This Week in Anime

Donghua Keeps Getting Better

Nicky
Anime's daring approach to the animation medium has earned it plenty of worldwide acclaim, so it's no wonder that there would be imitators and challengers.

However, we've acknowledged that anime is also in a bit of a slump. In our current era, we have more anime than ever, but many series are struggling with poor productions, stale premises, and limited reach. Among my friends and acquaintances, I don't know as many anime fans who actually keep up with current anime.

I'm not one to personally wish for the collapse of Japan's cartoon empire, but Maruyama does have a point that anime's current unsustainable conditions could prompt many to look for greener pastures. In previous slumps, anime's overseas success has helped keep it afloat. While there are many cultural points of contention between the two eastern countries, China actually rivals Japan and the U.S. for the biggest number of anime fans. It wasn't even a few years ago that we saw co-pros left and right trying to bank anime's popularity, many of them produced by a studio called Haoliners.

At the time, I found the co-pros to be an interesting novelty, but I wouldn't recommend most of them. Part of that is bad outsourcing and management on the anime studios' parts, but China's animation pipeline was still finding its footing at the time.

On the film side, though, I ended up really loving the Big Fish and Begonia, which came out around the same time, which is a gorgeous movie produced with the help of the South Korean Studio Mir. I liked it so much I couldn't help but jump to talk about it. It's a labor of love and a better display of the potential of China's burgeoning industry.

Big Fish and Begonia actually started as a internet flash animation. I can't understate the role the internet plays in all this; the director even put out a public SOS asking web users to spread the word about the film after being turned down by many investors. The '00s Chinese Interwebs was the perfect place for young animators to experiment with their own shorts on various websites. Later, some of them would also find popularity on Bilibili, a video upload site similar to Niconico or Youtube. Which also happens to be China's largest streaming platform for both anime and domestic Chinese animation, better known as donghua.

I first heard the term "donghua" when my friends started raving about their favorite novels/webcomic/drama series getting adapted into animation, which happened to be part of a larger group of historical fantasy works with a focus on specific beautiful men and their beautiful relationships with each other, all written by author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. That series in question happened to be Heaven Official's Blessing, which past me was fortunate enough to cover.

While also produced by Haoliners, it's a huge leap from the previously mentioned co-pros and even more accessible now that it's available on Netflix.

Oh hey, speaking of flash animation, this is a movie that's a prequel to a series of indie animated flash shorts/webtoon called The Legend of Luo Xiaohei, Something I did not know when I saw the trailer and decided I needed to watch the movie about a very well animated cat, but one I was presently surprised to see realized in English at all.

It's both a pretty charming and immersive film and an impressive showpiece for that style of web animation, which I'd describe as similar to what some may call sakuga in anime. Most people associate Flash with tweening or puppet-style animation, but the way Hei is drawn makes it feel closer to a traditional feature, despite being natively digital.

For sure. Just as I enjoy watching anime to learn about cultural stuff that might be new to me, donghua can be an opportunity to deepen our understanding and appreciation of a different culture; definitely a must with how many are historical fantasies. Although, there are many donghua that focus on modern settings and struggles as well.

Ah yes, gaming, is obviously a very foreign and alien culture strange and unfamiliar to me.

Though I'll note that this King's Avatar is not to be confused with the 2019 live-action drama. Both are produced by Tencent, a tech conglomerate that also invests in various forms of entertainment, even owning large stakes in many Western and other foreign game dev studios now.

Yeah, the esports angle really did feel unfamiliar to me, but the setting of the gaming café is lively and interesting, and most of the story is centered on the offline human drama of watching a guy having to start his career, reputation, relationships, and character from the ground up. Though it's not entirely dissimilar to some isekai since it is based on a web novel.

I also really like his interactions with said Chen Guo; it's really playful. She's his fan from his pro-gaming era, but as the owner of the café, she gives him a hard time so he can grow himself as a person. With her help, he's able to have steady housing and employment by working the night shift.

Link Click doesn't waste any time getting to the action, but it's a series where two bros run a time-traveling agency through photographs. The ability to travel through time and live events as the person who took the photo, while abstract, actually serves as a great gateway for emotional storytelling. Even the first episode's "drama-of-the-week" short plot felt effective.

It's also really dang pretty. Like Heaven Official's Blessing, the animation isn't perfect, but there's a lot of focus on composition and lighting that give it a lot of depth and sparkle. The character designs are also sleek and stylistic. Link Click prides itself on its modern style down to its dance-like opening.

It's so shocking to me how much Chinese Animation has improved over just a few years. Even though Link Click, Heaven's Official Blessing and many of the previously mentioned floundering co-pros like Spirit Pact are made by the same studio, they feel like totally different animals.

Strangely, I think this is arguably what makes Scissor Seven (or Killer 7 as it's known natively) the most "anime." Like, what's more anime than a young guy down on his luck but with big dreams of becoming a cool badass despite his current reality of selling stew on the street?

It's very silly, and it has an interesting "rough" animation style to accompany its even cruder sense of humor, but that's also what makes it charming. It feels very authentic in the same way as reading a ONE comic.

It's very unique, but I think a lot of people who like anime also like things that have a handle on its own vibes, and Killer 7 fits that bill. It's itself, but what makes it work is the willingness to commit to the bit. It's obviously a lot more low-budget compared to some of the other works we've highlighted today, but it makes up for that with confidence.

At least we're getting some dubs! Link Click and Heaven Official's Blessing both have a dub and are available on Crunchyroll thanks to their previous Funimation license. Though I still find the sub timings to be quite finicky, and I found the dialogue harder to keep up with because of that. Dubs might be easier for some people, even if they're used to watching anime subbed. Scissor Seven also has an available dub, though I can't confirm how much of the humor translates. It's also worth noting that many of these dubs have Chinese American voice actors involved.

That said, I'm very impressed by donghua's growth in spite of such barriers, and I'd even argue that some of the animation quality now rivals or surpasses that of some (but not all) anime. Part of that change has been because of a huge influx of money from companies like Tencent and even a large push from the Chinese government. Chinese animators may even have three times the salary of their Japanese counterparts ones. The promise of better pay has even started luring many good Japanese animators away from anime.

And yet the truth is, in my heart, I really don't want to see it as a competition. Loving anime has helped me learn to love animation of all kinds. Any diversity should be welcome! China is just one example of what it's like to try and enter the animation world, but there are all kinds of stuff out there just waiting for an audience who can fall in love with it. There are no teams when the only thing we're trying to rally is a world where everyone can express themselves through art.