This year's most popular process movie "Nezha: The Devil Boy" has been successfully released in North America for a long time. Judging from the current North American box office reaction, Nezha's overseas box office and reputation are both good. However, although foreign markets have a certain degree of acceptance of domestic animation, how to go abroad is a big problem. How does
go to sea? International exhibitions are a good choice
This week, the Cannes Television Festival (MIPCOM) officially opened. In this world's largest film and television content trading event, we have seen many Chinese figures.
There are more than 100 Chinese companies and institutions participating in this Cannes TV Festival. Among them, there are many well-known domestic animation companies such as Huaqiang Fangte, Aofei Entertainment, Two Ten Ten, Original Dynamics, and Wayu.
For Chinese companies that are not well-known overseas, exhibiting their works in international trade fairs is the most direct way to open up overseas markets.
Of course, Chinese companies are not newcomers to the Cannes TV Festival anymore. In the past few years, with the growing trend of "going out", many animation companies have noticed that this is a bridge to the international market.
Chinese animation companies performed well at this MIPCOM. A-Squad's new work "Variety of School Bus" is one of the five works that participated in the road show of the MIP Junior project. Lei Xi Entertainment's "A-Squad" entered the top 10 most popular projects of MIP Junior and ranked 8th. How does
go to sea? Streaming media platforms are a new opportunity for animation to go overseas. Thanks to streaming media platforms such as Netflix, Chinese animated films are also broadcast in overseas markets including Japan. In 2018, Netflix bought the broadcasting rights for 4 domestic animation films, namely "Big Fish and Begonia", "Stylish Youth", "Mamma Duck" and "Future Machine City".
Netflix has always wanted to expand its animation content in recent years, and for this reason, it has spent huge sums of money to cooperate with Japanese animation companies to launch original content. And as streaming media platforms like Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Apple TV+ expand to the global market, their demand for overseas content will also increase. This is good news for Chinese animation companies.
According to foreign media reports, Netflix's content budget this year is about 15 billion US dollars, and Prime Video's content budget is expected to be 7 billion US dollars this year. Apple’s Apple TV+ content budget is approximately $6 billion. Disney's content budget this year is 22 billion US dollars, and the dedicated budget for Disney+ is also 10 US dollars.
What difficulties does Chinese animation have when going overseas? Language culture and classification system
At the same time, we can also find that most of the children's animations that can truly go overseas are now. The reason is also very simple. Young-aged animation "is easier to break through national boundaries and regional cultural differences", while adult-oriented animation often requires a deeper cultural background or a higher level of production to impress the audience.
But wanting children's animation to go to sea is not that simple. Several target countries for Chinese animation to go overseas, such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, have film and television grading systems, and have strict standards for children's animation.
More developed European and American countries have more complicated classification systems, and even different administrative regions have different regulations. Although Chinese animation does not appear to have excessive violence and erotic elements, such innocuous content as foul language, smoking and pornographic jokes, which seem to us to be innocuous, may become a hindrance to the work going abroad.
When it comes to lines, you have to mention translation and dubbing.
For overseas children’s animation, animation must have local language dubbing. For preschool children, it is undoubtedly difficult to understand subtitles. Even if
is an animated work aimed at teenagers or adults, it is easier to open the market with dubbing, because most foreigners do not actually have the habit of watching subtitles. Usually, subtitles are prepared for the hearing impaired.
But dubbing does not mean that you have a good "localization". If the dubbed lines are not translated enough "local", then the charm of the work itself will be greatly reduced.
From this perspective, in fact, find a good distributor for animation, which can helpMany problems are avoided, but most of the domestic animation works currently choose to be directly authorized to the screening channel. This may make more money, but it is not conducive to opening up overseas markets.
For overseas audiences, cultural barriers are another obstacle to their appreciation of Chinese animation.
We can find that the animations that have been successfully exported to overseas markets are basically universal in the story level, without adding too many elements of Chinese traditional culture, such as "Bear Infestation", "Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf", "Pig Man" and "Luo Baby" is like this. The only exception of
"Peking Opera Cat" was exported to the Southeast Asian market, but this was mainly because Southeast Asia also had a Chinese community.
Isn’t it possible to play the traditional Chinese culture card then? Not necessarily.
Although there are cultural barriers, the most fundamental thing about cultural works is the quality of the works. The animated version of "The Master of the Demon Dao", which performed well overseas this year, incorporates fantasy elements. On YouTube, the cumulative number of views of "The Master of the Devil: Front Dust" has been close to 3.5 million.
Moreover, these results are based on the premise that only Chinese dubbing and English subtitles are available. "The Master of Magic" can achieve such a result, but the excellent production has moved the audience.
However, Tencent has not released the overseas copyrights of animations such as "Magic Master" and "Full-time Master". All overseas audiences can only watch these animation works on the official Tencent Video channel on YouTube.
Generally speaking, domestic animation films are still facing difficulties on the way out, especially the chaos in the domestic animation market. The investment of various capitals has led to an endless stream of low-quality animation films, which is also the key to restricting domestic animation films from going abroad.
