A SKETCHY INDUSTRY
In China, animation quality suffers amid volume incentives
BEIJING — When Zheng Wenyi, 18, went with her boyfriend to a cinema here last week, she wanted to pick an interesting movie for their date. All the films showing appeared to be Chinese-made, but her eyes brightened when she saw a poster with a smiling red cartoon race car.
“I thought it was the latest installment of ‘Cars’ from Disney,” she said.
To her disappointment, the movie had nothing to do with the franchise from Disney’s Pixar studios. Soon after the movie started, Zheng realized she and her boyfriend were alone in the 180-seat screening room except for one other per-
son. Thirty minutes later, they left.
The movie was “The Autobots,” produced by the animation studio Blue MTV in the southern Chinese city of Xiamen. Although the plot of “The Autobots” is not like “Cars,” its protagonist bears a striking resemblance to the lead character from the Pixar film: From its eyelids to the way it smiles, K1 — the main car from “The Autobots” — looks almost identical to Lightning McQueen.
The movie has become the topic of a heated debate, with many Chinese film fans accusing the director of plagiarism.
“What the heck is this? Please try to compare your poster to the original one of ‘Cars’ from Disney,” Lu Hengyu, an animation director, wrote in a mocking post on his official account on the social media platform Weibo. “You call these ‘The Autobots’? Then I will make one called ‘The Decepticons’!”
Thanks to government incentives, China has become the world’s No. 1 animation production center by volume in the last decade, said Ying Zhu, a professor specializing in Chinese media at the City University of New York. But “quantity often comes at the expense of quality in production companies’ rush to obtain subsidies and rewards,” she said.
Though Zhu said she is “not at all surprised by the copycat nature of much of the audio-visual products out of China … it is still quite astonishing to witness the utter lack of creative imagination in ‘The Autobots’’ wholesale emulation of Disney-Pixar’s ‘Cars.’ ”
Disney is not enthused about “The Autobots.” A Disney spokesperson said, “We believe ‘The Autobots’ picture blatantly infringes on Disney’s intellectual property rights from our ‘Cars’ and ‘Cars 2’ movies and intend vigorously to protect our copyright.”
Chinese authorities see animation as an area of film production in which the country might be able to compete more quickly on a global scale. In 2004, Chinese authorities introduced a rule requiring domestically produced animation programs to fill at least 60% of airtime for all animation-related content on Chinese TV. And since September 2006, all Chinese TV networks have been allowed to show only domestically produced animation programs in prime time, from 5 to 8 p.m.
Around the same time, Zhu said, China’s Ministry of Culture, the censorship bureau and other entities started to offer financial incentives, including direct subsidies and higher distribution fees, to production companies making animated films and TV programs.
For example, the local government in Xiamen, where the animation studio that made “The Autobots” is based, offers up to $483 for each minute of airtime if a studio’s animation content can be aired on national TV networks such as China Central Television. Such incentives have led to a proliferation of provincial- and municipal-level animation production centers.
Zhuo Jianrong, the director of “The Autobots,” has defended his movie and started a war of words on social media against those who have questioned it. Zhuo responded to Lu by calling him “shameless” and branded those who questioned his film “Chinese traitors” who must have “brain damage.”
Box-office results for “The Autobots” have been underwhelming. According to figures from Beijing entertainment analysis firm EntGroup, the movie grossed $900,000 in its first nine days in Chinese theaters, with an average of four people per screening.
By late last week, no theaters in Shanghai were still showing the movie and only two theaters in Beijing carried the film, with only one screening each starting before noon. A total of five people, including the young teenage couple, bought tickets to watch the film last Thursday morning in the two theaters in Beijing visited by Los Angeles Times reporters.
Subsidies from Chinese authorities have indeed helped to attract more activity in animation production. According to data compiled by government-backed North Media Research, the total revenue of China’s animation industry in 2014 reached $16.1 billion, more than double 2010’s $7.6 billion.