Latest update January 1st, 2016 3:17 PM
Little Door Gods Chasing Light
What if the gods above become jobless due to a general economic crisis?
Light Chaser Animation uses wild imagination to build such an adventure for these jobless gods in its first animation film.
1940 shots, 29 months, 160 artists and designers are now presenting a 103-minute film for the press and critics. The film is also running limited screenings in a number of second tier cities in China. Before its official release on the first day of 2016, it will launch roadshows in 36 cities in China.
If MONKEY KING: HERO IS BACK has shown that Chinese animation films can be highly profitable, then LITTLE DOOR GODS might further prove that stories of local animation films can also be original and relevant.
Light Chaser’s founder and CEO Gary Wang created China’s first video site Tudou.com in 2005 and then left it after its merger with Youku.com in 2012. In March 2013, Wang announced his new project: Light Chaser Animation.
LITTLE DOOR GODS is about choice and change: Faced with new conditions, how should the door gods continue their lives – to adapt themselves or stay still?
From an entrepreneur to a film screenwriter and director, Gary Wang has a simple belief: It is OK if the box office of this first film is just OK, as long as it is a quality film. The company shall survive and he will keep making his second or third film. Conversely, if the first film sucks, then there is no need to make another film any more. Wang is a practical idealist.
The quality of the animation is what Light Chaser pursues.
It is the artists who decide the quality of film, so Light Chaser went to great lengths in recruiting. At first, they received thousands of resumes and interviewed over one thousand candidates. Only thirty got the offer. Being selective was Light Chaser’s first step to make a quality film. Because the first group of artists would decide where the film was going. Many came (back) from overseas and were in charge of the film’s fate.
Light Chaser did not build the script up in the air. Instead, the story is rather grounded, and driven by the market itself. In this sense, it also looks like an Internet company – the product is researched and developed based on users’ needs and preferences. The budget has never been a problem.
Han Lei, LITTLE DOOR GODS’ VFX supervisor, joined Light Chaser after working for DreamWorks for seven years. The short film LITTLE YEYOS Light Chaser released last year won the applause from the netizens.
When the trailer went online, the audiences were already impatient to see the whole film. Some even said that the film’s got potential to be China’s selection for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
There are still 10 weeks to go before the film’s national release. Light Chaser has got giant partners in the show biz: Alibaba Pictures, China Film Group, Tencent, Baidu and Gewara, etc. Gary Wang expressed that this partnership with BAT was another example of Light Chaser’s default feature of mingling art with technology.
In fact, when you look closely, there is no other Chinese animation company has this advantage of combining the Internet DNA with artisanship. It is a unique company by birth, and we are curious to see how its co-production company Alibaba Pictures can optimize its resources to help the film’s distribution. If positive word-of-mouth spreads, then Taobao, the e-shopping division of the Alibaba
Group shall play an important role in selling the merchandising and even film tickets.
With its patient work and artistic taste, LITTLE DOOR GODS has already shown the local production companies a different way to make an animation film.
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