Chinese animators are seeing a boom in the cartoon industry.

Backed by favorable government policies and the world's biggest cartoon audience, young Chinese are scrambling for places in animation school as they eye their place on the global stage.

Animation artists in Beijing are busy bringing to life one of China's favorite cartoon series - Sanmao.

It traces the exploits of a young boy growing up in Shanghai in the 1930s. There is a huge demand for made-in-China cartoons. Since September, only Chinese cartoons are to be shown every evening from 5pm to 8pm. It means local animation houses will have to produce an estimated 30,000 hours of cartoons each year.

Currently, China does not even produce 1 percent of this. The biggest hurdle is securing investment. Compared to drama serials, cartoons are more expensive and take a longer time to produce. There's no shortage of interest - students fight for places in China's top animation schools.

Animation is hard work - two seconds on screen requires more than 30 pages of drawings. For a while now, foreign animators have come up with the concepts while Chinese artists are left to do the laborious drawing.

With more than 360 million young people, China has the world's biggest animation target audience. This in itself best illustrates the great market potential for the animation industry there.

But animators know that national pride alone will not be enough to conquer the global animation market.

Source:佚名