Living on Handouts, Teetering on the Brink of Bankruptcy"—How Hard Is It to Make Original Animation? Just Look at Them and You'll Know
On July 20, 2026, the original Chinese 2D animation White Lightning celebrated the second anniversary of its premiere and officially announced the production of its second season.
Two years on, this youth story about high school girls who bond over table tennis and strive both on and off the court has not faded from the industry's view.
Last summer, White Lightning went overseas as a compilation film screening in Japanese theaters; this summer, on its second anniversary, the official team also held offline commemorative events in many cities across the country.
Behind it is Huamei Animation, founded in 2019. Though a relatively young animation studio, it has shown astonishing creativity in recent years.
Multiple wildly popular game PVs, Capsule Plan short films, two consecutive original 2D animation series... Every animation studio has its own original dream, but very few can truly “be themselves.”
How did Huamei Animation step by step find its own original path, turn ideas into works, and further develop them into IPs?
On the occasion of White Lightning's second anniversary and the conclusion of Action! Monster Movie, we interviewed Huamei Animation's co-founder and producer, Jia Xuewen (Yibei). From the perspectives of project development and IP management, she talked about the road the team has traveled and what comes next.
01 From Working for Others to Originals
“Even if the decision itself was made rationally, the essence of original animation is still a gamble.”
Rewind to 2019, when Huamei Animation was founded: the production team, including Yibei, had only 6 members. Though the team was small, its members had all accumulated rich experience in 2D animation production, lived through the era when web animation was on the rise, and participated in producing many commercial animation projects.
But unlike the past, when they only did contract work, Yibei says Huamei Animation had a clear goal from day one: to create original IPs “held in its own hands.”
But ideals can't keep a company running. Original work requires time and money, and the team first had to solve survival. The company's startup capital came from founder and director Jiafei selling an apartment worth about a million yuan. In addition, all full-time employees at the time received a uniform monthly salary of 6,000 yuan, and things only improved slightly once contract projects came in. Beyond keeping the company running normally, investing all profits into original R&D was everyone's consensus.
Looking back at Huamei Animation's early Weibo posts, their earliest content was mostly “claiming credit” for commercial projects they contracted or assisted with, including the promotional PV for the game Ninja Must Die 3 and the opening animation for the web series Really Want to Be With You; among these, the Punishing: Gray Raven animation PV and Stone Hero Feels So Lonely were co-produced with Big Firebird Culture.
In fact, the survival strategy Huamei Animation has adopted since its founding is constantly alternating between “original + contract work” and “long-form + short-form,” with the two supporting each other.
On one hand, contract projects provide the team with stable cash flow, keeping the company running; on the other hand, producing different types of projects continuously hones the team's abilities while waiting for its own opportunity.
In Huamei Animation's third year after founding, the White Lightning PV was officially released on August 11, 2021.
Energetic high school girls, familiar cityscapes and school settings, and a relatively rare domestic sports theme... Within a day of the one-minute-plus short's release, its view count quickly surpassed one million, sparking heated discussion across major video platforms and social media, drawing attention from both audiences and the industry.
But Yibei revealed that although White Lightning was Huamei's first planned original project, it was not the earliest original project to begin PV production. From the company's founding in 2019, the team had been planning multiple original directions, and first launched PV production for the fantasy-themed original project Code: Birdman Plan. Due to the pandemic, that PV's production was suspended in early 2020. On the sports front, the team had also considered directions like running and badminton.
Ultimately, weighing the theme's popularity, animation production difficulty, the potential sports boom from the Hangzhou Asian Games, and table tennis's nationwide recognition and popular base as China's “national ball sport,” Huamei decided around 2020 to prioritize White Lightning.
Even if the decision itself was made rationally, the essence of original animation is still a gamble.
Without external investment, the team took on commercial projects while producing the White Lightning PV.
Production of the White Lightning PV proceeded intermittently for over half a year. But when the short was actually finished, the team seemed less excited than expected. As stated in the announcement after the PV's release, the team was still “in a daze” at the time, and Huamei's daily routine continued to be rushing between different projects. From a professional 2D animation production perspective, the team itself felt the PV still had plenty of room for improvement.
On August 11, as the White Lightning PV was released, Yibei was at a hospital in her hometown in Hunan accompanying her mother and hadn't looked at her phone all day. Only in the evening, after receiving messages from many friends, did she log into Huamei Animation's account backend — her phone immediately froze, flooded with a massive wave of notifications and private messages.
Without any planned promotional resources, the White Lightning PV surpassed one million views within 10 hours of release, was shared over 10,000 times on Weibo, and topped Bilibili's trending chart.
The PV's response clearly exceeded the team's expectations. Facing this unexpected popularity, Yibei nonetheless declined interview requests from multiple media outlets. “I found it odd at the time — we only made a PV, why interview me? Let's talk after we finish the actual series.”
During that period, Huamei gradually came into contact with several potential investors. But facing demands from some investors to invest in the company or buy out its production capacity, Huamei rejected them all — the team wanted to preserve the company's independence and long-term control over its original content. Yibei said: “It's not that we didn't lack money. We sought investment a few times in between, but somehow it never worked out — maybe fate arranged for us to run an experiment. We didn't understand investment back then; without investors, naturally no one interfered with the creative work, so if we did poorly it was on our own inadequacy. This is the dumbest, hardest way — I really don't recommend it.”
Ultimately, White Lightning was confirmed as self-produced by Huamei Animation, streaming on both Tencent Video and Bilibili, with Aniplex handling overseas distribution. Originally scheduled for October 2023 during the Asian Games, it was delayed to July 2024 during the Olympics.
The bewilderment caused by the PV's viral success in 2021 also made Yibei realize her understanding of traffic-driven marketing and IP monetization was very limited. Between “making an animation” and “running an animation IP,” there is still a long distance.
So, as White Lightning progressed from PV to a real animation IP, she began consciously “letting go” of on-site production, investing more energy in areas she previously knew little about: intensively “cramming” knowledge of promotion, commercialization, supply chains, and other aspects of full-chain IP management.
02 How Many Steps Does It Take to “Run” an Animation
“From the past focus on animation itself's 'work logic' to a deeper understanding of the 'commodity logic' surrounding an IP.”
To run an original animation IP, “knowing how to produce” is only the first step.
Looking at Chinese animation in the internet era, most original works are backed by major video platforms or companies that already possess film/TV development and IP operation capabilities. By contrast, studios like Huamei Animation — where the production team itself initiates an original project, successfully lands it as a long-form series, and participates in the entire commercial process — are actually rare.
This is one reason Huamei Animation draws attention: they not only “made” a PV or an animation, but also built a “commercial closed loop” around their work.
In Yibei's view, the work of “running an animation IP” can roughly be broken into four major areas: production, distribution, promotion, and commercialization.
The first step is mastering the core business of animation production — staying afloat and completing the work.
As mentioned above, Huamei established an alternating model of “original + contract” and “long + short.” As the team kept refining its collaboration, the company's production efficiency steadily improved. In Yibei's view, Huamei's 2D animation management pipeline is now relatively mature. “We break down processes like first key animation and second key animation extremely finely. Because we were so poor, this maximizes cost savings while ensuring quality — it really tests management ability. Without exaggeration, in the field of 2D animation project management, I might be the person in China who has studied it most deeply. From 2022 to 2024, lacking production capacity for our original work, I visited animation companies all over the country almost like doing fieldwork, and with everyone's help we finished the project like ‘eating from a hundred households.'” This detailed pipeline and management approach also allowed her to somewhat step back from on-site management and devote more energy to other areas.
At the company-management level, balancing the team's capacity across different projects was equally difficult. Especially in the company's early years, Huamei long faced an “impossible triangle”: “If you want to do things well, you have no money; if you want to make more money, you have to sacrifice quality; but if quality suffers, partners won't be sure they'll give you projects next time.” So throughout Huamei's startup years, Yibei jokes that nearly every year was spent “teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.”
After White Lightning entered full production, when negotiating external commercial partnerships, Yibei gradually shifted from focusing on project revenue to prioritizing “stable demand” and “brand exposure.”
“So in some cases, (our) project pricing was relatively cheap at the time, or we partnered with other companies to share risk. Projects must be stable, risk must be small, no recklessness. Because our company has no financing, we have no slack — we cannot afford a single project going wrong. We have no payment terms buffer to gamble with.”
The second step is stepping out of the animation production comfort zone and filling in full-chain IP management capabilities.
For distribution, she wanted White Lightning to “have it both ways”: serve core anime fans while also having the potential to spread to general audiences. In those years she noticed some animations had begun experimenting with simultaneous multi-platform streaming, so from the second half of 2022 she proactively approached major video platforms to explore multi-platform co-streaming.
But for an original project from a young company, this path was not easy. Yibei recalls the initial talks went unsmoothly, and platforms also needed time to evaluate this cooperation model. Fortunately, the platforms themselves were seeking change, and after nearly a year of negotiation, White Lightning finally secured dual-platform exclusive co-streaming on Tencent Video and Bilibili in winter 2023.
For promotion and marketing, Yibei keenly perceived the drastic changes in social platform dynamics between 2021 and 2023, and focused the team's limited operational resources on two major social platforms: Douyin and Xiaohongshu. The team set up official accounts, continuously released character materials, and encouraged user secondary creation, gradually building buzz for the work.
In this process, Yibei also maximally mobilized the personal connections she'd built over many years, proactively learning from professionals in different fields and exploring collaborations.
Very luckily, her high school classmate Nicole was a supervisor at an operations company with mature ACG marketing experience, so Huamei entrusted that company with a full-service operations partnership; her friend Qiqi had a background in managing real-person talent, so Yibei asked her to join the team in 2024 on a project basis to manage the operations department overall, working in tandem with Nicole's team.
Around 2023, as project production advanced steadily, Huamei began facing a new challenge: how to do IP licensing and commercial development? How to catch up on business knowledge for cross-industry partnerships?
“Many animation creators actually aren't good at expressing their value to the outside world.” To find answers, Yibei attended numerous comic conventions and licensing expos, trying to get more people to know about Huamei's original projects and build connections with industry professionals up and down the chain.
Meanwhile, she began proactively getting to know senior veterans in animation business and IP management, working hard to close the “information gap” between herself and the industry.
“From the second half of 2023 to the first half of 2024, I visited dozens of people, (many of them) seasoned professionals, and everyone generously shared with me. Looking back now, many of my questions were extremely ‘rookie-level,' but everyone patiently explained, helping me get up to speed quickly and giving me a grasp of how business licensing works.”
Looking at White Lightning's end credits, the staff and acknowledgments related to promotion and commercialization number over 80 people.
Through continuous exchanges, Yibei gradually completed a shift in perspective: from the past focus on animation itself's “work logic” to a deeper understanding of the “commodity logic” surrounding an IP.
When first preparing to develop merchandise, since the work had not yet aired, market awareness and reference cases for this original IP were limited, and White Lightning's early merchandise licensing went poorly. Facing partners' doubts, Huamei chose to prove it themselves with action. “No data or cases? Then we'll run the experiment ourselves and give everyone data and cases — otherwise we'd be stuck here forever.” To complete the first batch of merchandise, Huamei learned from scratch how to build e-commerce and warehousing systems — the person who led the team through this was Yifeng, a friend Yibei had met playing JX3 Online in college, who happened to work in e-commerce.
During the promotion phase after the animation aired, the team likewise had to constantly seek partnership resources. Exposure opportunities that seemed ordinary from outside required enormous trivial communication and coordination, and many collaborations depended on support from industry “friends and family” and even the Hangzhou local government.
From mall big-screen displays, to brand collaborations, to preview screenings — even inviting Olympic table tennis champion Li Xiaoxia to an offline premiere event. Huamei kept securing more exposure for White Lightning, further expanding the work's influence.
Through the full-chain development of White Lightning, Yibei gradually formed her own preliminary understanding of animation IPs:
“Animation production is the ‘point,' the full pipeline is the ‘line,' and long-term IP operation content is the ‘plane.' Getting more viewers to see it relies on promotion and commercialization bringing continuous exposure, forming a thicker ‘plane' — combined together, this is the ‘three-dimensional object' that makes an animation IP stand up.”
03 Withstanding the Pressure, Reaping the Results
“Though I did a lot and worked myself hard, it was really the team colleagues behind me who kept supporting me.”
When the team first decided to incubate an original IP, the starting point was quite simple and the mindset relaxed. Yibei says everyone only thought, “First get the original animation made; once it's done, that's success — the work itself is the reward, everything else can wait.”
But when the team actually got the chance to invest in original production, its mindset quietly changed.
Yibei recalls that around March 2024 was when her stress peaked. At that point, less than half a year remained until White Lightning's official launch, and Huamei Animation faced an enormous funding gap. Because several major payments had not yet arrived, the company needed bank loans to keep running.
“I did the math at the time: because the production scope grew from the original 3 episodes totaling 45 minutes to 6 episodes totaling 84 minutes, we were already way over budget — that's why we had to ‘eat from a hundred households.' Promotion and business would cost about another 2 million. I was extremely anxious and told the director: ‘Once that 2 million is spent, it's a 2 million gap, and we may not recoup it...'”
“The director and the others said: ‘We all agreed you'd handle (promotion and business) — we all consented, it wasn't your decision alone.'”
“I was under huge pressure then, because I was the one spending the money, and I worried so much — this was money everyone earned through hard work, and the company had to take out loans on top of that...”
But even at the hardest times, Yibei says Huamei has never once delayed paying salaries over these years; all the pressure was absorbed internally through management's “extreme micro-management.”
In the most cash-strapped second half of 2023, Huamei at one point suspended all outsourced second key animation, controlling mid-production costs through phased production. This approach compressed post-production time and left some regrets in the work, but at least kept the company running.
Beyond that, Yibei also notes that Huamei's survival through the crisis depended on the long tradition of mutual assistance among domestic 2D animation companies, and some accumulated “good karma.” After the yen exchange rate fell in 2022, a friend's company working on Japanese animation projects approached Yibei for business introductions. Through such chains of mutual help, Huamei in 2022 received the Honkai Impact 3rd New Year special animation, which supported the company's cash flow. Yibei says: “We're domestic self-taught animators who started from Flash, so we've never done Japanese-card work — it was only in 2022 that we learned how much exchange rate changes affected friends doing Japanese projects.” These market changes also strengthened her resolve to pivot toward original work.
White Lightning was originally scheduled to launch during the 2023 Asian Games, but after the pandemic lockdown ended everyone fell ill one after another, production time doubled, and the director unexpectedly broke a bone in a fall, disrupting the original plan. By the time White Lightning officially launched during the 2024 Olympics, Yibei described her and the team's state as “utter chaos.” “Looking back now, I don't even know how I got through 2023–24.”
But this gamble on original animation also reaped feedback beyond expectations. In its launch year, the work's main episodes exceeded 40 million views, its Tencent Video heat score broke 14,000, and its Bilibili rating reached 9.8. Within one month of its summer launch, merchandise sales across all platforms surpassed 1 million yuan.
Meanwhile, Huamei reached culture-tourism collaboration deals with the Hangzhou local government and scenic areas, launching itasha cars, stamp-collecting check-ins, and other events. The regional familiarity brought by the work's real-location references also earned the team proactive interviews and exposure from multiple Hangzhou local media.
A year later, a film version merging the 6 episodes of Season 1 into roughly 86 minutes, distributed by Aniplex, landed in Japanese theaters, with Japanese dubbing by well-known voice actors including Shiina Nana, Amamiya Sora, Asakura Momo, and Tomatsu Haruka.
And all of this was achieved without selling any rights, while maintaining the IP's independence.
Looking back now, Yibei reflects that the realization of White Lightning, this “extravagant original dream,” depended on the team's own persistence and investment, and even more on the opportunities of the era and the support of many parties.
“Though I did a lot and worked myself hard, it was really the team colleagues behind me who kept supporting me, enabling me to go out and run (business). Many animation studio producers can't get away — they have to keep the company running, and there's no money to hire promotion and business staff. I was able to step out because my colleagues bore enormous pressure.”
“And if back then I hadn't pushed White Lightning forward under pressure, and instead accepted investment or contracted other projects, it might have made running the company easier, but the IP's buzz would fade, the window for greenlighting would close, and there might never have been a chance to restart.”
“You have to understand: if you don't do original work at that juncture, you may never get to do it again. So you have to gamble.”
Persisting in original IP development and expanding full-chain management capabilities won Huamei more “chances to survive” and gave the team valuable experience. After White Lightning, Huamei Animation continued exploring more original directions.
This April, the original 2D animation Action! Monster Movie, co-produced by Bilibili and Huamei Animation, launched. The animation tells the story of Monqi, a director obsessed with monster movies, who partners with Lia, a demon-realm girl, to shoot a demon movie — only to discover along the way that the otherworld's truth is closely tied to himself.
Compared to White Lightning's grounding in a Chinese-style school youth setting, Action! Monster Movie takes a completely different style: a fictional fantasy worldview, a light-comedy narrative style, and more exuberant, outgoing character designs.
Worth noting is the work's exploration in art and character design. On one hand, it attempts brighter, more vivid color palettes and more fashionable character designs; on the other, the fictional fantasy worldview placed higher demands on the art, and the team conceived rich setting details around the demon realm's ecology.
This project let Huamei Animation further accumulate production experience in non-realistic themes, fictional worldviews, and effects-heavy action scenes. Especially in controlling character design consistency in long-form 2D animation production, the team showed clear improvement over the White Lightning era.
Speaking of the narrative regrets this animation left behind, Yibei says the team had originally hoped to maintain a relaxed episodic structure early on, then gradually advance the main plotline, using two seasons' worth of content to weave in reflections on real issues like cultural collision. But under various unforeseen factors, the project underwent multiple major adjustments after launch, and the later production schedule was extremely tight. Yibei admits that although Action! Monster Movie has its regrets, in the current industry environment, completing another original long-form animation with Bilibili's support is itself already remarkable.
At the same time, this project deepened her understanding of the rapid changes in the domestic animation market in recent years.
“Under current conditions, doing a large project inevitably means ‘spanning a cycle.' Choosing the right theme and predicting the market matter a lot. (As a project greenlit) in 2020–21, none of us thought there was anything wrong with the light-comedy direction... but now, times have changed.”
04 A New Role, Old Questions
“The longer you work in this industry, the more you know it's determined by those upstream. But why is upstream the way it is? I still don't know, so I want to explore.”
By 2026, Huamei Animation had grown from its initial 6 people to a stable staff of around 60. Despite personnel turnover, the company has built a relatively mature management system, with production capacity sufficient to support one long-form animation per year.
This July, White Lightning officially announced the production of a second season. The second season is planned at 12 episodes of 20 minutes each, hoping to make up for the first season's shortcomings in production and storytelling, with greater emphasis on ensemble character growth and new maps unlocked, targeting broadcast in 2028. “The project is currently seeking investment — interested partners of all kinds are welcome to contact us!” Yibei added.
Recently, Huamei further expanded beyond animation production, founding a new company in Shanghai, “Wanxiang Donghe”. On one hand, the company handles refined operations of animation IPs like White Lightning; on the other, drawing on the team's experience in full-chain IP operation, it builds bridges to market for more IPs and provides support for creators.
Meanwhile, Wanxiang Donghe has also invested in new IPs such as indie games and the original character convention OCO, and co-organized offline events like Beijing Animation Week. The team hopes that through these attempts, creators can dialogue more with audiences, engage with the market, and grow together with the times.
It looks like a cross-industry leap, but in Yibei's view, it is a natural extension of her career path over the past decade-plus. In developing the White Lightning IP, she increasingly realized the limitations of creators themselves and the importance of IP commercialization.
“I do feel a sense of mission, because I was ‘lifted up' by others.” Yibei says she happened to live through the era of the web animation investment boom and the rapid growth of Chinese anime-style mobile games, and received help from many seniors and peers. Now that she possesses the knowledge and ability to run an IP's full chain, she hopes to build more bridges.
Having struggled and “leveled up” in the animation industry all this way, Yibei explains the spiritual drive that has supported her:
“I think our generation of animators all probably have questions when entering the industry: Why is Chinese animation the way it is now? Why the generational gaps? Why can't (many things) get done? The longer you work in this industry, the more you know it's determined by those upstream. But why is upstream the way it is? I still don't know, so I want to explore.
How does an animation project actually get in front of audiences? How does full-chain operation work? Why do animation companies themselves so often fail at it? Over my decade in the industry I've always been curious — it's also just my personality (that drives me). So I'm willing to do investment, promotion, commercialization, and many other things that may seem unrelated to animation.”
She believes that Huamei has so far only completed the “from 0 to 1” work for itself, and that continuing to advance original animation production and IP management going forward is like “from 1 to 100.” Yibei relays a friend's evaluation of Huamei: “Like Sun Wukong before being pinned under Five Fingers Mountain — now he's out, but obtaining the scriptures still requires eighty-one tribulations.”
Now the peak of the web animation era seems to have receded, short-video content formats are on the rise, and AIGC continues to impact society as a whole. In Yibei's view, under these conditions, today's 2D animation teams cannot simply bury their heads in improving a single link of the craft — more than ever, they need to re-understand animation's position within the broader content industry: animation is still deeply loved and consumed by audiences worldwide, and it is both one of many creative media and one link among many forms of commerce.
No one can give a definitive answer about the future of original animation. But Huamei Animation and Yibei are setting out with their questions, learning bit by bit, trying step by step, and building their ideal commercial closed loop with concrete action.