Recently, AI Office has become a hot topic. Making reports, creating PPTs, organizing data, generating weekly summaries... the tedious daily tasks of corporate drones finally seem to have a solution.

However, at first glance, these office functions seem to have nothing to do with animation creation?

AI office software cannot come up with ideas for creators, cannot design storyboards, cannot painlessly improve color sense, and certainly cannot remotely control a digital pen to automatically draw what the user has in mind.

But besides their core creative work, professional creators often have to handle various administrative tasks as well.

Collecting materials before creation, coordinating schedules with clients, archiving materials for long-term projects, delivery processes after creation, format adjustments, post-mortem summaries...

It is precisely these often-overlooked non-creative tasks that most easily distract creators and drag down efficiency.

Every creator hopes for a personal assistant to help them handle the administrative work outside of creation.

This expectation can be realized with the newly launched Doubao Work.

Compared to everyday conversation, Doubao Work can not only answer questions, but also understand work goals, autonomously break down tasks, and call upon local computer, documents, spreadsheets, web pages and other tools to continuously execute and complete tasks, upgrading from "answering questions" to "professional office work."

After an in-depth trial, Donghua Xueshu Pa believes that this AI, which does not create, can indeed become a close steward for creators, providing the assistance creators most need.

01 Creation Preparation: Encyclopedia + Universal Tool​

The assistance provided by Doubao Work can be divided into two categories: Creation Preparation and Creation Publication.

In their work, professional creators often need to face fields they previously knew nothing about.

Although ideally, in-depth study before creation would be best, projects usually do not allow such ample time. Creators need to establish a 0-to-1 understanding of a completely new domain in a short time.

"Gather information → Filter information → Process information → Extract information" — these routine steps of preparing for a new work, while tedious for humans, are exactly what Doubao Work excels at.

It can not only extract key information from various websites and books, but also list information sources for easy manual verification, avoiding the dangerous AI hallucinations when searching for references.

During the search, you can call upon the Side Workbench, operating the browser while chatting with Doubao to avoid frequent switching that breaks your train of thought; you can also monitor Doubao's operation path in real time, adding questions and adjusting direction at any time.

Once the material is ready, give a new instruction to Doubao, and the collected material can be directly converted into a specified format, downloadable file within the workbench, saving the trouble of copy-pasting and secondary saving. The generated file is not just "for show" but a universal document that can be edited and modified block by block.

Some multimedia materials — such as audio and video, which take too long to watch by oneself, can be handed over to Doubao Work to summarize key points. After a quick overview, you can ask follow-up questions about interesting segments and establish connections with other documents in the work project.

When facing some highly difficult professional literature — such as scanned ancient books or foreign-language documents, Doubao can perform accurate OCR and also provide collation references from different versions, making it easier to find materials for creation.

Of course, knowledge is constantly updated, and creators need continuous input. But faced with massive amounts of information, manually searching and organizing every day not only wastes time but also makes it difficult to see everything at once and pick out the key points.

At this point you can set up scheduled tasks to regularly and directionally gather information and generate news reports in a fixed format.

For example, creating an animation related to the perfume industry, with a protagonist who is an industry professional while the creator is a total outsider. To highlight the protagonist's professionalism, you not only need to use the above functions to understand the basics of the perfume industry, but also need to continuously supplement the latest industry developments.

First, find the scheduled task in Doubao's sidebar, then set the task topic, specific requirements, push time, etc. in detail. After that, just open your computer and wait for the daily automatic push of news.

Another common scenario: I have already prepared plenty of materials, but I don't have time to read them.

Massive piles of e-books and reference images gather dust in the hard drive; various tutorials are "bookmarked as learned." When you actually need them, you don't know where to start.

Doubao Work can read local documents, enabling speed reading, comparison, extraction, and summarization, truly putting long-idle materials to use.

For project-specific materials, users can organize them into a folder locally, then upload to Doubao Work to generate a corresponding project folder; or directly create a new project in the Doubao Work interface, gathering all materials and conversations under that theme for easy future follow-up and reference.

As creative resumes and project experience accumulate, many insights, knowledge, and experiences become a creator's valuable asset. Condensing these accumulations into a skill that matches one's work habits can make personal experience visible, tangible, and traceable.

It not only makes replicable daily workflow tasks easier but also helps users self-examine, self-insight, summarize their creative style and strengths from past experience, and design improvement methods for future goals and current shortcomings.

Yecao (Liu Shuliang), the founder of Donghua Xueshu Pa, recently came up with a brainwave and tried "creating a personalized skill unique to oneself."

The point is not just to let AI understand the knowledge in texts, but more importantly, to let it learn one's own way of thinking, academic stance, and even speaking habits. The goal of creating this skill is to discuss academic issues in the ACG field with AI, even to argue with oneself, thereby inspiring more ideas.

He fed his own books, papers, and column articles to Doubao to read, and repeatedly debugged during use, finally obtaining a phased skill product. This skill can not only help him organize his academic thoughts, but also provide a preliminary academic guide for animation students.

02 Creation Publication: Leave the Post-Drawing Matters to It​

After struggling to complete a work, the publication stage finally arrives.

But the data may be disappointing, making one fall into self-doubt and data anxiety.

Many creators don't know how to, and are ashamed of, promoting themselves to the outside world, firmly believing that "good wine needs no bush" — that as long as they bury themselves in creation, they will be discovered one day.

But in the era of information explosion, getting good works in front of an audience is not easy. Therefore, promoting and showcasing oneself generously, and learning some communication skills, is both a practical consideration and a responsibility to one's own work.

Through Doubao Work's Connector feature, creators can more smoothly interface with the outside world. Whether it's task division with collaborators or communication with clients, Doubao can directly search for information and process tasks within commonly used tools; and through Work Partners and Work Squads, users can select one or multiple Agents of different professional directions based on actual needs to collaboratively analyze problems, break down steps, and complete deliveries.

Settling a complete set of working SOPs and handing them to Doubao Work to complete automatically can save creators a lot of mental effort.

And the combination of Skill and Virtual Desktop offers more practical possibilities.

Under "Work Task" mode, Doubao can operate Windows computers through the new "Doubao Virtual Desktop," and of course can also execute various skills to complete complex tasks. Sometimes a deadline is imminent, and you wish one device could do the work of two. Doubao Virtual Desktop can automatically process files that require complex processing according to user instructions, saving users' time.

For example, a foreign-language video urgently needs subtitles. If you follow the traditional method of extracting, proofreading, creating subtitles, and then adding them to the video for export, it may be too late.

At this point, you can select "Operate Computer" from the skill panel, upload the video, and instruct Doubao to operate CapCut to automatically recognize and translate subtitles, finally obtaining a finished video with subtitles.

Doubao Virtual Desktop can operate applications, browse the web, and complete cross-software tasks in an environment that does not interfere with the user; it will not take over the mouse, keyboard, or interrupt current work. Through the virtual desktop, users can view Doubao's operation process in real time, and pause or take over tasks at any time when needed, just as if there's an extra self operating another device.

In addition, Doubao Work can also implement some seemingly trivial but very practical small functions, such as adding watermarks to works with one click, converting document, image, audio/video formats, changing output resolution... it can be called a comprehensive collection of technical mini-tools. Combining various skills can evolve more practical functions, allowing creators to achieve twice the results with half the effort.

Creation is a career that requires long-term dedication. On this long path of cultivation, every minute of time and mental effort is precious.

Today's era is developing rapidly, with technology and industries changing quickly. But the core competitive edge of creators — creativity — will not fade with the changing times.

There is no shortcut to accumulating creative ability. The times require creators to update their skills faster and adapt to new ways of creation, which undoubtedly adds anxiety, but there is a solution —

Convenient new tools can help creators reallocate time and energy, take on more repetitive and tedious tasks, allowing creators to devote their limited mental energy to the parts that truly need creativity; they can also help creators review the past, summarize experience, and examine themselves, precipitating core competitiveness that is not shaken by the times, achieving personal long-term development.

Doubao Work will not overstep its role; it is like the "auto-battle" mode in games, executing specific instructions given by the user, freeing up the creator's hands, and returning the core creative part of deploying strategies to humans.

The times are changing, technology is advancing, and creative modes are evolving, but humanity's pursuit of better art and more convenient ways of production and living will never stop.

"By the late 2020s, flexible electrodes began taking over nerve endings. Humanity rewrote its neurons, allowing the brain to read the language of circuits — they called it the Cognitive Revolution. From then on, the distance between old and new humans was like the difference between knowing how to use fire and not."

This is the opening vision of a future world from the anime Saibo Yingxiong Zhuan.

On August 15, a video titled "A 60-Year-Old Man Hand-Crafts an AI Anime: Saibo Yingxiong Zhuan" began spreading through the anime community. A cyberpunk future worldview, a boy's survival and struggle atop a wasteland... This 24-minute anime "pilot episode" quickly sparked heated discussion. After going online, the topic climbed to No. 5 on Douyin's overall trending list and No. 3 on Bilibili's hot search, with views across the internet surpassing 10 million.

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AI film label 'Jimeng Studio' launches — do animators' 30 years of 'old craftsmanship' now matter more?

,AI film label 'Jimeng Studio' launches — do animators' 30 years of 'old craftsmanship' now matter more?

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And its creator is indeed a gray-haired elderly man.

However, setting aside the gimmicky labels of "60-year-old animator" and "AI-made," what truly deserves attention is still the quality of the work's imagery itself.

Whether it's the cinematography and shot composition, the editing rhythm of the dialogue, the continuity of character blocking and spatial relationships, or the presentation of cybernetic mechanical details, Saibo Yingxiong Zhuan displays a level of polish that surpasses that of ordinary AI creators.

Behind it is a 30-year animation veteran, Zhao Bin, together with his animation studio Yihua Kaitian and the technology of the Jimeng AI platform, in a joint creative exploration.

01 30 Years of Experience, 4 Months of Experimentation, a 24-Minute Work​

Zhao Bin entered the industry in the 1980s, taking part back then in the outsourced production of a large number of overseas animation orders, and later worked on art, storyboarding, and more for many domestic animations. He contributed storyboarding work to the first season of Ling Cage: Incarnation, a landmark Chinese sci-fi anime.

In other words, Zhao Bin carried decades of accumulated creative experience into the AI era.

In the early stages of the project, he still used the traditional animation workflow he knew best: first completing characters, settings, and storyboard drafts by hand, then learning to use AI video tools, hoping to make the images that had only existed in design drafts truly "come alive."

Zhao Bin says the process involved plenty of pitfalls, including more than a few moments that made his "blood pressure spike." One of the biggest challenges was accurately "translating" his years of animation experience into instructions the AI could understand:

How characters move, how the camera travels, how shots connect — everything had to be broken down into sufficiently specific prompts, sometimes even specifying the content of a shot second by second. Only after round after round of generating, revising, and retrying did he gradually work out a smoother creative method.

As the project progressed, Zhao Bin brought in some younger creators more familiar with AI tools to form a small team. In early August, Zhao Bin completed the first version of the pilot; around the same time, his studio Yihua Kaitian noticed this personal endeavor and decided to provide resource support in the mid-to-late stages of the project. Meanwhile, the team kept polishing the work using Jimeng AI's latest video generation model, Seedance 2.5.

From first exploring AI to completing the first version of the pilot took about 4 months; from pilot to final cut took about 20 days.

The prevailing narrative about AI creators today loves to emphasize "teenagers gaining industry attention" and "young people mastering new tools overnight," as if the younger generation easily outstrips their predecessors; and as model capabilities keep improving and the user experience keeps getting better, what people often hear is how AI keeps "lowering the barrier to creation."

But the case of Saibo Yingxiong Zhuan may present an "anti-age-anxiety / anti-replacement-anxiety" side — the fact that this work exists at all, and that many viewers consider it close to the polish of a commercial series, owes everything to this "sixty-something old man's" 30-plus years of animation experience, as well as the production support of Yihua Kaitian as a professional animation team.

AI can certainly already generate polished visuals and shots, but what truly determines the caliber of a work is still often the aesthetic sense and judgment honed by time and experience. Especially when the creative goal shifts from a concept short to a complete work, mastery of character design, camera direction, and narrative pacing remains where traditional film and animation experience proves most valuable.

As AI grows more powerful, the professionalism of creation itself has not been diluted. On the contrary, as creation moves from early-stage conceptual, short, and fragmented experiments toward longer-form content with more complex narratives and higher polish, AI filmmaking is increasingly "falling back" into the comfort zone of seasoned animators and animation teams.

02 Jimeng Studio, a Content Label​

Animation has always been a form of image-making "from nothing." First you build characters and worlds that don't exist in your mind, then, through design, art, storyboards, layout, animation, and editing, they are turned step by step into watchable images.

But traditional animation professionals and teams have long faced a constraint of "grinding away at production" while being "powerless to create." Pre-production demands extensive磨合, trial and error, and iteration; mid-to-late production requires considerable manpower and time; and even after finishing a demo and pilot, actually bringing it to market means confronting new problems of distribution, promotion, and commercialization.

This is precisely the pain point that Jimeng AI's recently launched 'Jimeng Studio' aims to solve.

Unlike simply offering an AI video generation tool, Jimeng Studio positions itself as a label for professional film and TV content, focusing on films and series, seeking AI video projects with further development potential in story, visuals, and expression, and extending its support to both production and distribution.

Seedance 2.5, launched earlier, had already gone through a round of iteration around video generation quality, long-take control, and professional creative capability.

For projects accepted into Jimeng Studio, Jimeng will further provide computing power, production credits, model access, technical testing, technical guidance, and other support, giving creators more room to iterate.

In September this year, the web version of Jimeng AI will also be upgraded further. According to reports, the new version will strengthen canvas capabilities, bringing the product closer to a real professional film and TV production pipeline and allowing traditional workflows like storyboarding, layout, and mood boards to plug into AI creation more smoothly.

Beyond production support, for selected projects Jimeng Studio will also help connect with theatrical, streaming, and short-video platform distribution, and explore revenue models such as box-office revenue sharing, joint distribution, and guaranteed minimum splits. At the same time, it offers industry resources like brand sponsorship, IP derivatives, cross-media collaborations, film festival submissions, marketing promotion, and offline premieres.

At this point, what AI filmmaking truly lacks is not just stronger models, but a complete pathway from idea to pilot to finished work, and on to distribution and commercialization.

Jimeng AI hopes to offer a more flexible creative path outside the existing film and TV production system, letting professional creators' accumulated experience land, in new ways, as complete works and commercial case studies, rather than crudely seeking to "replace" the traditional animation industry.

As Yihua Kaitian, the studio behind Saibo Yingxiong Zhuan, revealed, the company currently leans toward "walking on two legs": on one side, relying on its mature animation industry system to keep producing traditional premium content; on the other, exploring new content production models with smaller teams and faster iteration, leveraging platforms like Jimeng AI.

03 Conclusion​

Currently, Jimeng Studio has fully opened project submissions as of August 26; creators can apply through Jimeng AI's official channels to participate.

This call for submissions is broad in scope: it includes animation teams with mature production experience and industry resources, as well as professional creators such as directors, screenwriters, and artists, and individual creators already familiar with AI tools who possess a unique voice. No restrictions on subject matter or style.

So far, first-batch partners including Shanghai Animation Film Studio, the Chen Liaoyu Studio, Huanyu Entertainment, and Wanzhonghexing Film & TV have already begun exploring with Jimeng Studio. Jimeng Studio has also teamed up with Tomato Film & TV to launch the "Tomato Novel IP Special Support Program," further experimenting with combining AI and mature IP development.

For projects at different stages with different production needs, Jimeng Studio has also established a tiered collaboration mechanism to match varying levels of resource support.

Meanwhile, creators accepted into the "Jimeng AI Growth Program" also receive benefits such as priority project evaluation and 1-on-1 support from the operations team; if a project is further accepted into Jimeng Studio, there is a chance to receive additional support such as direct access to Jimeng Super Creators and Super Membership. For quality original AI shorts that have already been published, free credits, DOU+ resources, and cash rewards will be provided based on the work's reach.

From professional animation creators and teams like Zhao Bin and Yihua Kaitian stepping in, to more film and TV institutions, IP holders, and emerging creators joining one after another, the AI filmmaking ecosystem is growing ever richer; Jimeng Studio, through computing power, technical services, and promotion, supports the full-pipeline development of films, series, and promising IPs.

Whether you're an "old friend" who has worked in animation for many years, or a new-generation creator who has just found their own creative language — what Jimeng Studio ultimately hopes to find are stories that someone wants to tell, and that someone wants to watch.

Only when these stories truly enter the market, receive audience feedback, and generate sustainable returns can "AI + IP" go from scattered creative experiments to a genuinely viable commercial path.

---

"AI creation is moving from the 'content generation' stage into the 'content control' stage."

In the dead of night, a monster named Jiaben Ni rampages through a village, burning, killing, and plundering, and a little girl left alone is in mortal danger.

Suddenly, a figure in red descends from the sky and clashes fiercely with the monster. He summons a paper-cut barrier, wiping out the monster horde in an instant.

However, as more and larger monsters close in, the red-clad figure falls into a desperate struggle. To protect the girl, he takes the monsters' bombardment with his own flesh and blood……

The above scenes come from the recently viral AI animation Baijiang: Zhiqiling.

Built on 小云雀, the work achieves complex scene staging, multi-angle camera work, and subtle character facial expressions, with details maxed out. As of now, Baijiang: Zhiqiling has racked up over 50 million views, 2 million likes, and 1 million shares with just a single episode.

This has made many people realize for the first time: the development of AI animation has gradually shifted from pursuing efficiency and realism to competing on "creativity, content, and professionalism."

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小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

,小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

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As tools improve and content production becomes ever easier, what determines a work's quality has shifted from concrete commands and prompts to a deeper level of shot awareness and storytelling ability.

AI generation and traditional animation workflows operate on different principles. Their randomness and haphazardness often make it hard to translate a user's vision one hundred percent into visible results—even abundant professional knowledge can go to waste.

But there is no chance in animation production. Unlike live-action film and television, which occasionally enjoy happy accidents like "a chicken wandering into a big city," every detail in animation—every strand of hair stirring, every blink—is the deliberate design of an animator.

To achieve the desired effect in AI, creators have no choice but to roll the dice over and over, wasting time and money, running directly counter to the original intent of boosting productivity and controlling costs. This has long been a pain point of AI production. As a result, there always seemed to be a "wall" between AI and traditional animation workflows.

On July 31, 小云雀Seedance2.5 officially launched.

Single-shot direct output was raised from a maximum of 15 seconds to 30 seconds, long-take control was greatly enhanced, image quality is clearer and footage more stable, and it now supports free switching between multiple styles—a fully upgraded AI video creation experience.

Even more noteworthy, it targets the "controllability" problem that has long plagued creators, launching brand-new features such as the 3D Director's Desk, green screen editing, and clip re-shooting, improving the AI animation workflow at a fundamental level, moving image generation from random to controllable and professional.

This also means that the "wall" between AI animation and traditional animation workflows is gradually being broken down.

01 In the era of individual creation, what kind of tools do we need?​

Normally, before an animation creator puts down the first stroke, they have already conceived the shots and frames in their mind: where the character stands, whether the camera uses a medium shot, close-up, or extreme close-up, how many seconds before cutting to the next storyboard panel, how much distance to keep when two characters interact……

Yet these most fundamental elements of animation creation—"performance design" and "cinematic language"—were precisely what AI found hardest to understand in the past.

The image is already in your head, but all you can do is rely on random rolls of the dice and luck. Not only can quality not be guaranteed, but precious energy that should go into creation is wasted on battling the AI.

This time, Xiaoyunque's updated 3D导演台 offers multiple solutions to this problem. Its significance lies not in fully replicating the 3D pipeline, but in bringing the cinematic language and spatial thinking creators are familiar with into AI creation, giving more ideas a path to realization.

Take the "short drama agent" as an example.

Entering the Director's Desk, character models are pre-installed, and you can set parameters such as position, angle, pose, and size for the models.

The asset library offers rich presets that can be adopted directly, or manually fine-tuned.

For multi-character scenes, you can add multiple models and arrange their positions and interaction movements—essentially letting your "virtual actors" rehearse their blocking. Creators can finally place characters precisely; they will never again be "right in front of you one moment, gone the next."

Beyond characters, there are asset presets for crowds, animals, furniture, plants, and more, making it easy to quickly generate rich scenarios.

After arranging the models, adjust the camera to a suitable angle, take a screenshot, and send it to the canvas, where it can be used directly as reference material and continue being edited in the infinite canvas—no need to switch back and forth between programs.

Whether 3D or 2D animation, storyboarding and layout are crucial. Very often, when animation lacks a "cinematic feel," it is because suitable camera work was not used to convey emotion correctly.

AI lacks human artistic experience. It may imitate the animation styles of famous animators, but it cannot understand the emotional principles behind their shot design: how to use a dolly zoom to express a character's inner shock, how to use a crane shot to show the grandeur of a story's backdrop or a character's sense of relief, how to use smash cuts plus close-ups to create impact. This part of the work is exactly where a creator's professional skill is tested.

And for storyboard design, one picture is worth a thousand words. Xiaoyunque's 3D Director's Desk not only provides basic static image references but can also directly record camera movement videos, saving complex prompts.

The 3D Director's Desk has a built-in timeline feature, where creators can place models at keyframes and demonstrate movements, forming rhythmic motion trajectories. Meanwhile, single-frame shots and camera movements can also be set on the timeline; once debugging is done, you can record the video reference directly. The recorded video can plug straight into the infinite canvas, becoming a dynamic layout.

If you want to build personalized scenes that fit your work's unique worldview, you can upload your own images and convert them into white models with one click, going straight from flat concept art to a 3D scene, bridging the workflow from 2D to 3D.

The white models generated from images are not one-off visual references but reusable digital assets. In long-form animation, serialized content, and IP development, such assets help creators build a stable scene library, reduce the cost of repeated production, and ensure visual consistency across different shots and chapters, making worldbuilding more coherent.

Going further, the white models and scenes creators build themselves can continuously expand the digital asset library in later works, forming a cycle of "create—accumulate—create again." Especially for genres like Western fantasy, xuanhuan fantasy, and historical political intrigue that require grand world settings, this ability to accumulate assets can further enhance a work's texture and strengthen the credibility of its fictional world.

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小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

,小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

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Movements, white models, camera work, and more that users adjust themselves can all be saved to the asset library and reused directly the next time you open it, continuously outputting content in line with each user's unique animation style.

In conventional animation production, main characters and backgrounds are produced separately, so each can be adjusted without interfering with the other. However, AI animation has struggled to replicate this workflow.

AI video generation is often a one-shot deal: foreground and background are mixed together, and local edits tend to affect the whole frame, so adjusting the result means rolling the dice again and again. One can't help sighing: if only AI could support green screen editing.

Now, Xiaoyunque Seedance2.5 supports inputting videos with green screens, can precisely recognize the green screen area, and replace or regenerate it, achieving flexible separation of character subjects from backgrounds.

This way, not only is more material directly usable, but more importantly it completes the post-production workflow for AI animation, allowing foreground and background to be edited and modified separately.

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小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

,小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

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小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

,小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

​动画学术趴已关注

In team collaboration, this means character subject and background generation can proceed in parallel, with job roles divided more finely. Fully drawing on the mature production pipeline of traditional animation helps improve overall output efficiency and further enhances the flexibility and controllability of content creation.

The enhanced controllability is also reflected in local modifications in both time and space.

In conventional animation production, whatever stage an animation error appears in, it can be caught and fixed at the next stage—the animation supervisor checks the key frames, the chief animation director checks the overall footage, and once a problem is found, it is immediately and precisely corrected.

But AI generation cannot do this. In the past, once a segment of AI animation was generated, even if only a strand of hair or a clothing fold needed tweaking, the entire segment had to be regenerated.

Now, with the help of timestamp editing, creators need only select a specific time range to adjust local shots without affecting other already-finished frames—essentially completing "correction drawing" within Xiaoyunque AI.

For even finer control, you can use Xiaoyunque's unique "clip re-shooting" feature: within a specified time range, using markers/box selection + prompts, modify only a certain character, a certain prop, or even a single movement detail, with editing supported down to the single-second level.

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小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

,小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

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This kind of local editing not only reduces time and computing costs but also strengthens process controllability, truly achieving "hit exactly where you aim."

Xiaoyunque Seedance2.5 not only makes imagery more controllable, but with its powerful multimodal reference capability, it can also integrate the multiple references a user provides into one complete animation.

Multimodality means multi-dimensional information. In practice, users can specify content across multiple dimensions simultaneously: text, character design, voice, music, camera movement, and more.

This means that with only a first-frame reference and an animatic storyboard, Xiaoyunque can turn the storyboard images into a finished animation in the style of the first frame; and if dialogue, voice timbre, and other information are also input, even the audio editing can be completed at the same time.

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小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

,小云雀Seedance2.5上线，动画创作者的核心需求终于被看见

​动画学术趴已关注

The benefits of this approach are, first, ensuring stylistic consistency of the finished product and preventing the AI from freelancing and turning the animation into a mess; second, precisely controlling the generated content so that every element in the frame follows the user's vision. Finally, it eliminates redundant work, freeing creators to devote their energy to more creative stages.

AI animation is a big tent, and users with different emphases have different needs—artistic experimentation, professional comic-drama production, or simply turning their wild ideas into finished works……

Building on Seedance2.5's existing capabilities, Xiaoyunque has further upgraded its product features to fit the real needs of AI animation creators, offering multi-dimensional, one-stop solutions for users with different emphases.

For example, in the "short drama agent" interface, you can upload a script with one click and have the AI automatically generate an entire animation based on preset characters and scenes, skipping the manual setup of every shot while maintaining character consistency between episodes.

Another example: if you want to polish a premium animated short, after initially generating video footage you can import it into CapCut with one click for editing and adjusting the overall pacing. You can also use audio separation for professional audio post-processing.

If you hit a creative bottleneck, Xiaoyunque can also become a chat buddy, helping creators find inspiration or refine their ideas.

This means AI is no longer just responsible for rolling the dice and producing results—it can genuinely participate in and assist the full pipeline of conception, drafting, revision, compositing, and publishing, freeing more time from random rolls and repetitive labor and returning it to content creation itself.

02 The right way to use a super assistant​

As an agent under ByteDance, Xiaoyunque was the first to integrate the brand-new Seedance2.5, opening the upgraded super creative capabilities to users at the earliest opportunity, letting every creator experience stronger, faster, and smarter AI animation productivity ahead of the curve.

From inspiration to finished film, Seedance2.5 will greatly improve AI animation creation efficiency, helping more hit animations like Baijiang: Zhiqiling continue to emerge.

At present, with the dual boost of the powerful Seedance2.5 model and the 小云雀创作者计划 computing-power support, a batch of distinctive, high-quality works keeps emerging, and more creators are using Xiaoyunque to make the leap from idea to hit.

The AI animation pipeline is becoming more refined, efficiency keeps improving, and the barrier to using creation tools keeps dropping—everyone now has a chance to turn their own story into animation.

But the lowering of tool barriers actually places higher demands on creators.

Cinematic language, animation principles, narrative pacing, character performance—this set of professional theory of film and animation creation remains the key foundation for generating high-caliber content.

The more solid your creative concepts and audiovisual expression skills, the more precisely you can translate your ideas into creative instructions AI can understand and execute, and the better you can leverage Xiaoyunque Seedance2.5 to produce high-quality content.

Looking at the industry as a whole, AI animation creation is entering the "content control" stage from "content generation." The upgrade of Xiaoyunque Seedance2.5 is less about adding new features than about responding to creators' increasingly specific creative needs, letting AI better integrate into the professional film and animation creation process.

At the end of the day, AI is only an assistive tool for creators and cannot replace humans in the core creative work. What it can do is help people with ideas and knowledge recreate the images in their minds, allowing individual creators to become "an army of one."

At the same time, through more controllable tools, Xiaoyunque can effectively reduce the number of rolls needed and improve image quality, helping creators cut time and money costs so that everyone can experience a better model.

​现在，正是体验小云雀Seedance2.5的最佳时机: Activate the Super Membership to receive 50,000 credits every month, and enjoy a 46% discount when generating videos with the member discount—generating 1 second of video costs as little as 14 credits, easily covering everyday creative needs.

Meanwhile, a new round of the Xiaoyunque Creator Program is now recruiting. Whether you are a newcomer just starting out or a seasoned creator pursuing premium content, you can receive computing-power support and creative assistance.

Good tools don't automatically produce good works, but we are witnessing a change in the logic of animation production. As productivity rises, the importance of early-stage creativity and post-production optimization becomes ever more prominent, and good content becomes the key to victory—Xiaoyunque Seedance2.5's "wall-breaking" this time may truly open up a new chapter for the animation industry.

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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.