The animated drama "Reflections" is more in line with the tastes of female audiences in terms of visual design, art style and plot, and has gained a lot of female audiences.
At noon every Sunday in the recent period, the post-00s primary high school students will open Bilibili (Station B) on time, and play the bullet screen for the first time after the update of "Mortal Immortals". The screen-filled "Thoughts Are Clear" is a tacit code word among the viewers of this animated series, meaning that it is finally waiting for the update. According to statistics, the number of domestic animation plays has reached 430 million, far more than the Japanese animation "King Ranking" that has been promoted and marketed in China for many rounds.
The "Digital Economy Panorama White Paper" released by Analysys Data not long ago shows that the mainland animation industry has continued to grow in recent years, and the total output value has exceeded 200 billion yuan. Among them, domestic animation accounts for more than 70% of the total industry. According to iVideoTracker data from iResearch's online video market monitoring system, in the past year, the average monthly broadcast time of domestic network animation has exceeded that of overseas animation series. Domestic animation is gaining the hearts of more and more audiences and becoming the core contributor to the growth of China's animation industry.
Good animation needs a good story, and high-quality IP builds the cornerstone of domestic animation quality
"The costumes and modeling are pleasing to the eye, and can be called the top of the national comics" and "the heroine who does not love the brain praise" - in the comment area of the animated drama series "Thoughts", the audience who applauded it expressed their own feelings of watching the drama. The directors, screenwriters and other main creators of this anime series are mainly women, so they are more in line with the tastes of female audiences in terms of visual design, art style and plot, and have gained a lot of female audiences who were originally enthusiastic about Japanese animation. In recent years, original masterpieces such as "Reflections" have appeared frequently, such as "Wu Liuqi", "Spirit Cage", "Five Elements of the Misty Mountains" and a series of works with double harvests in the market, which have firmly established the audience's confidence in domestic animation works.
Although the original works indicate the great potential of domestic animation in the future, there are also problems such as unstable script quality and long production cycle, so the current mainstream works are still based on IP adaptations of comics and novels, such as "Under One Person", "Bad People Who Paint rivers and lakes", "Fox Demon Little Red Lady: Two Flowers", "Breaking the Sky", etc., which not only achieve high network ratings, but also occupy an absolute advantage from the playback data of major platforms.
It is worth mentioning that reading group sitting on a large number of high-quality IP is also speeding up the entry into the field of animation, and is currently developing more than 50 animation projects, including "Dafeng Da Renren", "Star Domain Forty Thousand Years", "The First Sequence", "Global Gaowu" and other highly popular IP. For the phenomenon that IP adaptations have become the mainstream of domestic animation, animation producer Zhou Yangjian believes that the root cause lies in the fact that good animation must first have a good story: "The key to animation works is to have excellent scripts, after all, no matter which country, region and cultural background the audience likes good stories. ”
The bright prospects of the domestic animation market continue to attract new players to join. Taking the short video platform as an example, Douyin launched the "Light Comic Plan 2.0", which will build an animation small theater; Kuaishou announced the "Power Generation Plan", which will focus on supporting secondary content with 100 million-level traffic every month.
Open up the upstream and downstream markets to achieve income generation and efficiency of the whole industrial chain
Testing the degree of user love and whether they are willing to open a membership for domestic animation can be described as an important indicator, that is, the payment rate. According to the data of Station B, in the past year, the membership income of the site's domestic animation audience increased by more than 120% year-on-year, and the growth rate of user payment rate exceeded that of foreign animation dramas. In addition, Tencent also said in its own earnings report that the growth in the number of paid video members "mainly benefited from the launch of popular anime IP and episodes".
Station B was once the main front of foreign animation dramas, and now the domestic animation on the platform has reached the point where it is equal to overseas dramas and even has advantages. Since 2018, the website has produced 178 domestic animations and 430 online animations; the cumulative number of viewers is 340 million, the cumulative viewing time is 1.92 billion hours, and the total number of user interactions is 2 billion; an ecosystem that can continuously produce excellent domestic animation works has been formed. On other platforms, the dominant position of domestic animation is also very obvious. For example, the animated drama "Battle of Two Cities" introduced by Tencent Video in 2021 has an audience base of a large number of "League of Legends" gamers, and its sophisticated production has also received very high evaluation, but the playback volume is only one-tenth of the domestic animation "Magic Master" broadcast on the same platform.
The reason is that industry experts believe that contemporary young people have many lovers of national style, and domestic animation is more suitable for the tastes of Chinese audiences in terms of art style than foreign dramas. For example, "Five Elements of the Misty Mountains" used traditional ink painting techniques to integrate contemporary aesthetic styles of pictures, and won the "Best Series Animation Award" at the 18th China Animation Golden Dragon Awards in 2021.
Not only that, because domestic animation has its own IP, it is more free in the development of diversified themes than foreign animation, so it has the ability to continuously break the circle and expand its own boundaries. For example, "Five Elements of the Misty Mountains" and milk tea, canvas shoe brands released joint models. Domestic animations with ancient Chinese backgrounds such as "Qin Shi Mingyue" and "Dali Temple Log" have also launched their own joint models with Hanfu brands and men's wear brands.
In addition, successful cases of adapting domestic animation into scripts are not uncommon. For example, the domestic animation drama "Qin Xia" tells the interesting story of how a Qin Dynasty teenager who was made into a Qin figurine seal two thousand years ago and only woke up in the contemporary era performed heroic and righteous deeds in the contemporary city. After the animation work was broadcast, this IP was favored by the script killing industry, which had a strong desire for good scripts, and was adapted into a script to kill the audience to play from online to offline, to play the role to experience the happiness and revenge in the plot. The popular animation "Little Red Lady of the Fox Demon" was not only adapted into a script to kill, but the Hangzhou Lin'an Scenic Area also specially developed a theme scenic spot for it. The mutual penetration of different circle cultures has continuously extended the boundaries of domestic animation.
This means that the domestic animation industry is opening up the upstream content market and the downstream derivatives market to achieve revenue generation and efficiency of the whole industry chain. (Reporter Wei Zhong)
Source: Wen Wei Po