The 6th China International Cartoon Creative Industry Fair (CICCIF) recently wrapped up with nearly 400 domestic and foreign companies in attendance, and 37 world-renowned animation IPs including Transformer and Detective Conan on display.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Chinese animation.As a crucial part of acclaimed traditional Chinese culture, Chinese animation has made historic achievements over the past century with stable quantity of products, high-quality contents, emerging masterpieces and diversified development, exporting Chinese wisdom and spirit to the whole world.

Adhering to integrity and innovation

A large number of marvelous animations embodying the theme of the times and Chinese aesthetic style have emerged over the past century, receiving good social and market responses and deep love from youngsters, with Chinese animators persevering creations and adhering to tradition and innovation.

China's first animated feature film "Princess Iron Fan" came out in 1941, which inspired numerous animators to forge ahead on the path of ethnic animation creation.

During the next decade after the founding of Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1957, more than 200 long/short animations related to Chinese ink-painting and paper-cutting were created, such as "Pigsy Eats Watermelon" and "Tadpoles Looking for Their Mother", which laid the foundation for the creation of Chinese animation in the new era.

Apart from the Shanghai-based studio, the China Central Television (CCTV) also produced many attractive TV animations, among which was its self-made "The Journey to the West" - a big name to millions of households. The CCTV later established its animation company in 2007 on animation original production, copyright management and development, producing works including "The Legend of Nezha" and "New Big Head Son and Small Head Father" that won both public praise and rating.

Many blockbuster Chinese animation films were released after the turn of the 21st century. Among them, "Nezha: Birth of the Demon Child" in 2019 became the top-grossing animation film in a single market of the world, surpassing the 600 million USD record set by "The Incredibles 2" in North America.

"The most outstanding contribution of Chinese animation in creation lies in the continuous integration of fine traditional culture and ethnic arts into the animation's character design, technology advancement and work presentation. For instance,  Chinese animation has shaped a group of images with strong Chinese features, like the main character in 'The Monkey King' and contributed to the world a new kind of astonishing animation -ink animation, " Song Lei, director for development of China Animation Comic Game Group said in an interview.

Promoting multiple development

China animation has actively developed copyrights to unleash the maximum value while vigorously improving the work quality. China's animation market has shown a diversified pattern in the copyright development in recent years with multiple production entities, broadcast channels and product forms. In particular, a number of high-quality new copyrights related to instant animated videos, avatars and meta-human have invigorated the domestic animation copyright market, according to Song.

Fantawild is just the one who focuses on animation copyright. As of date, the company has cooperated with over 200 global renowned licensees including Yili, Mengniu, McDonald's and Ferrero Rocher in the IP licensing on more than 3,000 products of food, toy, clothing and other 30 categories, with its annual sales exceeding 3.5 billion yuan.

"IP licensing, as an ecology of the entire industry chain, requires the comprehensive capability not only on continuous IP creation, but also on licensed enterprise development and cooperative services, product quality control, right protection, channel expansion and market promotion. The improvement of IP product's life cycle and market performance lies in creating IPs with good content and form and building long-lived brands while strengthening industry exchanges to learn from well-known enterprises of home and abroad, jointly making the market bigger and stronger," said Shang Linlin, CEO of Fantawild.

Chinese animation, in the past decade, has combined traditional culture with animation arts by integration and innovation and diversified operations to tell Chinese stories right and create real masterpieces by all forces, making the seeds of Chinese culture take root and blossom in people's hearts. It is expected that Chinese animation has a promising future.