2016, Communication University of China: The Young People Leaving the Animation Department

Why did they study animation? And where is their future?

The Communication University of China screened its animation class of 2016's graduation films on June 10. That day the 1,500-seat auditorium in the university's main building was full on both floors, aisles and corridors included. More than 2,000 people came, from inside the campus and outside it.

With the screening minutes away, Li Qiwei still had no confidence in Tales from the Mountain 《山中故事》. Two weeks earlier, in the department's internal grading, his group's short had earned only a "Good." The music license came through the night before, which meant another recut. The film had been changing right up to the end.

When Tales from the Mountain ended, the applause ran about 30 seconds — Li Qiwei's parents filmed it and timed it. Two of his teammates, Fu Yuxuan and Huang Zishan, were seeing the finished version for the first time, and were more excited still.

At the end of June, Bilibili ran a featured page of "CUC graduation projects"; it has since drawn close to 360,000 views. Tales from the Mountain has its own Douban page and a rating of 8.2, among the highest of this year's CUC animation graduation films. One commenter wrote: "Green, inevitably, but it catches something of My Neighbor Totoro. The music especially — the blossoms on the branch open one by one in time with the score, and the little dandelion's wide-eyed look is full of life."

The graduation screening is the Animation Department's Spring Festival Gala. Before they graduate, students form teams and make one animated short; the grade it earns is their graduation grade. When people argue about whether a school's animation department is strong or weak, these films are usually the evidence.

It is also the day animation companies come to pick people. Among the 2,000 in the hall were more than 40 companies in the animation business. The day after the screening, Li Qiwei got a call from October Media, the studio of Tian Xiaopeng, director of Monkey King: Hero Is Back. He took the offer and became a storyboard artist — the role in animation closest to a screenwriter's.

He was happy with that.

But the gala has its sad side. Animation students at every major school share one unspoken assumption: after graduation they may never again find the drive to pour themselves into a short film of their own. In all likelihood this is the best work they will ever make.

Tales from the Mountain, by Li Qiwei, Huang Zishan, Fu Yin, Fu Yuxuan and Zhang Yubing

Four years earlier, Li Qiwei had come from Henan to Beijing to start college. CUC's animation class of 2012 took in 81 students, in three sections.

Those 81 had won a long selection contest. More than 250 universities in China offer an undergraduate animation major, and each year more than 10,000 freshmen start one. Usually only the strongest reach the handful of best schools: Communication University of China, Beijing Film Academy, Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, China Academy of Art, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

Most animation programs are young. CUC's dates from 2001. China began pushing the animation industry around 2003, and most schools opened their programs in the decade that followed. Some converted an existing department, moving teachers over from design or film and television — the same teachers as before, or young graduate students with no practical experience. Even the best schools have this problem.

Li Qiwei knew none of this, of course. He picked the major because, among art programs, animation sounded fashionable.

Animation does not recruit like ordinary arts and science majors. It runs on the "art exam" track: the gaokao score counts only as a reference, and the school's own skills test decides.

Li Qiwei did poorly in high school, so he took up drawing. In early 2012 he sat the early entrance exams for the animation departments at Communication University of China and Beijing Film Academy. Both tested art theory, drawing fundamentals and storytelling — the same things he would spend the next four years studying.

He counted as bold: he applied to only two schools. Some art students, to be safe, sit exams at a dozen or more.

Kong Youyang, his classmate, chose animation on impulse. He finished at the high school affiliated with Yunnan Normal University with grades good enough for a solid first-tier university, and had never trained in drawing. But in his final year, weighing his choices, he "didn't want to study arts and didn't want to study sciences," and then discovered this thing called an animation department. He had also seen The Red Scarf Hero 《红领巾侠》 on CCTV, a short by Cheng Teng from CUC's class of 2007, and thought it was superb.

All of which is now just dinner-table talk. Once at college, every one of them found that making animation was not what they had pictured.

Kong Youyang says the normal state of his college life was staying up all night. The department fills the week with classes — required and elective, theory and practice — and many of them come with assignments. The freshman course in 2D animation design teaches Flash, the software with the lowest barrier in the trade. Students might work more than ten hours for a few seconds of footage.

Kong Youyang liked it. He felt he had come to the right place — "the people around me are from the same world I am" — and the daily talk was art, film, design.

Li Qiwei did not like it at all. He arrived as one of the best draftsmen in the class; four years on, key animation was not his strength. He says he let his studio courses slide from his first year to his third — assignments can be faked if you want to fake them. For a while his interest moved to live-action film and he spent his energy there, sitting in on classes in the directing department next door. In the holidays he drew storyboards and worked as an art hand on film crews, earning enough to pay his own tuition and living costs.

From the second half of junior year, the classes stop. Students form their own teams for a "joint project," also an animated short — a rehearsal for the senior-year graduation film.

They started preparing over the summer before senior year: picking partners, picking an advisor, working out a script and a style. Once the term began, they went to work.

Both the joint project and the graduation film became compulsory at CUC only after 2010, with the class of 2006. Ai Shengying, who heads the Animation Department, told QDaily that before that students also had to submit a graduation work, but some applied to graduate on the strength of a trailer that was not a finished film. Watching animation and making animation are two different things, Ai Shengying said; without the real thing, it is hard to say what a student has learned.

Li Qiwei's work on Tales from the Mountain went badly. He wanted a lyrical film but could not settle the plot. He tried more dramatic turns — the hero stumbling into a mountain cave and meeting strange creatures — and dropped them all. Only in the last two or three months did he see his direction clearly and hit his stride.

Kong Youyang's problem was the size of the job. The graduation film he made with Zheng Ligang and Lü Wei, Anima 《生 ANIMA》, is science fiction set in space, a story of warring races. The characters are drawn realistically and the backgrounds are dense with detail. At 12 minutes it is one of the longest films in the class.

Anima earned an "Excellent." The team divided the work cleanly: Kong Youyang did the design, Zheng Ligang, the best draftsman, drew, and Lü Wei handled backgrounds.

Anima, by Kong Youyang, Zheng Ligang and Lü Wei

The films that drew praise this year look nothing like one another. Akemi's First Love 《明美的初恋》 does broad Japanese-comic comedy: a girl who likes only human-beast romance falls for her gorilla teacher. The "hero" of The Old Song 《老歌》 is a cassette recorder moving through Beijing in 1997, where it meets a music-box girl from an even older era. Some students worked alone. Hot Hot Hot 《烫烫烫》 is an experimental, music-video-like short built on style, so the workload was lighter.

Animation needs sound as well as pictures — voices and music. Every team spent money on them, from three or four thousand yuan up to ten thousand, split among the members.

The end credits of Tales from the Mountain, Anima, The Old Song, Akemi's First Love and Hot Hot Hot all carry a "116" logo. It stands for Study Room 116, on the ground floor of the School of Animation's teaching building. Something over thirty students, in about ten teams, spent their senior year in it.

In that room, Kong Youyang says, everyone could see everyone else's progress, offer opinions, and get help the moment a piece of software defeated them. When one team's advisor came by to inspect, the other teams got advice too.

Some became acknowledged workhorses. Li Ruijie of Akemi's First Love came in first and left last. Her teammate Pan Jing, she says, could draw fast and well, so she had to put in more hours to get to the same place.

The building locks up at 11 p.m. Nobody worried about staying late; at worst you climbed out of a particular window. When a deadline closed in, someone would be there all night. At its fullest the room held 10 folding beds.

They were rarely alone that year. Room 116 held animals as well as people: a dog, a cat, two birds, a hedgehog, two tree frogs. The teachers looked the other way and let them live in the classroom. Walking the dog became the fashionable cure for anxiety; sometimes a walker came back only for someone else to take the leash and head straight out for the next lap.

After the June screening, Li Qiwei sent a WeChat message to the official account Dushe Dianying, pitching his class's films. The first reply: come back when you have a theatrical release. Li Qiwei sent over the comments from Bilibili and Douban. Then, on August 15, he saw that Dushe Dianying had published "Amazed Again by an Obscure Chinese Animation." The piece passed 100,000 views.

The students will earn no box office from these shorts. But "academy animation" has become a category of its own in Chinese independent animation, and fans watch for good work. That, Ai Shengying says, is part of the point of the graduation film: the more the result feels like a sacred ritual, the harder students will push.

Ai Shengying looks after three sections at once and is, by student consensus, among the most reliable teachers. Each section has a homeroom teacher, but outside class meetings they seldom appear. Li Qiwei says he had little contact with his teachers in his first three years; on the graduation film he could still get help from his advisor.

Not everyone took the major seriously. Some had decided long before to leave the field and looked for a team to attach themselves to, taking the last credit. Some films failed, the teams broke up, and the members were parceled out to others. Ten students in this class were failed and must delay graduation and retake.

For some, the destination was settled before the film was finished. The list of 10 students admitted to graduate school without an exam was fixed before winter break, and it included Cui Daiqi, who made The Old Song, and Li Ruijie, who made Akemi's First Love. They had finished every course, politics and English included.

As graduate students they may join their teachers' animation projects. A third of the department's 30 teachers make commercial animation off campus. Li Zhiyong's Jiang Jiang Jiang Studio produced the series Kung Fu Bunny and Cabbage Dog 《功夫兔与菜包狗》. Li Wei, whom students call the key-animation god, was one of the executive directors of Big Fish & Begonia; a sample reel from Legend of Deification, which he is directing, has also been well received online.

A few take their own road. Liu Nanli, who made Hot Hot Hot, started her own studio, taking music videos and commercials to begin with. By her second and third years she had decided she would not be somebody's employee. Like the rest she worships animation gods such as Satoshi Kon and Katsuhiro Otomo, but the life she wants belongs to the independent cartoonist Little Thunder, who gets to make what she likes and answer to no one.

Three people fund Liu Nanli's studio: her mother, her older sister, and the head of the Shanghai animation company Liutang. She had worked with Liutang since college, drawing comics for it on the U17 platform. Liutang is now moving into animation; it handed her a script in an American cartoon style, made her the director, and left her to round up some classmates.

After graduation Liu Nanli found a duplex apartment in Beijing to serve as studio and home. Eleven people from 116 now live there together.

Kong Youyang first meant to study abroad. His idol is Cheng Teng, whose short he had seen on CCTV and who now works at DreamWorks in the United States. Cheng Teng finished his animation degree at CUC in 2011, then spent three years as a graduate student in the animation program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

About five of the class of 2016 have confirmed places abroad, in the United States, France and elsewhere; others are still applying. Going abroad, Kong Youyang says, means the most advanced animation training, and jobs overseas.

But Cheng Teng told QDaily that going abroad is a gamble. Art majors rarely get scholarships, and his three years at USC cost US$150,000 in tuition. Count the top animated-film companies in the United States and you get Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and a few more; each hires only a handful of people a year. He was the only student DreamWorks signed last year.

Another fact: animation students all love Japanese anime, yet almost none of them think about studying or working in Japan. Japan's own animators have to grind for years to break through, and the industry has little room for outsiders.

Kong Youyang stayed in China anyway; he had not prepared for the TOEFL. Four years in the Animation Department, he says, cost him much of his ability to sit exams. In July he moved to Shenzhen and joined the animation division of Tencent Pictures. Tencent Interactive Entertainment announced a film and television unit in September 2014; Tencent Pictures was formally founded in 2015, and its first slate included an animated feature adapted from the game QQ Speed 《QQ 飞车》.

Kong Youyang's parents see Tencent as a big, stable company with better benefits. He also considered Luo Xiaohei Studio, founded by the animator MTJJ. Its web series The Legend of Luo Xiaohei 《罗小黑战记》, in production since 2011, has a following for its cute drawing style and is preparing a feature version.

Four of CUC's 2016 animation graduates went to Luo Xiaohei Studio, Kong Youyang's teammate Zheng Ligang among them. Count the companies the industry agrees are reliable, Kong Youyang says, and you get fewer than ten.

Pay varies widely. The low end is five or six thousand yuan a month; a good job pays more than 10,000. Lü Wei, another teammate, is at Tencent in Shenzhen with him but earns more, because he joined the most profitable division — games.

Li Qiwei says he once meant to stay out of animation companies, until the pleasure of making Tales from the Mountain changed his mind.

The praise from Bilibili and Douban, he says, went to his head a little at first. Then he arrived at October Media in August, saw what Tian Xiaopeng and the other veterans could do, and was persuaded. What he wants, he says, is commercial films with the widest possible audience.

He may have timed it well. Monkey King: Hero Is Back took 900 million yuan at the box office in 2015; Big Fish & Begonia took 500 million in 2016. New companies are forming and new money is arriving. Enlight Media invested in October Media, which made Monkey King: Hero Is Back, and in B&T, which made Big Fish & Begonia. At the end of 2015 Enlight set up Coloroom Pictures, announcing investments in 13 animation companies and a slate of more than 20 films, among them adaptations of popular games, web novels and web comics.

Out of that pile of choices the students have to work out for themselves which is the future and which is a bubble. Kong Youyang remembers a boss from Anhui who called him after the screening: "We're making a big feature. Bring your whole team."

CUC's animation graduates are already the best cohort on the talent market. In an interview with AVG News, Wang Lei, deputy dean of CUC's School of Animation, said the industry employs about 200,000 people, and newcomers equal to a twentieth of an industry arriving every year is, without question, a few too many. "The fever for expanding the animation major has largely passed," he said. "We have reached the stage of settling down and competing on quality. What matters is not chasing the wave; what matters is respecting the basic rules of education."

Cheng Teng says the companies he wanted to join when he graduated in 2011 were all in Los Angeles. The project in his hands now, though, belongs to Oriental DreamWorks in Shanghai. He has talked to Enlight's Coloroom, but he thinks he needs more time being sharpened on projects.

Cheng Teng's own 2011 graduation short, Happy Anniversary 《纪念日快乐》, won a Special Prize at the 11th Tokyo Anime Award. Asked whether a graduation film has to be the best thing a person ever makes, he says: "That's up to you."

Li Qiwei still remembers what his advisor said over the farewell dinner on the night of the screening: "On the graduation short you were the creative core, but inside a company you have to be a cog, fitting into other people's work. That's what the industry is."

He accepted it. After saying he was in no hurry, he added: "I might think about directing in my thirties."

Photos by Liu Nanli, Kong Youyang, Li Qiwei and Cui Daiqi