How does the niche secondary yuan become a big business? Tencent Animation has something to say

But people soon discovered that there is still a lot to go to develop the high-quality IP at hand to a level comparable to Japan, South Korea or the United States. In the past year, companies including Tencent and Aofei have begun investment, acquisitions and open cooperation in the animation industry.

How has the animation industry, which is regarded as a "niche" by second-generation people, been enlarged into a big business here in Tencent Animation? It is crucial to have a vision of "pre-entertainment layout": a high-quality comic IP, from comics to film and television dramas to games and surrounding areas, must be planned in advance.

The animation industry is successfully attracting more and more people's attention. In the past year, the annual output value of the entire animation industry has exceeded 100 billion yuan. This long-standing industry, which was once regarded as "unable to produce animation and recruit talents", has suddenly changed its decline. From comic platforms to video websites, from game development to theater movies, they have welcomed a wave of youth.

But people soon discovered that there is still a lot to go to develop the high-quality IP at hand to a level comparable to Japan, South Korea or the United States. In the past year, companies including Tencent and Aofei have begun investment, acquisitions and open cooperation in the animation industry.

Through integration and rapid development, Tencent Animation, which has produced "Under One" and "Fox Demon Little Matchmaker", has become a leader in the industry. But in fact, this situation was unimaginable a few years ago-Tencent Animation, which started as an "internal entrepreneurship", was once very embarrassed, and the editorial department even debated whether to increase the contribution fee of 20 yuan to a comic author.

In the past two years, the development speed of Tencent Animation has been somewhat dazzling. Official data shows that currently, the number of serialized animes on Tencent's animation platform exceeds 22600, the total reading volume of 29 is more than 1 billion, the total playback volume of 12 animations exceeds 100 million, and 610 signed authors. This year, 120 new authors have been added, and the MAU exceeds 90 million... How did the animation industry, which is regarded as a "niche" by all second-generation people, become a big business in Tencent Animation?

On October 20, Tencent Animation held the second "Tencent Animation Industry Cooperation Conference" in Shanghai, including Cheng Wu, Vice President of Tencent Group and CEO of Tencent Pictures, Zou Zhengyu, General Manager of Tencent Animation, Li Xiaoting, Director of Tencent Animation Content Center, etc. A number of senior executives spoke and shared some industry thoughts of Tencent Animation, which was established four years ago.

At the 2015 "Animation Industry Cooperation Conference", Tencent Animation first proposed the slogan of realizing "secondary economy" in the concept of pan-entertainment. Over the past year, Cheng Wu, Zou Zhengyu and others summarized their experience and prospects for this industry and market on several important topics of domestic animation-this is also a microcosm of the development of animation in China since 2015: there are many problems in the secondary industry, but they can all be solved.

1. Get rid of the quality of the five hairs: First improve the animation industry chain and then

due to many factors such as subsidies and institutional monopolies, domestic animation has long been in a vicious cycle of large quantity and poor quality. The loss of animation talents has caused the development of the domestic animation industry chain to be in a state of stagnation. Comic animation requires more mature and stable animation production institutions. However, China's animation industry lacks necessary talents such as cartoonists and painting supervisors, as well as mature companies that can integrate all aspects.

But things began to change positively in 2016: domestic animation giants began to frequently acquire domestic and foreign animation production agencies, and established "production committees" with Japanese and Korean production agencies to learn from their industrialization experience. The large investment of companies like Tencent has caused the figures presented by the Japan Animation Association in the recently released "Japan Animation Report 2016" to tilt towards the China market: Japan's sales in overseas markets increased by 78.7%, a considerable part of which came from a surge in production orders from the mainland of China.

In addition to cooperating with Japanese organizations to produce "Universe Detective", Tencent Animation also announced the launch of "Football Hero" with CCTV Animation. Zou Zhengyu, general manager of Tencent's mutual entertainment animation business department, said: "By cooperating with domestic and foreign animation production organizations to jointly produce, you can gain more valuable experience."

2. To make a profit, Guomi IP should focus on the development of "pan-entertainment" perspective.

"Guomi cannot make profits solely by animation." Zou Zhengyu believes that "we still rely on games and animation, film and television." But the reality is that the development of a considerable part of the national manga IP has ended in the online animation stage. There are few manga dramas like "Painting the Bad People of the Jianghu", and the box office profit of "The Return of the Great Sage" is also the only one in the industry.

In clear contrast, the development of comics IP in Japan, South Korea, Europe and the United States began a series of plans at the beginning of the birth of comics IP, the so-called "pre-pan-entertainment layout", transforming a high-quality comics IP from comics to film and television dramas to games and surrounding areas, planning in advance-what most domestic animation development organizations lack is this long-term vision.

For this reason, Cheng Wu proposed that in the secondary economic model, good star IP should = high-quality animation content + mass creation platform + pan-entertainment symbiosis. "Content, mass creation, and pan-entertainment development are progressive layer by layer, hoping to connect with each other and add value."

Taking anime derivatives as an example, a report from CBNData shows that the highest sales amount of anime derivatives in Japan and the United States was won by "hand-made" products, while the highest sales derivative in China is "stationery"-this is precisely the category with the lowest sales of Japanese and American comics.

The best IP development in China is mobile games. The domestic "roaming linkage" was born earlier than the "movie and drama tourism linkage". The Tuzki image, which originated from QQ emoji, is copyrighted to TurnOut Ventures, a subsidiary of Time Warner, which started licensing development for domestic mobile game companies as early as 2013.

Today, the gamification industry chain of national manga has rapidly matured, and almost every national manga will consider the same mobile game at the beginning of its animation. One of Tencent Animation's advantages is that it can cooperate with the mobile game department, which belongs to Tencent Entertainment, around animation IP. Its "Gun Girl" was favored by the popular game "Crossing the Fire Line", which belongs to Tencent Mutual Entertainment. The two sides also announced IP cooperation this time.

In addition, Zou Zhengyu also announced game development plans for anime such as "Mr Surprise of China","Once upon a time there was a Spirit Sword Mountain", and "Silver Tomb Keeper". It is worth noting that the development of the latter IP has adopted an open cooperative attitude, and Tencent Animation has licensed these animes to development institutions such as Huogu, Jiuyou, and Caesar.

In addition, cultural derivatives such as house dance, COS, and music have also entered the horizons of national manga developers. More and more secondary bands and even offline symphony orchestras that mainly play ACG songs have appeared one after another. For national manga, it may not be a good sign.

3. Is foreign for use? Is the Chinese system used in the Western system? Localization and internationalization can be achieved

at the same time. Whether it is the development model of national cartoon or the painting style, the national cartoon circle has been debating these topics endlessly. If you cooperate with Japanese animation production organizations, you will be regarded by some as "going abroad to gilt and come back to deceive people"; if the style of painting is similar to Japanese manga, you will be criticized by others as "having no national manga characteristics." In these wars of words, embarrassment is the domestic IP development and animation production organizations.

But the data does not lie. The "China Original Animation Big Data Report" released by CBNData shows that in 2015, 82.2% of second-class homesteads still liked to watch Japanese comics and Japanese animations.

From this perspective, over the past year, Tencent Animation's investment and even cooperation with Japanese and Korean production organizations have been the right choice in line with the trend: After cooperating with the South Korean team on "Fox Demon Little Matchmaker", Tencent Animation recently announced that it will establish a production committee with Japanese production agency Saieisha to launch the animation "Universe Detective".

"Localization and internationalization are not contradictory." Cheng Wu said in his speech,"What is national is the world's. We have hope to combine local and international animation."

Now, how far are we from the beautiful new world of the "secondary economy"?

China's animation is undergoing major changes from the inside out: on the one hand, comic masters are worshipped by more and more people, giving birth to new secondary idols; on the other hand, the entry of capital has also caused the entire industry to undergo drastic changes. "The number of vertical animation media in China is increasing, and there are more good works. People's awareness and attitude towards the animation industry have undergone great changes, and the capital level is also paying more and more attention to the animation field." Zou Zhengyu believes,"I believe that the entire industry will change faster in the next few years."

In a speech at the cooperation conference on the 20th, Cheng Wu, vice president of Tencent and CEO of Tencent Pictures, said optimistically: "Guomao is on the eve of its rise." So, how far are we from the truly rising "Beautiful New World"? Zou Zhengyu is even optimistic that this time may not be more than 5-10 years-the basis for this optimism is: the secondary economy.

At the first Tencent Animation Industry Cooperation Conference in 2015, Tencent Animation proposed the concept of "secondary economy". It tried to cultivate newcomers and excellent IP through the model of "CP cooperation for content co-creation, joint promotion of brand IP, and entry into the community to accumulate fans"., improve the layout of the industrial chain by "infiltrating offline animation product production and fan services" and create "multi-layer symbiotic value-added IP". However, today, as the industry has undergone tremendous changes, some senior animation industry people who have been in the industry for a long time seem to disagree with this.

A considerable number of people in the second yuan circle are unwilling to face the new trend of industrialization and commercialization. They have also claimed more than once that the second yuan is a niche economy and its weight in the entire national economic system is not worth mentioning. Practitioners who "clean","emotionalize" and "private territory" the second element have become obstacles to the historical trend. This is something the Internet needs to face, persuade or even surpass to subvert and reshape the second element business model. problem.

Editor: yvonne