China has been a mysterious market and many are trying to decipher on how to enter the country. With co-productions happening across many countries, many are trying to understand if a co-production is possible between China and their studio. At the recently concluded ATF 2016 market, Thunder Communications International, founder and CEO, Charles Lei marked his presence to talk about the topic “Go Big Or Stay Home!: The Dilemma Of Independents In China And India”.
While the session observed interesting insights about the Indian and Chinese marketplace respectively, AnimationXpress got in touch with Lei to know if there’s a possibility of co-production between India and China.
Thunder Communications International (TCI) is a media communications and investment company that focuses on production, distribution, events marketing, and investments in the rapidly developing Chinese entertainment industry. Currently, Lei is working on an undisclosed co-production animation project as an executive producer. The deal is between China and the USA.
Lei says, “There are challenges with co-productions. In Europe, the state started supporting local production because they were afraid of American culture invasion. If you think about the film industry, theatricals and show productions, it’s only a 150 year old industry and given that it’s a young industry, the whole subsidy system was started for two things: one was to stimulate local creativity and at the same time act as a protection barrier against Hollywood encroachment. However, the problem was that many of the European countries were too small to support the industry completely so that they could defend themselves against US Hollywood invasion – cultural invasion.”
So what happens when you are too small? “You combine forces. And when you combine forces, you try to lower costs and access each other’s costs, markets, and subsidies.” Lei goes on to explain why the co-production takes place taking the kidney dialysis as an analogue. A kidney dialysis patient basically needs an external machine to clean the blood in order to survive. In the same manner, a lot of countries that rely on the so-called co-production are not healthy. “The Indian business is very healthy on its own and same is the case with the Chinese company.” How do you get two healthy patients to exchange blood? The first question is are they compatible or perhaps if they want to exchange blood, then why exchange blood? So how do you look for the common denominator, the mutual interest?
“In China, we love Indian food. But besides Indian food and Buddhism, we don’t know much about India. We don’t really see India as an enemy, but Indians see Chinese as enemies. Having said that, we don’t think about South Asia much,” explains Lei. He goes on to reveal that over the years, Indian producers have reached out to him. “The ultimate goal of co-production is getting married. But the reality is what is the future going to be? What kind of world would it be? I think other developing countries should look forward to working with heavily subsidised places such as France, Belgium, and Poland. The reality in my opinion is that most of the young people, at least in China and Asia prefer Japanese animation – anime. So anime is much cheaper to make than western style of animation.”
The animation business is difficult to support. Other than the USA and Japan, most animation businesses have some kind of government support and like India, China too hardly has any government support. With animation, the cost of manufacture is much greater than the sales price. So it needs to be an economically viable project along with some kind of other reason beyond economic ones.
In China, anime and Disney films work well. So far, China has imported six anime movies with the recent hit being “Your Name”. It’s a lot cheaper to buy content rather than to produce it. As far as piracy is concerned Lei believes that it isn’t really an issue as theatrical experience is a social experience whereas watching the same on cell phone isn’t the same.
When asked why are they doing co-production deals with the USA, he elaborates, “Co-production with USA is done majorly for the money part. Also Hollywood is regarded as the best and hence gives a validation and boosts the ego.”
To the young film-makers, Lei advises, “Focus on local and not global content. Make the content relevant to the audience as they are going to watch it. Art film-makers sometimes become selfish as they create content on the basis of the fact that they have a story to tell even if the audience doesn’t want it. All I have to say is, Always think about the audience.”