This article is reproduced with permission from "Donghua Xueshu Pa"

Author / Mei Guiyuan

Editor / Pel

With three-quarters of 2025 behind us, the heat around animated short dramas continues to break expectations.

In the past few months, I've seen more and more "good news" from the animated short drama industry on my social feeds and circle of friends. Some come from production teams, others from platform operators: total views across platforms easily exceeding 100 million, paying user revenue multiplying more than tenfold in half a year, and major new and old platforms continuously increasing incentives and support…

Even more striking, I've seen the prediction that "the comic-drama market size will surpass 20 billion RMB this year" — a figure that is nearly half of China's total annual box office revenue.

Looking around, the buzz around animated short dramas feels real: tired commuters watching on the subway, the husband-and-wife duo at the local restaurant killing time, and even some elementary and middle school students I know are watching them.

Animated short dramas, once again in the spotlight, are nothing new — but why has 2025 brought them such a tidal wave of traffic?

In my view, today's popular animated short dramas can be broadly divided into two categories: dynamic comics and silly-style animations.

Dynamic comics are not unique to China. Their production method involves a limited animation treatment of comic panels paired with sound effects. Their advantage lies in retaining the original comic style while providing an audiovisual experience at a relatively low cost. As early as around the 2010s, companies like Marvel Comics in the U.S. began using this format to extend the commercial value of comics.

The dilemma of dynamic comics is that: compared to comics, their pacing feels more sluggish; compared to true animation, they appear stiff and lack impact. As a downstream product of the comic industry, they have never been able to stand alongside real animation, stuck in an awkward position of "high floor, low ceiling."

Ten years ago, China's comic industry saw a wave of investment, and China's dynamic comic industry set sail along with it. Adaptations of works like Xia Da's Changgexing and Shituzi's Dawang Bu Gaoxing were representative works of this period.

But as original comics declined overall, dynamic comics, along with the comic industry, became downstream of the online literature industry, tasked with visualizing web novel IPs. During the expansion phase of video platforms, dynamic comics, thanks to their efficiency and low cost, though still in an awkward position, largely satisfied platforms' need for animation content.

In other words, before the short drama explosion, China already had a sizable dynamic comic industry. But at the time, neither the original comic industry nor the web novel industry regarded dynamic comics as the "final destination" for adaptations. Even in the early days of short-video platforms, platforms preferred to showcase explorations and investments like "live-action short dramas adapted from manhua" (officially called "live-action vertical-screen dramas adapted from manhua").

Now, with the short drama market heating up and users' fragmented viewing habits becoming ingrained, the monthly active users of short dramas on many short-video platforms have each exceeded 100 million. Amid increasingly fierce competition in short dramas and an unprecedented hunger for content — dynamic comics have turned the tables, becoming a rare growth area in the animation industry.

When "dynamic comics" are rebranded as "animated short dramas," their production method may not change fundamentally, but in the media ecosystem, they gradually decouple from "comics," no longer serving to funnel traffic to the original manhua, but instead becoming an independent market.

More critically, the introduction of generative AI has further transformed the production logic of dynamic comics.

Text-to-image and text-to-video technologies have significantly reduced costs and improved efficiency, bringing dynamic comics visually closer to real animation. Although AI still has shortcomings in controllability and consistency, these flaws are not fatal for dynamic comics, which originally had limited motion. Service providers like "Jurilu AI" have even emerged, offering complete sets of production tools. Cloaked in the guise of "animated short dramas," such "dynamic comics" can achieve about 60–70% of the completeness and impact of traditional 2D animation, and they can even skip the comic step entirely, adapting directly from web novels or original scripts.

And if dynamic comics still lean aesthetically toward "Japanese-style anime," the other major category of animated short dramas — silly-style animations — represents a native Chinese aesthetic and industry structure that has grown spontaneously.

Silly-style animations, also known as "panda-head short dramas," "shrimp-man short dramas," or "emoji animations," derive their visual style from the panda-head memes of Rage Comics. Early works often adapted historical time-travel web novels, where the protagonist travels back to chaotic eras like the Warring States, Three Kingdoms, or late Ming Dynasty to rewrite history. Today, their subject matter has expanded to doomsday/island survival, suspense and horror, Xianxia and primal chaos, period dramas/office dramas… even including IP fan works like Naruto and Douluo Continent. Their source stories mainly come from the vast library of free web novels on emerging platforms like Tomato and Qimao.

From a technical perspective, silly-style animations are a type of "cut-out animation," related to Flash, and their mainstream production tools include Flash's successor, Adobe Animate. The production method is extremely economical: AI dubbing, cut-out assets, simple lip-sync and expression swaps, and a handful of keyframe motion tweens with almost negligible cinematography.

A group of individual animators represented by "Xiamen Fan" have been active on various video platforms for four or five years already. But unlike the "Flash artists" of the Flash era, their works do not emphasize an independent authorial voice; instead, they focus on the appeal of grassroots storytelling based on the original web novels.

Most of them precisely tap into people's desire for a miraculous turn that changes personal destiny or even history, blending absurd, tight plots with trendy memes, and telling stories in a plain, direct manner similar to film recaps. Although the characters are not conventionally handsome or beautiful, the heavy use of jokes and breaking the fourth wall actually makes the audience feel more familiar.

Perhaps it can be said that, unlike dynamic comics which are more of a B2B business, silly-style animations first emerged from a spontaneous UGC ecosystem. Revenue initially came from ad placements, platform incentives, paid apprenticeships, and resource pack sharing. Many creators also explored the production techniques of silly-style animations on their own, trying to enhance special effects, improve shot quality, and increase character recognition.

Animated short dramas have activated previously marginal areas of the animation industry.

However, this ecosystem is also extremely fragile. Since last year, many creators have reported shrinking incomes, and controversies such as "training course scams" have emerged. In the "gig-ization" environment of animation production, individual animators find it difficult to secure long-term stable development paths. What's more, the booming short drama market, coupled with severe employment pressure and economic conditions, has led more unemployed/freelance animators, dynamic comic studios, and even traditional animation studios to flood in chasing growth, making the market increasingly cutthroat.

## 02## Facing our hidden desires head-on

When discussing the popularity of animated short dramas, we often equate it with the rise of short videos. But such attribution is too crude. The characteristics of short videos are not just "short," nor can they be summarized by a few phrases like "fragmented" and "fast-paced."

Quite counterintuitively, at least in my experience of watching many animated short dramas, the experience is actually relaxed and unhurried.

Unlike the live-action short dramas that exploded on mini-program platforms a few years ago, animated short dramas do not entirely rely on extreme twists and dense gratification points. Even when the protagonist has a golden finger system, a lot of screen time is spent showing how they grope their way through the world, grow, pursue goals, and realize self-worth. In terms of plot progression speed, it's certainly not slow-burn, but the content is quite rich and winding.

The core advantage of animated short dramas may lie in their extreme 'dewatering' treatment of web novels and traditional animation.

The "water" here can refer to the redundant prose and poor writing in the original web novel (so third- or fourth-tier web novels with mediocre quality but novel ideas also get a chance at adaptation); it also includes the multi-perspective setup, environmental depiction, and exposition in traditional animation adaptations, as well as the "preachy tone," "literary pretentiousness," and "meaningless show-off of skills" that some readers have long criticized.

At the same time, whether dynamic comics or silly-style animations, their relatively minimalist forms dissolve the 'formality' of the content.

The lower expectations viewers have for animated short dramas actually allow them to enjoy the fun without "burden." Relying on voice-over narration, it feels more like a revival of storytelling stand-up comedy than traditional film/TV narrative. Viewers don't need to fret too much about whether the logic is rigorous or the characters' motivations one-dimensional; "grasping the big and letting go of the small" avoids the frustration of poor animation pacing. In some cases, a 'tragedy' has occurred where the animated short drama adaptation of a web novel IP surpassed the popularity of the long-form animated series on major video platforms.

Have short animations impacted long animations? This question is debatable. But there is no denying that animated short dramas have activated animation demands long ignored. The conditions for the maturation of the animated short drama industry are diverse: practitioners of dynamic comics and traditional animation provided the "skin," the accumulation of web literature forged the "bones," and the mature content consumption habits of short video users filled in the "flesh."

To summarize, we can compare animated short dramas with other forms of animation and live-action short dramas to better understand their unique niche:

Compared to social-media-oriented animated IP short video content like "Yi Chan Xiao Heshang," "Nailong," or "Wo Shi Bu Bai Chi," animated short dramas emphasize coherent narrative.

Compared to streaming animated movies/series, animated short dramas are more genre-driven in storytelling, with uneven quality, faster update cycles, lower costs, massive output, and direct payment models.

Compared to live-action short dramas, animated short dramas have natural advantages in fantasy themes, effortlessly depicting superpowers, Xianxia, and other content that is difficult for live-action to handle.

But it is worth noting that the mainstream aesthetic of the animated short drama market leans more toward male-oriented tastes. In ByteDance's public sharing, it was pointed out that animated short drama users are significantly different from live-action short drama users: a large number of users are men under 30, and the audience in first- and second-tier cities is larger than in lower-tier markets.

At least in my viewing experience, although a few female-oriented animated short dramas made with game editors/3D engines are on the rise (such as some works under the account "Nishuihan Yinghua"), female-oriented content in animated short dramas is still far from the level of prosperity seen in live-action short dramas.

## 03## Animated short dramas, an infinite game

On the content upstream, whether dynamic comic dramas or silly-style animations, the stories of animated short dramas heavily rely on web literature and its twin scripts. The rise of free novel platforms in recent years has provided an almost inexhaustible content library for short dramas.

In the production phase, AI is expected to comprehensively intervene in scriptwriting, production, dubbing, and other processes. Well-known teams like "Jiangyou Dongman" have even developed their own highly recognizable AI-to-painting style, with several of their short dramas surpassing 100 million views.

But as many netizens can imagine, the limitations of animated short dramas at this stage are also obvious. Content style is monotonous, character development is flat, and formulas are heavily relied upon; so-called "schemes" and "twists" often depend on tangible or intangible systems, easily falling into homogenization. Lack of strict classification and regulation makes them a hotbed for vulgar and sensational content, posing serious challenges to platform governance.

On the distribution side, compared to traditional animation's weekly updates, many animated short dramas have already escalated to "publish all 100+ episodes at once on completion." Monetization methods include membership payments, episode-by-episode unlocking, and platform purchases, and they heavily rely on short-video traffic promotion. At the same time, piracy of animated short dramas is rampant, with collections and secondary recaps forming an industry chain. Moreover, characters generally have low recognition, making the lifecycle of works and the value of IP images highly questionable.

From this perspective, it can even be said that the rise of animated short dramas has, to some extent, "deconstructed" the original systems and strategies of the traditional animation field.

Traditional animation production has long been under the pressure of "high cost, high threshold, long cycles," with resources concentrated in the mid-production stage. Animated short dramas, on the contrary, emphasize reducing costs and increasing efficiency in mid-production, correspondingly requiring stronger planning and promotion capabilities, faster pace, and more precise targeting. Traffic attracts wealth, wealth enhances power, power captures traffic — the new world of animation follows this path.