From Tudou Founder to *Little Door Gods*: What Wang Wei Did in 29 Months | Founders Speak

Wang Wei wants Light Chaser Animation to release one animated film every two years, and to keep that rhythm going.

Two days ago, the Chinese animated film Little Door Gods held a launch event at a Wanda CBD cinema in Beijing.

Wang Wei skipped that morning's rehearsal. The writer and director of Little Door Gods, who is also CEO of Light Chaser Animation, went to the office and sat through meetings as usual, and turned up at the venue only shortly before the event began. He went on stage at the start and at the end to "play a bit part."

For most of the event, Wang sat quietly in the audience and watched his producer, Yu Zhou, tell the story of how the film was made on the big screen, play the trailer, and introduce partners to the media and guests.

"If it were a product launch, say explaining what a particular phone is like, maybe I'd be the one to talk. But this is a film. Whether it's good and how to sell it, the producer is better placed to speak about," Wang told us the day after the event, sitting in Light Chaser's Beijing office.

The arrangement disappointed some people who had come to see Wang. His success at Tudou, and an artistic streak rarely found among internet people, have made him an unusual kind of business celebrity, and quite a few fans have followed him to this day.

Three years ago, tired of the price war over video copyrights, Wang sold Tudou, the company he had founded seven years earlier. A year later, with two partners, Yu Zhou and Yuan Ye, he founded Light Chaser Animation, with the aim of making the best animated films in China.

A second startup brought the spotlight back, and Wang has deliberately chosen to "dodge" some of it.

He put Light Chaser's office in an international art district on the outskirts of Beijing, backed by two expressways; the best-known landmark nearby is the Beijing Scitech Outlets. He is not active on social media, and it is usually co-founder Yu Zhou who goes to industry events. If you want to find him, the best approach is to go to the company's door: unless he has other plans, he is always at the office. With luck, you might also see him riding his BMW motorcycle.

At Tudou, Wang was a product manager; at Light Chaser, he became a screenwriter and director, an "artist." The change has drawn plenty of controversy: an internet guy, a video guy, making up stories and directing them himself, and directing animation at that, sounds like a fantasy.

Wang believes the books he has read, and the years he lived in New York, Paris, Shanghai and elsewhere, gave him plenty of material and inspiration. He had also written a book and stage plays before, so writing stories is not entirely new to him. And for an animated film, he says, the hardest part is not actually the story. "I think for animation, the story is not the essential problem," Wang told QDaily. "On the contrary, the framework of a story is the easy part. Once a story starts moving forward, there are endless problems to solve, and if one thing is wrong, the story doesn't hold up. Making it work after that is the hard thing."

How do you turn the story in your head into 90 minutes of animation on the screen? It took Wang a year to work that out.

His success at Tudou helped. Once the idea of making animated films took hold, Wang spent about half a year visiting famous animation studios abroad, in Hollywood and in Europe. Thanks to the Tudou name, "people were willing to talk to you." These "pilgrimages" gave Wang a basic grasp of the animation business: how long the industry's supply chain is, how the budget for an animated film is set, what stages a film goes through, what each type of job involves, how to control cost and schedule, and so on.

This was an entirely different world from his first startup. When he founded Tudou in 2005, YouTube did not yet exist and video sites were an unfamiliar idea; there was nothing to go on for what the product should look like, who the users were, or what the business model would be. Animated film, by contrast, has developed for more than a century and already has a complete production pipeline, business model and ecosystem, which Wang and Light Chaser could quickly learn from and borrow.

Pixar is an important model for Light Chaser. Several features of the company show Pixar's influence: its more than 190 employees split evenly into thirds across art, management and technology; the emphasis on art and technology working together; and the encouragement for everyone to speak up.

Some things cannot be copied. Light Chaser, for example, cannot afford to put more than US$100 million into a single film over an average of 4.5 years, as Pixar does. Little Door Gods cost around US$20 million (about 130 million yuan), so it could not be expected to match Pixar's level of animation detail. Light Chaser has set the production time for an animated feature at an average of three years (with overlaps), so that even if one film does poorly at the box office, it will not drag the company under.

Wang does not accept that Light Chaser can simply be classed as either a Hollywood animation studio or a Chinese one. "Light Chaser is Light Chaser. We have learned a lot, and we also bring our own working habits," Wang told QDaily. "Collaboration, sharing, knowledge sharing, tool sharing, iteration, taking on as many opinions and versions as possible: we push these further than a lot of American companies."

At Light Chaser, for example, everyone can see the latest version of the script and everyone can suggest changes, but only the screenwriter, that is, Wang, has the right to make them. The same goes for other stages. With special effects, apart from the director, people in other roles can only give the head of effects suggestions, not demands. Wang believes this approach delivers collaboration and sharing while respecting each person's expertise.

This "respect" matters especially when Light Chaser is trying to attract and recruit talent. "The individual skill of Chinese animation talent has been underestimated," Wang said. Many highly skilled animators, held back by budget or time, cannot produce work as good as they are capable of, and he hopes to create the environment and conditions at Light Chaser for them to do so.

The team of more than 190 people is almost entirely ethnic Chinese, including some experienced animation professionals who returned from overseas. Wang has also brought in consultants from Hollywood to give advice at particular stages and in particular areas. "We are making Chinese stories, so only Chinese people can make them," Wang said.

Wang is confident about making animated films from Chinese stories. "Audiences still have feeling for Chinese culture." For Light Chaser, Little Door Gods means more than its box-office figure when it opens in a few months. Using the project to learn the process and to break in and train the team may matter even more to a company that hopes to release an animated film every one to two years. "If you asked us now to make another film at the level of Little Door Gods, that would be far too easy. We will certainly hold the next one to a higher standard," Wang said.

Little Door Gods has formally entered its publicity period, while the production team has already moved on to the second film, Tea Pet and the Little Robot. Wang told us that project has reached the "lighting" stage and, on the current schedule, should be finished by the end of August next year. He has also finished the script for the third film.

At the launch event, Wang said he was "very nervous" and had "mixed feelings." This is his first animated film, and the first for most of the company's employees. He hopes audiences will like it and that it will do well in the market. "Of course we hope Little Door Gods succeeds. But the box office of any single film can't be predicted. We have a chance to make at least three films, so even if this one doesn't work out, nobody dies," Wang said.

We talked with Wang about his recent work, and about what he has learned and felt starting a company for the second time.

Q = QDaily

W = Wang Wei

"Making animated films requires a time strategy"

Q: After the launch event, people seem to have raised their box-office expectations for Little Door Gods. What about you?

W: From day one we have said that any film can succeed or fail. So our plan is to make three films and have at least one succeed. We can have some expectations for the box office overall, but not for any single film. We have a chance to make at least three films. Of course we hope Little Door Gods succeeds, but even if it doesn't, nobody dies.

Q: At the launch event you said you were "very nervous" and had "mixed feelings." How does that compare with Tudou, say, when you released a new version or were about to go public?

W: The feeling is completely different. Artistic creation still has uncertainty in it. I really like polishing it shot by shot, and I hope more people will like it; I wonder how everyone will see it and what they will think. The quality of the production, I believe everyone can see for themselves. But how the story is, how the characters are, each person's impression is different, and that is harder for me to be sure about.

Q: What if audiences don't respond well to the story and the characters after release?

W: We put 120% of our energy and ability into this film. As a company, as a whole team, this is the level we can reach right now. We worked extremely hard, and everyone was completely committed. The second film should be stronger than the first.

Q: What is the second film about, and what stage is it at?

W: The second is called Tea Pet and the Little Robot. We've already started on lighting, and it should be finished by the end of August next year. Our rhythm is three years per film: half a year to let the story take shape, half a year to write the script, and that first part is basically my own job. Then in the second year we spend a year on design, and then a year on production, so about three years in all.

Q: But from the outside, it looks like there will be a new film every year and a half to two years.

W: Right. Two years, because at the front end we need to put enough time into the story, the script and designing the process.

Q: How did you arrive at three years per film?

W: From having a story to the finished film takes three years. We worked out the three years by estimating roughly how long each part would take, taking in everyone's opinions, and looking at how each person works, some faster, some slower. Pixar takes four and a half years, DreamWorks three and a half, and Illumination perhaps two and a half to three.

When we were starting out, I consulted every company and talked with them. Illumination, for instance, made Minions, and back then I asked them: what is the most fundamental difference between you and everyone else? The key, they said, is self-discipline, and that is the biggest difference between us and them. I thought that made a lot of sense. I came back and said we must have self-discipline. We are a new company, there are many things we're not used to yet, so getting one film done in three years is about right; we don't need to chase two and a half. Making this kind of thing requires a time strategy.

"90% of my decisions every day are saying NO"

Q: What does your working day look like now?

W: I start at 9:30 and work until about 7 p.m., every day. There are 11 or 12 meetings scheduled each day, because our production system depends on reviews: I need to look at what has been done and say what I think, and these meetings push the project forward. So if I'm away for even a day, the project suffers a little. This is my main job.

Q: Little Door Gods was finished two weeks ago. What are the meetings mainly discussing and solving now?

W: We're making the second film, and every meeting is different. In a modeling meeting, we check whether the model matches the design and whether the lines look good; the lines on each character's face are different. Once lighting and camera shots come out, we look at the lighting and check whether it feels consistent with the design drawings I first settled on, whether there's too much highlight, or too little backlight, or whether we should add some overhead light. We go into quite a lot of detail.

Yesterday, for example, we looked at a finished, rendered animated shot where a line had suddenly appeared between a character's two eyes. We look at things like that.

Q: As the process gets more familiar, do meetings go faster?

W: Not necessarily faster, but in the same amount of time, the quality of what we make is higher.

Q: Some say the most important job of an animation director is making decisions. Do you agree?

W: You certainly have to make decisions; that goes without saying. But that's only part of it. The other part is that you need your own ideas: what you want, and what you base your decisions on. So much happens every day on an animated film that if you don't know what you want, you can't pull it off.

Q: When ideas clash, do you usually persuade the other person?

W: A director's job is to articulate the story and protect the story. 90% of the decisions I make every day are about saying no. An animator asks whether it can be done this way, and I say it can only be done that way. The lighting artist asks, what about this, and I say no. When you're writing a story, there's only you, and your head needs to be clear. That's part of a director's job. What other people say in general terms, in casual chat, is of no use.

Q: Little Door Gods has a strong "Chinese style." You had a Western education and lived abroad. Where does your interest in traditional Chinese culture come from?

W: Mostly because I have a strong sense of self, I think. You see a lot of people who go abroad to study, and after a while they carry themselves like ABCs (American-born Chinese) or like Japanese people, but wherever I go, people take one look at me and know I'm Chinese. It may also be that I come from Fujian, which is still one of the more traditional parts of China, where a lot of folk customs survive. For example, when guests came to the house my mother wouldn't sit at the table; on the day of Banda (phonetic; a folk festival in Fuzhou) you had to slaughter a duck, take the door panels off and set up an offering table... I think I was shaped by these things from childhood.

Q: That is still very different from what you encountered studying and working abroad.

W: Open the front page of The New York Times and look at what Americans care about. Elections, feminism, race, gay rights, basically those. Do we care about those? No. What we mostly care about is the enormous changes in society, the conflict between old and new, nature, pollution. I'm the same; those are the issues I care about more.

"The technology gap with Hollywood has actually been underestimated"

Q: It was quite hard to hire people at the beginning, wasn't it?

W: Yes, mainly because we were crossing into a new industry, and at first we didn't know anyone. Some people had heard of what we were doing, most didn't know us, and we didn't know who they were. It took a long time to build the team. Once we found the first two or three right people, the rest followed.

Q: What were those first few people's backgrounds?

W: I talked to several hundred people, more or less at random. Some thought we were really good. Some thought we weren't credible, which is normal; if I had been a job applicant back then, I'd have thought it pretty shaky too. So the first two or three who joined were really brave.

Q: At the start, how did you try to win people over?

W: We said the same things and promised the same things to everyone. We would make world-class animated films; we would work to build a team, spend this much budget, and take three years to make this film. Back then a lot of people heard that and thought: you've never done this before, and you'll make a film in three years? Come on. But later we delivered on everything we promised.

Q: What do you look for when hiring?

W: All of it. Basic skills, but above all whether the person is curious. What's printed on our business cards is "creation begins with curiosity." You need curiosity and a real love of animation. If someone is just working for the sake of working, I think it's hard for them to last, because they won't produce anything.

Q: Since it was probably hard to recruit truly top people at the start, were you more relaxed about ability?

W: Ability can be trained, but it depends. Take me: people in the internet industry have basically all crossed over from somewhere else, and what we make is always new. I had never done media before, I had never done this or that, and it didn't matter; you can learn. What matters is that you have the basic qualities and are eager to learn. Of course it's best to have some basic skills too, but above all, to keep moving forward, you have to love it.

Q: Little Door Gods already looks pretty good. Having made it, do you think the so-called technology gap between us and Hollywood may have been overestimated?

W: No, quite the opposite. The technology gap has actually been underestimated, and the gap in the quality of people has been overestimated. There are a lot of outstanding Chinese creators. And by technology I don't mean individual skill. Technology includes things like accumulated software, work, capabilities and processes. All of that is technology.

It isn't individual skill; individual skill is a personal matter. Technology is the spirit of animated film. You can see it: every improvement in the quality of animated films has come from technology. I think individual ability here is very strong, no problem there. The real problem, if anything, is technology, and the system we work together in.

Q: One shortcut to good animation is to bring in good people from abroad. Why is the vast majority of Light Chaser's staff Chinese, with so few foreigners?

W: We do have consultants, and they are in the US. The team is basically Chinese, 99% Chinese, and many came back from overseas. What do we want to do? We want to make world-class animated films. I want to tell Chinese stories; I care about the environment, about Chinese stories. I think telling Chinese stories takes a Chinese team, and we have to find ways to build it. If I brought in some Americans, what Chinese story could they tell here? They couldn't. And if you went to tell an American story, I think that would be hard too. Film is a very subtle thing. You can feel it; you can sense the slight differences just by watching. Minions, for example, feels very French.

Consultants are very helpful and bring experience, but at the core you have to do it yourself, hands-on, every day. That is the most important thing. You fight your own battles; rely on consultants to fight them and you will be crushed. You have to be clear that this is a war. If you can't even count on mercenaries, you can count on consultants even less.

Q: Light Chaser's funding rounds haven't been especially large. Is that deliberate, or is there another reason?

W: First, the investors have all been friends for many years, so there is trust. Second, how much the company is worth and how much it needs is something everyone can see at a glance. For Light Chaser as it is now, raising this much money at this valuation is, I think, about right.

Q: But valuations of Chinese film and television companies are quite high overall.

W: For me it comes down to one word: reasonable. You can't force things and expect them to turn out well. Look at the ones who insisted on pushing for more; in the end it basically all got ugly. When Tudou started, it was US$500,000 for 30%, which I thought was very reasonable. Half a year later the valuation was up 20 times, and still very reasonable. Tudou was a platform, so its value was higher, its price was higher, and it needed to spend more.

Q: After Monkey King: Hero Is Back became a hit, that company's valuation presumably rose quickly. Wouldn't the same happen if Little Door Gods sells well?

W: Look at animation companies abroad. Pixar sold for only US$7 billion, and DreamWorks for only US$2 billion. How high a price can an animation company command? If I were an investor, I wouldn't take a very high price either. It should be reasonable.

"No one can change my work"

Q: From your two and a half years of experience, is Light Chaser more like a Hollywood animation company or a Chinese one?

W: Neither. Light Chaser is Light Chaser. We've learned a lot, but we also bring our own working habits, the working habits of the internet: collaboration, sharing, knowledge sharing, tool sharing, iteration, taking on as many opinions and versions as possible. We push these further than a lot of American companies.

Q: Can you give a concrete example of how this collaboration and sharing works in practice?

W: Take the script: only I write it. I don't believe in a bunch of people sitting together to make this kind of thing, and I don't much like it, though maybe in the future it will be needed. I believe more in division of labor. I'm the screenwriter, I have the world in my head, and I write it out. Everyone can offer opinions, I look at how good they are and then revise, but no one else can change it. No one can change my work.

Q: Is this approach limited to the script, or do other stages work the same way?

W: All of them. Take lighting: we set the design requirements, the lighting director is in charge of lighting, and everyone can give him suggestions. Apart from me, as director, who can make demands of him, no one else is allowed to make demands, sometimes not even the producer. You can give opinions and suggestions, but on lighting, he makes the call. It's division of labor, and the final work belongs to everyone.

Q: Some reports say you have become a gentler manager.

W: Because people treat me pretty well. The model itself is different too. Tudou was a product, whereas this, as I said, is an artistic work, and people work differently. Ours is also a combination of art and technology. We have technical staff and artistic staff, and putting the two together, I think it's mostly these factors.

On a personal level, with age I may have gained a bit of the "free from doubt at forty" that Confucius talked about, and I'm more tolerant of some things. I'm not like when I was younger, charging ahead with everyone required to follow me up. Now it's more about taking a step back, everyone moving forward together, doing what we can, and thinking more about what others think, since not everyone is like me. Before, I was always shouting: you lot down there, follow me up. Now it's more that we all go together.

Q: How does the way you work differ between starting Light Chaser three years ago and starting Tudou ten years ago?

W: The most critical, core difference is that Tudou was like making a product. With a product, the hardest and most agonizing question is whether the product is right. I didn't know whether people would like to use it, whether we could find real demand, whether others would think it was good. There was a huge amount of uncertainty, and you always had to be ready for it to die the moment it launched. Once you got it right, what came after was relatively simple.

Making films is exactly the reverse. Thousands of years of stories are there to be told, and I don't think the story is essentially the problem. Once a story starts moving forward, there are endless problems to solve, and if one thing is wrong, the story doesn't hold up. The framework of a story is actually the easy part; making the story work after that is the hard thing.