His Second Animated Film Flopped Too. What Is Wrong With Wang Wei and Light Chaser Animation?

He is an investor, a creator, an operator, an entrepreneur — why hasn't that pile of roles added up to one good animated film?

Wang Wei's second film, Tea Pets (《阿唐奇遇》), opened on July 21. At its peak it took under 8% of screenings. It cost 85 million yuan to make and finished with 30.15 million yuan at the box office.

So the second film didn't win the round back either. His debut, The Guardian Brothers, released on New Year's Day 2016, also carried a total investment of nearly 100 million yuan. It took more than 10% of screenings in its opening weekend and earned 78 million yuan in all.

Public interest had fallen sharply in between. By the time Tea Pets opened, its Baidu Index stood at about 18,000; The Guardian Brothers reached more than 50,000 in its opening weekend.

That may explain why the rest of the film business showed so little interest. Tea Pets got very limited marketing and distribution. Its co-producer and distributor was Dadi Films, the studio arm of the Dadi cinema chain; the other partners were Youman Cartoon, Hengdian Film and Jinyi Film and Television — none of them first-tier marketing and distribution companies.

A year earlier Wang Wei had far more than that. Alibaba Pictures announced it would co-invest in and co-distribute The Guardian Brothers, put more than a million US dollars into it, and take on roadshows, publicity and merchandising. The other co-producers included Tencent, Baidu Netcom and Gewara; China Film Group came in as co-distributor.

Not one of those partners turned up behind Tea Pets.

Light Chaser Animation was Wang Wei's second company.

In 2012, saying he was "tired of the price wars over copyright in the video industry," Wang Wei sold Tudou, the video site he had run for seven years. A year later he announced that he and his partners Yu Zhou and Yuan Ye were starting an animation company, and said they would put out a feature film within two years.

Wang Wei is an animation fan. As a viewer, like plenty of others, he had taken enormous pleasure in films such as Up, The Incredibles and How to Train Your Dragon — "clean stories that also make you think." The name Light Chaser is said to stand for the lasting mark animation leaves on an audience: a snowman runs toward the sun, melts slowly, and still leaves something in the world. "Time passes, the story stays."

After Tudou merged with Youku, Wang Wei was worth more than US$100 million. Light Chaser then took venture money from IDG Capital and GGV Capital, US$25 million across two rounds.

Internet platforms and animation production are two different industries. But Wang Wei had capital and a name, and he found a way in and a way to build a team: go to Hollywood. He talked his way through DreamWorks, Pixar and the investment world, and said he "found his bearings within a few months."

Light Chaser grew from a starting team of a dozen-odd people to more than 190. Experienced people back from abroad filled the key posts. On his first trip to California, Wang Wei hired three people out of the American film industry — two Chinese-American animators and one American who had worked at Pixar Animation Studios and Industrial Light & Magic.

Labor accounts for 60% to 80% of what an animated film costs. Once the script and the 3D models are done, production moves into the grind of animation and rendering, where an animator can spend hours to get a single second of footage.

But 2012 was a good moment to start.

Chinese animation fans were waiting for a real mainstream domestic film. The country's film market was growing fast: box office reached 17 billion yuan in 2012, second in the world. Animation looked like the next hot spot. Kung Fu Panda 2 took 617 million yuan in China in 2011, which led DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg to set up a DreamWorks branch in Shanghai.

The same expectation is what won Big Fish & Begonia 1.58 million yuan in crowdfunding on the strength of one striking Flash short. Directors Tian Xiaopeng and Yang Zhigang (Busifan) had each spent years in television and web animation; they went on to release Monkey King: Hero Is Back and Dahufa.

In the animation world, Wang Wei is a very loud outsider.

He went to Hollywood companies to hire partly because he admired the technology there, and partly because of the distance between him and China's own animation talent.

One person in the industry, who asked not to be named, told QDaily: "He [Wang Wei] wasn't in the animation world before, then suddenly he was in it, with no connections built up. Our circle has always been closed, and people here don't much like outsiders. If you want good hands, you think about poaching them from overseas… That's also the state of the animation business — some bosses deliberately chase technology, and projects that can blow up. Everyone imitates Disney, and that doesn't work. Even Disney, when it makes films with Chinese partners, still can't get the story right."

The money Wang Wei spent on Hollywood talent did buy something — Light Chaser once raised expectations on the strength of its craft. In late July 2015, while Monkey King: Hero Is Back was still in theaters pushing at the animation box-office record, The Guardian Brothers set off its own round of discussion with a trailer.

The animation in that trailer was a genuine highlight. The characters moved vividly and naturally, and the quality stayed with you — the shot of a plum branch brushed aside to shake loose a fall of snow, the face reflected in a sword blade.

Five months later the full film opened and disappointed people who had hoped for a "good story." As a plot-driven film, it was muddled in every part of the dramatic work: the central conflict, the shape of its narrative turns, the handling of emotion.

This year Light Chaser's second film, Tea Pets, left audiences feeling much the same: a by-the-numbers opening, a wavering plot thread, a climax out of nowhere, an ending that only convinces itself.

Beneath the loose, aimless plotting another problem surfaces: neither film has a core set of values. The Guardian Brothers never worked out the relationship between holding on to tradition and changing, which left it stuck in a preachy register. In Tea Pets, Ah Tang covers his inner conflict with mischief while trying to answer the question of why he looks different from everyone else — and by the end he seems to talk himself out of it by force of will, shaking off his confusion with no trouble at all.

Because the values are stated so weakly, audiences can find no emotional foothold in either of these two anthropomorphized stories. Monkey King: Hero Is Back and Dahufa have their own gaps in plot and image, but the emotional charge of the values behind them won broad approval, and then box office.

The biggest reason for the thin stories and the missing values is thought to be the company's power structure.

Early this year, Light Chaser producer Yu Zhou told the WeChat account Entertainment Capital that Wang Wei cut the trailers for Tea Pets himself, "in order to convey the film's message precisely."

At Light Chaser, Wang Wei is CEO, producer, director and screenwriter. In the first stage of production, "from concept and outline to screenplay," he is the one in charge. Employees can offer opinions; he is the only person who can actually change anything.

Writing is the one area where Wang Wei has stayed confident. In an interview with QDaily, he said original stories are the part of the work he enjoys most and the part truest to why he started.

At 26 he wrote an autobiographical novel, Waiting for Summer (《等待夏天》), published years later in the literary magazine Harvest. He recalled for QDaily what a Harvest editor once said to him: "You should have gone on writing novels — why start a company? What a waste."

In 2011, on the eve of Tudou's troubled IPO, Wang Wei put most of his energy into writing a stage play, The Compound (《大院》) — "set against the redevelopment of old Beijing, it follows how the fates of the people in and around a compound change." The play ran three performances, all of them packed.

He likes being asked why he wants to make films, and animated films in particular, and his answer sounds genuinely sincere: "Because there's room to imagine, a chance to build a world, and best of all to see things we don't normally imagine come alive."

But one of the motives behind that imagining is weariness with the real world. Before Tea Pets opened he told QDaily: "I'm not that interested in realistic subject matter. It's boring, just the same petty stuff day after day. So-and-so fell in love with so-and-so, so-and-so did this or that — people have been writing about the relationships between people for thousands of years, what's left to write? No interest. Everyone has their own thing they like, right?"

Wang Wei's choices sit in contradiction with how storytelling works. It is one of the oldest forms of communication, and its purpose is not to convey the story itself — that is what news reporting is for — but to work the story into the storyteller's own life, so that it reaches the listener as experience.

As Walter Benjamin put it: "Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel."

In the time since Tea Pets finished its run, Wang Wei has kept looking for the reasons it failed.

He sums up the disadvantages the market handed him: "The film market as a whole has been flat all year." Comparing his film with Dahufa, he thinks Tea Pets didn't get people talking enough — and he now appears to see the point of "realistic subject matter": "Maybe from here on we still need to do more socially critical topics — equality, institutions, prejudice, things anyone can throw in two lines about…"

He also doubts who his audience is. "The mainstream audience for Tea Pets is much weaker at spreading the word than younger viewers." The mainstream here means "parents in their 30s," while "teenagers and people in their twenties watched it less, so fewer people passed it on."

Which means that beyond "realistic subject matter," Wang Wei has begun to doubt another of Light Chaser's foundations: the family film.

"Family film" is the gentle phrase. Judging by what the category actually contains in China, the accurate phrase would be "cartoons small children can sit through." Wang Wei thinks that on the technical side Light Chaser should be making 3D features that deliver the strongest possible visual impact on a big screen; on the story side, at 44, he says, "I want to be able to share his story with my two-year-old son."

The family film was once thought to have plenty of market potential. The best example is probably Despicable Me, whose third installment took more than 40% of screenings in its opening weekend in 2017 and passed 1 billion yuan in total. Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf and Boonie Bears, both of which grew popular on television from the 2000s on, did well at the box office too and proved to have huge merchandising potential.

The market turned quickly, though. Monkey King: Hero Is Back in 2015 and Dahufa in 2017 both showed that animated films in China can also find an audience with more grown-up minds. If Wang Wei wants to reach them, the characters he has built so far will look out of place.

Wang Wei had hoped that "making films" would end in a result as respectable as the last one. He holds on stubbornly: "What makes a film work, we really can't say. So you get ready: if the first one doesn't work, there's a second; if the second doesn't work, then a third — and we get a few more chances to try, right?"

Founding Tudou gave him the pleasure of being a "creator." In his youth he spent eight years in the United States and one in France, and took three degrees: international business, computer science and an MBA. In the late 1990s he worked on satellite broadband and satellite television at Hughes, and he was CEO of Bertelsmann Online China.

This is how he describes the feeling he cares about most: "I think you can't get anything real done by repeating what someone else has already succeeded at. The moment one person succeeds, thousands or tens of thousands imitate it, and it becomes very hard to break out."

Back during the marketing and preview screenings for Tea Pets, viewers kept telling Wang Wei that the design of the tea-pet toy made it hard not to think of Pixar's Toy Story. He brought the feedback up with QDaily himself, and said it made him feel "ashamed."

He has a way of explaining it: "We work hard to make something that feels completely new, so why do they still think it looks like something else? What is it that makes them feel that? On one side you're bound to be influenced by the people who came before you, and by extraordinary masters at that. On the other side we want to leave our own mark, and that has to be entirely new. So the two are in conflict."

He does admit one thing: he has not found a style of his own. "I'm still looking. Still in pain over it, to be honest."

Light Chaser will release its third film in mid-2018, again directed and written by Wang Wei, called Cats and Peachtopia (《猫与桃花源》).

After Tea Pets left theaters, Wang Wei started saying something he had never said before: "If the box office keeps looking like this, what happens to Cats?"

"I really am an operator too, and I do think that insisting on original work every time is far too ambitious."

Images: film stills.