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From Al-Jazeera:
China is on course to join Japan and the US as a leader in the art of animation.Zhongnan Animation, is one of China's top animation studios — but fledgling at only 5 years old.
There are approximately 1,000 employees working there and trying to compete in an industry dominated by Japan and the United States.
As Al Jazeera's Melissa Chan reports, it is a lucrative market and China already has an audience of 265 million children as potential viewers.
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Except Chinese cartoons are either empty and boring (and thus Chinese kids love US and Japanese cartoons) or have some dark political motivation ("Little Hero).
Quantity? Sure. Quality? Forget about it. As with pretty much everything else.
> China is on course to join Japan and the US as a leader
> in the art of animation.
Amusing statement, at best.
Agree 100% with the prior two comments - China may be able to churn out higher quantities of raw materials, but almost assured to be incapable of competing on the level of quality.
Not much different than the plethora of cartoons (back then, hand drawn) from the Soviet Union, though those probably still had higher style and originality :-)
Well, FWIW, most animation houses are just sweatshops for animators to crank out volume and not creativity anyhow right? thus the attractiveness of doing it here in China I suppose... just another factory mentality. But I suppose fledgling industries have to start somewhere.
It is difficult to say when China can be the animator leaders, but i visited that Zhongnan animation company one year ago, very impressive. they showed me a few un-released copies, some of them are really good (creative and presentable). But they do need to find some real good interpretors to translate them into English. As far as i remember, The owner has a young daughter who studied aboard before, is now fully devoted herself in this animation business.
We did a tour to find a good animation studio, and were overly impressed with Sandman Animation Studio, in Suzhou, China.
It is a very impressive studio and set up as well as any studio I have worked on back home. It is run by a western animation director, Kieron Seamons and they have produced many shows for the USA and Europe as well as producing their own quality animation shows for china.
Last time we talked they had won 3 awards for the work. I would very seriously recommend them if you are looking for a chinese quality animation studio.
Their site is www.sandman.me
Joe