China makes a play for the Teen Anime market

One interesting development which has gone somewhat unnoticed during the first half of 2017 was China’s streaming media companies entering the teen animation market. While Chinese companies have for a long time been providing animation services for the Japanese market on the production end of things, China is finally making an effort to turn some of their more popular Young Adult properties into animated series.

One of these is Full-Time Mage (Quanzhi Fashi), which is based on a popular webnovel series and would be best described as “In a world where magic exists alongside technology, a poor teen is given the chance to go an elite magic high school where he tries to improve himself despite barriers of class and status.”

Note: I’ve included two episodes because the first one was done by one subber (who only did the first episode) and the second one (and the rest of the series) by another subbing group. You need to turn on the Closed Captions option to see the English subtitles.

The animation is still a bit rough, as is the storytelling. You can tell this is a cut-down version of long serial story which is just hitting the high points, but that does make it move at a brisk pace. It is very simple, and lacks the storytelling refinement you often see in the better Japanese anime, but the main character is likable, and the Chinese cultural elements bring something new to the mix so I enjoyed it overall. It’s a little bit like Final Fantasy meets Harry Potter.

Another series which got more attention (deservedly, if for nothing except the gorgeous animation) was The King’s Avatar (Quanzhi Gaoshou) which is basically the story of a professional Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game player who loses everything and has to start again from the bottom. It’s not bad, story wise, but if you’re not into MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, I think you might some of it hard to follow. Then again, I’m not a gamer, but still enjoyed reading a manga version you can find kicking around online.

What both of these have in common is that they originate from the Chinese Webnovel world, which has basically turned into the Chinese counterpart of the Japanese manga industry. It produces massive amounts of stories across all genres in the form of serialized online novels that people can read (mostly) for free, and which are written by the users as well. The best of them get promoted, printed, and monetized by the webportals they’re hosted on, and prior to now they would also get turned into comics. Now they have a new goal to aim for- animation!

Of course, just like anime, webnovels have their own tropes and storytelling styles that will work for some and not for others. If you read enough of them on translation sites like Wuxia World and GravityTales you’ll pick up the patterns pretty fast. For example, boys webnovels (and some girls) have a very standard trope where the main character was switched from our world to the body of another person in the story setting. Even Full-Time Mage implies something along those lines in the first episode, but they just gloss over it. It’s a fast way to write a fish out of water story, but the Chinese webnovel writers tend to overuse it.

In any case, check out the above shows if you’re in the mood for something a little different in your animated entertainment. I think they’re the first in a wave of Chinese animation we’re going to be seeing more and more of in the future.

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