campaign at the end of 2014 with the purpose of financing the marketing strategies of MKHIB. When the film was almost finished, Lu Wei used the app Wechat, the most extensive mobile messaging application in China, which provides users with a plethora of functions including different mobile forms of payment and the possibility of making transfers among its users, to launch an equity crowdfunding campaign. After promising that the names of the children of those who invested around 100,000 yuan would appear on the film credits, the project achieved 89 investors and a total amount of 7.8 million yuan. The money collected finally allowed them to cover only part of the costs of the film promotion, although the most important consequence was the tipping point effect that was produced. This effect is considered as the crucial moment in which a given social movement or trend is started and becomes viral. Gladwell (2002), the author of this concept, defines it as ‘the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point’ (Gladwell, 2002: 12). The case of MKHIB may also be linked in some way to The Law of the Few, one of the three rules identified by Gladwell required for the tipping point effect to take place, which describes the impact of a reduced number of people, in this case the 89 film investors, in the viralization of a given social aspect.

Since the benefits of the investments were linked to the movie box-office takings, the investors collaborated actively in the film paratext construction, namely all these materials that surrounded the movie and ‘can affect the running of the text’ (Gray, 2010: 6). Many of them created and spread all kinds of promotional content on the social networks, and encouraged their social circles to watch the movie in theatres. Some investors even rented movie theatres for their own screening (Xinhua, 2015). Rather than obtaining funds, the crowdfunding strategy was designed to make the most of the affective implication from investors, reaching considerable media coverage thanks to its remarkable actions.

The motivating story built around the production of MKHIB was a real communicative achievement. The film became one of the main trending topics on Weibo and Wechat and made a huge impact with the film-related videos uploaded on Bilibili, one of the main websites where fans can share videos of anime, manga and games. The first content, which appeared on Bilibili two weeks before the release of the film, was a music video (Monkey King’s theme music), which not only got four million visitors, but also received the attention of the generations marked by an era of Chinese animation series, that is, young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. This public subsequently became one of the communicative pillars of the film after actively promoting it on the social networks and ‘achieved a profound shared influence and a unique form of power’ (Jiang and Huang, 2017: 135).

This fan community, one of the keys to transforming MKHIB into a success, did not originate as a consequence of the classic promotional strategies used by the film before its premiere, but arose from the crowdfunding campaign launched in 2014. Since then, the investors’ persuasive power led to the preconfiguration of an engaged fan community that promoted a lasting and favourable reception to the film.

In the box office, MKHIB raised more than 956 million yuan, a figure that turned the film into the highest grossing national production at the time. This amount meant that each of the 89 investors collected an average of 250 thousand yuan (Chen and Wang, 2018), becoming an example of crowdfunding in the Chinese film sector with the biggest return of investment – 400 per cent (Gu, 2017: 46). Once again, MKHIB is an exceptional case since it has surpassed even the major Hollywood productions that usually lead the Chinese market. This blockbuster has become a model to be followed to promote a quality animation bearing the national identity of the country and a representative case of a business model appealing to and profitable for crowdfunding investors.

After its distribution in movie theatres, throughout 2015, the film was launched on the most important Chinese online video platforms and currently accumulates around 400 million views among all of them. ⁹ This important figure highlights the relevance of netizens and digital platforms for boosting contemporary Chinese animation in the internet era.

Big Fish & Begonia (2016): A unique work rooted in Chinese culture

Unlike the majority of independent animation productions that go unnoticed in the Chinese market, Big Fish & Begonia (BFB, 2016, dir. Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun) is a notable exception. The film is inspired by philosophical and mythical classical Chinese texts like Zhuangzi (庄子), Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经) and In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记); it includes Chinese traditional culture like the Tulou (土楼), an emblematic circular building of the Hakka ethnic, and establishes connections with contemporary artistic works like Last Experimental Flying Object and Osedax by the Chinese animator artist, Linghan Ye. Although BFB is fed by Chinese culture, its dreamlike quality and aesthetics are also influenced by the works of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the most remarkable figures in Japanese animation. The end result is a unique and creative piece without any precedents in contemporary Chinese animation, which has been able to put the focus of attention on this work.

The origin of BFB is connected to the online short Flash hit film Swallowtail Butterfly (2004), ¹⁰ and the decisions of the directors Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun to found the B&T Studio to transform it into a film project, Big Fish & Chinese Flowering Crabapple, which eventually turned into BFB. Just as in the previous cases, the small animation studio had a serious challenge in accomplishing and financing the film, which is the reason it took them 12 years to produce it.

After nourishing the expectations for this project on the social networks for nearly a decade, the turning point of this film was reached in 2013 when the studio launched a reward crowdfunding campaign on Demohour ¹¹ to meet the costs of the music, sound effects and dubbing production of the film. For the purpose of enhancing the campaign, Xuan uploaded a specific trailer on Weibo that quickly got the attention of potential funders, thanks to its seductive aesthetic. In exchange for the amount of money donated, the project also offered certain rewards, such as tickets to watch the film, exclusive posters, books, invitations to visit the company or see the movie premiere, and one of the most frequent rewards: the inclusion of their names in the closing credits.

At the end of the campaign, BFB had raised 1.58 million yuan from 3,510 sponsors. Even though the amount reached was a very small percentage of the movie budget, which eventually cost 30 million yuan, it was enough to become the most successful crowdfunding campaign in China for an animation project until then. ¹² Such an achievement caught the interest of Enlight Media, one of the main companies of the entertainment industry in China, which detected the commercial potential of the film and financed the rest of the production costs.

The positive accomplishment of the crowdfunding campaign together with the creation of an appealing story based on the difficulties encountered in producing the film, clearly visible in its promotional tagline ‘赴你十二年之约’ (Twelve years coming at you), allowed BFB to design a communicative strategy on social networks focused on arousing emotions and expectations amongst the public. The film became one of the top trending topics on Weibo, achieving more than 3 billion clicks and 2 million reviews of posts related to BFB (Fan, 2016). As a result of this online social buzz, in the first weekend of the premiere the box office made 227 million yuans, which was the best release in the history of Chinese animation so far. In total, BFB earned more than 565 million yuan, placing a national production among the top-grossing animated films in China in 2016.

In its journey on the Chinese online video platforms, ¹³ this independent animation production currently registers more than 293 million views and, unlike the previous cases, it has reached a global audience. Additionally, after the attention that BFB achieved in some International Animated Film Festivals, such as Annecy (2017) in France or the ITFS (International Trickfilm-Festival Stuttgart, 2017) in Germany, this film was released in foreign markets and distributed on Netflix. Despite the gap between its launch in China and its international appearance, this shows the considerable opportunities that Chinese independent animation has when it comes to internationalizing its animation blockbusters.

Conclusions

There has been an emergence of consecutive productions that have renewed both the industry and audience interest in Chinese animation. It is, perhaps, too early to announce a new golden age of Chinese animation. However, the cases analysed in this article may be considered as evident indicators of the transformations underway in this industry, which seeks new formulas to overcome the economic and communicative needs, and to increase the engagement of the audience in its productions.

The three emblematic cases of this study highlight the difficulty that Chinese independent animation has faced to finance its productions, as well as the possibilities offered by crowdfunding for partially transforming this situation. Although the online collective financing is not mainly oriented to fully meet the cost of small and medium productions, crowdfunding is used as an appealing method that serves to grab the attention of major film studios. This can enable the materialization of animation movies and, as a preliminary promotional strategy, makes it possible to increase the number of fan-followers in an early stage of production while encouraging their active participation in publicizing the film.

Crowdfunding platforms are thus an experimental field for transforming investors into persuaders. Capitalizing on the rewards offered and the investors’ affective involvement, the animation projects that make use of online microfunding are promoted by absorbing their influence on the internet, and the most active spaces of these are the social networks Wechat and Weibo.

Regarding the effectiveness of this formula, due to the fact that the goal is to partially finance the project, either its promotion or part of its production, the chances of meeting the purposes proposed in the crowdfunding campaigns are much higher. The achievement of objectives then serves as a starting point for building a promotional narrative generally based on effort, overcoming of barriers and a search for quality, which favours the film’s media coverage and the extension of communicative actions by fans at the end of the crowdfunding campaign. This strategic use subverts the classic concept of crowdfunding and may have a negative impact on the animation industry if this fundraising option is limited to meeting some minor budgets to ensure the achievement of the funding objectives.

By changing the original nature of crowdfunding, the cases analysed have shown a potential artistic, cultural and economic revival of Chinese animation by adapting products from the network culture to conquer new market niches (OHTBJ); constructing renewed referents on the basis of one of the most popular and adapted stories to all kinds of media in China (MKHIB); fostering a singular work that created a new Chinese style using traditional culture (BFB); and, as a whole, awakening an international interest in this cultural sector because of its unexpected resonance with the national market.

Based on the research undertaken on how Chinese animation films use national crowdfunding platforms, future investigations may address a number of areas. These include the impact of crowdfunding on other popular animation formats, including web series or short films; the influence of investors’ participation in the film production process; advantages and disadvantages of the different types of crowdfunding in animation projects; or, from the exploration of innovative business models, the economic and communicative synergies produced on crowdfunding platforms connected to other film-related services belonging to the same business conglomerate, such as Alibaba or Baidu.