When Daisy Shang first came to Cannes in 2008, the Chinese animation industry was just beginning to really find its footing, and billion-dollar franchises seemed like a pipe dream.
As the executive president of Fantawild Holdings and chairwoman of Fantawild Animation now points out, animated productions that topped the box office at around $14 million (RMB 100 million) were a rarity — even when the Chinese box office Records were breaking – and, on the French Riviera, Sheng found an international market that still sees Chinese animation as one of the film industry’s great unknowns.
Shang arrived at Crozet with two of Fantawild’s first animated TV titles, which were based on Dinosaur Wars. Dino rampage and water adventures Conch Bay. But the mission was really more about research, as his company wanted to shift its focus away from the high-tech equipment and multimedia technology it was built on. By 2008, Fantawild had found both of these markets too fragmented, and the company decided to use the technical expertise it had been developing to venture into animation.
“We were among the few. [Chinese] Companies will go to Cannes, and I think we were lucky that we were able to sell our programs in the first market as well,” says Sheng via video call. “I think people saw the quality in our products and wanted them. We had confidence in our products and so we started selling our programs overseas.
“In those days very few buyers worked with China. We brought two initial programs and the clients told us that the quality was good and our stories were interesting, and so they wanted to try us.
Taking what she saw and heard on board, Sheng went back to Fantawild’s southern China base in Guangdong and essentially rebuilt the company’s future.
By 2014, Sheng had returned to Cannes and had brought Bonnie Bears Along with that, a move that would see his company amass more than $1 billion in box office revenue over the next decade from big-screen animations of cartoon characters on everything from hamburgers to theme parks. Will expand your IP footprint.
“When it came time to create Bonnie Bears, we have received a lot of feedback from our clients. By then we knew what kind of programs they lack and what kind of programs their audience likes,” explains Shang.
And so it seems. Bonnie Bears Ticked all the boxes. A decade later and this year the 10-film franchise broke the $1 billion mark at the box office.
Originally released as a TV series in 2012, Bonnie Bears follows the travails of two friends who bond with the characters as protectors of their forest home. Initially, Fantawild cast three bears from the supporting cast in its series. Kung Fu Masters of the Zodiac But the company believed that three would be too many characters to focus on. So, those three bears turned into two, Briar and Bramble, and an assortment of side characters, including logger Wick and Warren, the red squirrel.
gave Bonnie Bears The series has been wildly successful domestically – with Chinese media claiming more than 200 billion online hits, has been sold in nearly 80 markets to date and has been syndicated by entertainers such as Disney, Sony, Netflix and Discovery Kids. Sold on enterprise platforms.
But the big payday came when Fantawild got into movies, starting in 2014. Bonnie Bears: To the Rescue – which saw two bears try to protect their forest alongside an orphaned girl – and then with nine follow-ups, including a ninth film, Bonnie Bears: Guardian Codewhich went on sale widely at Hong Kong Filmart in 2024.
Bonnie Bears: Guardian Code
Fantawild animation
“We tried to create an IP not only for the Chinese, but also for people outside China,” says Sheng. “Before we introduced this IP, we had a lot of different types of content — I think it was more than 10. Before we started with Bears, we developed Kung Fu Masters of the Zodiac, Chicken Stew, Brainy bubbly bug friendand others, and from the development of this material, we gained experience on how [animation] The market works [asking] What is the market, what do consumers like?
“We also did some market research to see what kind of cartoons were becoming popular. That all led us to this. Bonnie Bears. We also discovered that people find stories relatable. They had to be able to see their own lives in the lives of these characters.
While animated features date back to the early days of Chinese cinema and are popular and influential. Princess Iron Fan (1941), the first of hundreds of productions based on the 16th-century text Journey to the WestThe genre didn’t really keep pace with the meteoric rise of the Chinese film industry during the first decade of the 2000s.
Shang claims that it was rare for animated films to exceed RMB 100 million ($14 million) until the record was set. Bonnie Bears: To the Rescue It became the highest-grossing Chinese animated film at the time with approximately RMB 245 million ($41 million) in the year of release in 2014.
Says Rance Pau, CEO of consultancy Artisan Gateway. Bonnie Bears‘ Success is based on “emerging storylines” that deal with topics such as space travel, genetics, environmental protection, and “keeping up with the times”.
The films also hit the market with a well-established fan base and were slated for release during the Chinese New Year boom box office.
“It’s family entertainment that crosses cultural barriers,” he said. “There are positive attitudes and values, of course, authored from a Chinese perspective. [including language] and sensitivity.”
Fantawild continues to point to “relatable characters” and stories that resonate. Rather than a life-and-death struggle between a bear and a logger, for example, the company claimed in a statement that it’s more of a “clash of ideas and principles: The logger wants to cut down trees for money, basically. depicts the working class character, while the bears aim to protect the forest that is their home.”
“Loggerwick is just like us all,” says Sheng. “He’s not a bad guy, and he’s just trying to make his way. He’s under a lot of pressure from his boss, and he just has to do what he does to survive. All over the place. People can relate to it.
In the decade since the Boonie Bears hit the big screen, Fantawild has grown its staff to between 18,000 and 20,000 – depending on which projects are underway – and then the theme parks and those There are burgers.
” Covers the business concerned. Bonnie Bears themed Attractions in Fantawild parks, Bonnie Bears-branded zones, hotels, live shows and we have stores, and we’ve developed a lot of merchandise with licensees,” says Shang. “We also have food like Bonnie Bear’s Burgers. But our main aim is still that we are trying to make as many successful films and series as possible. We believe that the quality gets better and better every year. We always look to the next and strive to make it the best it can be.
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