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Rhino Entertainment Original

Text｜Xiaofu Editor｜Pu Fang

The summer season market has finally started to heat up.

This year's summer season was a "slump followed by a rise". In the early stage, the market was in a downturn due to the lack of hot projects, and the industry generally lowered market expectations. It was not until the preview of "Catching Dolls" that the summer season returned to the era of more than 300 million yuan per day. However, while live-action movies are hot, domestic animated films in this summer season are still eclipsed.

Affected by the overall market, two original Chinese comics, "Falling into the Mortal World" participated by Alibaba Pictures and "Umbrella Girls" participated by Maoyan, both failed in the market. As of July 17, "Falling into the Mortal World" was released for 6 days and "Umbrella Girls" was released for 12 days, and the cumulative box office was less than 20 million, which is less than a fraction of the current one-day box office of "Catching Dolls".

In fact, the situation of these two films is not an isolated case, but reflects the long-term and common dilemma of non-IP original Chinese animation.

Original Chinese comics are difficult to gain momentum

Looking at the domestic animation film market, most of the high-grossing projects are backed by IP.

Among the top 20 domestic animated films at the box office, there are 7 animated films adapted based on well-known public IPs such as "Nezha", "Jiang Ziya", "Journey to the West" and "The Legend of White Snake", while the domestic family-friendly IP "Boonie Bears" occupies 8 seats alone. "Tea Boy" and "The Legend of Luo Xiaohei" are adapted from popular animated works with a certain basic base.

The remaining three atypical IP animated films, "30,000 Miles from Chang'an", "Deep Sea" and "Big Fish and Begonia", actually also have their own special features.

For example, last year's summer animated hit "Ancient China", although box office expectations were not high in the pre-release stage, but it received wide acclaim for its educational attributes, and the children's competition to recite Tang poems in the cinema helped the film to achieve long-term box office success.

The reason why this film has a chance to make a comeback is, on the one hand, because the content quality is high enough and the audience's enthusiasm for watching the movie is high during the release period; on the other hand, it is because the historical figures such as Li Bai and Gao Shi that the film focuses on are universal enough, especially for the core target audience of students. The images of these textbook characters are familiar enough, which laid the foundation for the film to become popular.

"Deep Sea" and "Big Fish and Begonia", produced by Guangguang, have their own topic basis.

"Deep Sea", which was released during the Spring Festival last year, is the new work of Tian Xiaopeng, the director of "Journey to the West: Hero is Back", who returned after 7 years. Although it is an original IP animation, it still has a considerable audience base thanks to the accumulated publicity over the years of development and the director's own fame.

A similar situation also occurred with Big Fish and Begonia. After the film's creators gained some attention with their short film in the early stage, they launched a crowdfunding campaign online, laying the foundation for the feature film and gaining the first batch of super-sticky audiences. This film not only opened up the possibility of domestic animated films, but also became a miracle of domestic animation that is difficult to replicate now.

In comparison, the best performing non-IP, non-topic original Chinese animation "Young Lion" only ranked 22nd in the overall list with its box office revenue of 249 million yuan - although the film has a Douban score of 8.3.

This shows how difficult it is for non-IP original Chinese cartoons to enter the Chinese animation film market.

This time, the two films "Falling into the Mortal World" and "The Umbrella Girl" once again fell into the "painful cycle" of original Chinese animation.

Strictly speaking, these two films are not completely without IP attributes. For example, "Umbrella Girl" is adapted from a domestic comic, and "Falling into the Mortal World" is a Chinese comic born out of a graduation project and developed and produced for five years before it was put on the big screen. Compared with many big IP Chinese comics, the IP potential of these two films is weak and they really don't have an advantage.

In particular, "Falling into the Mortal Realm", after receiving an opening score of 7.7 on Douban, its score rose again to 7.8 points due to its excellent quality. It is still the most popular domestic new film in this summer.

From the perspective of content, this original work has a novel worldview, a smooth narrative, and gradual emotional advancement. As a movie born out of a student assignment, "Falling into the Mortal World" is already quite complete. However, objectively speaking, as a "young" work, "Falling into the Mortal World" also has some room for improvement in modeling and graphics, and is not a stunning work with impeccable reputation.

Although the film's word-of-mouth ratings did not reach the heights of "The Return of the Great Sage" and "Nezha", the solid word-of-mouth is still driving "Falling into the Mortal Realm" to make a small comeback, and the box office reversed the decline on the first Sunday of its release. The publicity and promotion are also trying their best to seize the advantages of the film and continue to accumulate momentum for the film. Unfortunately, with a limited base, this comeback is still a drop in the bucket.

Publicity and promotion, the "moat" of original Chinese comics

In addition to the content itself, publicity and promotion are actually the key link for many films to reverse their disadvantages, and this also applies to original Chinese animation. Last year's summer blockbuster "Chang'an Miles" gained popularity again with the help of publicity and promotion, achieving a low opening and high closing.

This year's summer season also saw a lot of effort put into the promotion and marketing of these two Chinese animated series, among which "Falling into the Mortal Realm" left a particularly deep impression on us.

Similar to many original Chinese cartoons, the overall promotion and marketing strategy of this film is to expand the audience and broaden the circle.

In the early stages of promotion and marketing, "Falling into the Mortal Realm" focused on deepening audience awareness, laying the groundwork and strengthening the film's temperament through popular science knowledge of the stars and the main characters in the film. It promoted IP linkage as the release date approached, and cooperated with more than 11 popular IPs such as Luo Tianyi, Shanghai Animation Film Studio, and Non-Humans to launch offline activities, joint posters, and free tickets, in an attempt to reach audiences from all walks of life.

The distribution side takes offline as the central stage. On the one hand, it starts pre-screening to accumulate core word-of-mouth; on the other hand, it takes traditional culture as a starting point and holds roadshows and premieres in Guangzhou, Xi'an, Suzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing in combination with the temperament of each city. These roadshows are quite innovative, such as holding activities in the Chang'an Twelve Hours Street in Xi'an, and integrating local garden architecture and intangible cultural heritage Suzhou embroidery skills in Suzhou. Through the activities, it not only radiates various vertical groups, but also creates hot topics.

As the release platform of the short film "Falling into the Mortal World" and one of the producers of this film, Bilibili has also become the focus of attention for this film. Reaching vertical user audiences from vertical platforms, the promotion strategy is precise enough.

On Xiaohongshu, which is known for its large number of active users, many viewers also spontaneously posted long articles to recommend the movie and voiced their disapproval of the film.

In our opinion, both the promotion and marketing actions and the effects are impeccable.

Coincidentally, the film "Umbrella Girls" released at the same time also used traditional Chinese style aesthetics as its main promotional point. In addition to the regular publicity and promotion activities, the premiere was planned as a traditional Chinese style garden party, which was quite innovative.

Although the popularity of the two films could not be sustained due to the limited reputation of the content and the lack of post-production support, overall, both films played a full role in publicity and promotion in their respective fields, received resources from the platform, and received positive feedback from the core audience.

To put it bluntly, everyone tried their best.

When the "rise of Chinese comics" becomes a thing of the past

When content and marketing have played their maximum role but still cannot reverse the sluggish box office, we believe that the greater influencing factor comes from the outside world.

The first is the change in the overall environment.

In the past two years, due to the economic environment, audience entertainment consumption has continued to be weak. The entertainment form of young audiences, who used to be the main audience of moviegoers, has gradually shifted, changing their original viewing habits and raising the entry threshold. At the same time, the viewing demands of family groups are also undergoing subtle changes. In addition to animated films with obvious educational significance such as "Chang'an 30,000 Miles", parents generally prefer early childhood animation products.

The second is the difficulties in the film market.

It is not difficult to find that the tap water effect of domestic animated films has slowed down significantly recently, and the once-talked-about "rise of domestic animation" has basically become a thing of the past. Even Guangguang, which once created "The Return of the Great Sage" and "Nezha: The Devil Child Comes into the World", has now begun to act conservatively. Its original IP animated film "A Chinese Odyssey" has been in preparation for many years, but it still withdrew from the May Day holiday this year due to market reasons.

Especially since this year, the supply of upstream high-quality content has been insufficient, resulting in a slow summer season, and the market has only gradually started to pick up since July. The cold market is undoubtedly more unfavorable to these two original Chinese cartoons.

Finally, there is also the influence of certain schedule circumstances.

As luck would have it, "The Umbrella Girls", which was expected to enjoy a relaxed schedule, encountered a strong concurrent project. Especially "Falling into Earthly Dust", which was in a more passive situation, had a competing product "Despicable Me 4" at the same time, and the next day it encountered a sudden large-scale preview of "Catch the Dolls", which compressed its space.

These various external factors exerted pressure on each other, making it even more difficult for the two original Chinese cartoons, which already lacked an IP foundation, to develop. In the end, they lost the few opportunities they had for a comeback.

Conclusion:

It is difficult to create original Chinese comics, difficult to promote them, and even more difficult to break out of the circle.

Just like "Falling into the Mortal Realm", even though it has played a huge role in maintaining word of mouth and popularity after its release, original Chinese animation still does not have a winning trump card.

But precisely because of the existence of good content, we still have firm confidence in original Chinese comics.

The market is cruel and the road ahead is long, and it requires "Falling into the Mortal World" to slowly explore.