---
title: "How AI Comic Short Dramas Broke the “Impossible Triangle”"
author: "Unique Research"
sourcePublication: "Unique Research Substack"
originalPublishedAt: "2025-12-22T12:00:46+00:00"
canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/src-20251222-01html"
source: "https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/src-20251222-01html"
language: "en"
---

# How AI Comic Short Dramas Broke the “Impossible Triangle”

_Original · Unique Research · 2025-12-22_

_Historical edition: This complete text preserves the December 22, 2025 report on the December 19 Hangzhou event. Revenue, reach, output, award credentials, forecasts and product claims are attributed to the original report or named speakers, not new measurements. Monetary units are not specified in the original figures here. MovieFlow’s “218 countries” is retained as the speaker’s wording, not a verified count of sovereign states. The phrases “paid organic traffic in the tens of millions” and “commercial paid traffic over 15 million” do not specify whether they measure views, money or another metric; no such unit is supplied in translation. Company, creator and work names without established English forms are transliterations or descriptive translations, not assertions of official English names. The concluding research invitation belongs to the original historical article._

Before organizing this event, we had just assembled an initial version of an “AI Comic-Drama Industry Map” that is still being refined. From leading studios such as Jiangyou Culture generating 50 million in monthly revenue, to meme comics, motion comics, and AI 3D comics all moving into the spotlight together, we saw three particularly clear realities. First, comic dramas have evolved from a content category into an entire industry chain spanning scripts, storyboards, modeling, motion effects, dubbing, and distribution. Second, AI is genuinely reducing costs and improving efficiency—not merely saving time, but making approaches that were once unimaginable accessible to ordinary teams. Third, Chinese players in this arena are no longer merely following; they are taking the lead.

That led to the Feifan Ji (非凡暨, the source's event name) × Hangzhou AI DAY special session on the evening of December 19, 2025. Unique Research joined forces with the Wu Xiaobo Channel, and 515 registrants filled both the venue and the community groups. The entire event focused on one subject: a practical, commercially viable AI comic-short-drama ecosystem. We handed the microphone to creators and companies that had already closed the commercial loop: some came from the film industry, some entered through overseas short dramas and tool portfolios, some had cultivated animation IP for years, and others had pivoted from female-oriented short dramas to making AIGC shorts.

Short dramas are pulling AI off the toy shelf and onto the production line

Huan Jiachen, head of research at Unique Research, began with several keywords that had dominated feeds over the previous week: Wanxiang 2.6 × Qianwen AI Theater, the fiercely sought-after beta slots for Vidu Agent, and the steadily advancing capabilities of Seedance 1.5 Pro; the central signal he saw was that video-generation capabilities are being packaged into products people can truly use. Instead of writing a prompt, sampling random generations and gambling on luck, users select a template, define a character, and enter a sentence; the platform then delivers a publishable clip. Behind all this is the high-turnover logic of short dramas and comic dramas, forcing the change: shorter, denser, faster to iterate, and more data-driven. It compels tools to solve three problems at once—production capacity, localization, and cost.

Drawing on Unique Research’s global data, Huan Jiachen highlighted several thought-provoking contrasts. On the Web, Hailuo, Kling, and PixVerse command mindshare, while Suno, Runway, and ElevenLabs lead on revenue, showing that sound itself is a major and underestimated business. China’s Web market may look small, yet Apps such as Wink and Kuaiying (快影) support enormous gateways into video. His conclusion was that users do not really want 3-second animated images; they want narrative consistency + workflow integration—consistent characters, advancing plots, synchronized sound and visuals, and the ability to edit and redo work. The future moat will not belong to whoever has the model with the longest parameter list, but to whoever possesses a director’s aesthetic judgment and can bring AI into a production line capable of sustainable delivery. This is also what Unique Research will continue helping the industry understand through its research and industry map of the AI comic-drama value chain.

Liang Wei: compressing sixteen years of film-industry expertise into an AI canvas

MovieFlow co-founder Liang Wei began with his sixteen years in the film industry. In traditional film and television, producing a single work means high costs, long cycles, and highly uncertain outcomes—scripts, shooting, and post-production each burn money in a high-stakes gamble. MovieFlow aims to break that expertise into steps that can be handed to AI: from inspiration to storyboards, and from shot direction to the rhythm of the score, everything is placed in a one-stop platform. A sufficiently precise editor is then added so creators are not relying on random generations but refining their work, gaining AI efficiency while preserving a filmmaker’s sense of control. In 70 days after launch, MovieFlow reached 218 countries and attracted 600,000 users, who created 1.5 million videos. In essence, it packaged the experience of a seasoned director into a set of AI agents that anyone can use.

In his view, what is being rewritten is not only the method of production, but the very meaning of “video.” Traditional video captures reality; AI video generates reality. Ordinary people can enter a story through a single photograph, turning video from a recording tool into a medium onto which ideas and emotions are projected. Liang Wei predicts that beginning in 2026, “frictionless storytelling” will become an industry keyword. Users will not need to understand complex technology; they will create through natural language and visual previews. A platform’s job will be to reconstruct the division of labor, standards, and expertise of the film industry into an intelligent production line that can be delivered and scaled, so that “everyone is a director” ceases to be merely a slogan.

Deliver 600 videos first, then build an AI intelligent factory

Liu Rushan, founder and CEO of Kuangye Qunxing, told a more “sweatshop-like” story. Before formally building the Mulan product, the team delivered AI video content to a listed company for 6 consecutive months: at least 600 pieces every month, more than 1,000 at the peak, while also carrying traffic KPI targets. This high-pressure project exposed every problem with painful clarity, including offline assets, fragmented processes, and extremely high communication costs. Talented creators were trapped in repetitive transfers and tool switching, while novice users were kept out by a steep learning curve. The team realized that unless it built a product capable of carrying a complete workflow, the supposed efficiency gains from AI would remain a joke on a PPT slide.

Mulan’s answer is a true “canvas workflow”: characters, scenes, dubbing, subtitles, and editing are all completed on the same canvas, and every node can be refined repeatedly, avoiding the enormous waste of “start all over again if you are dissatisfied.” By preserving character assets, worldbuilding, and scenes, the same IP can quickly begin production under different scripts, turning short-drama production from one-off projects into a reusable industrial assembly line. Liu Rushan candidly described a development journey that moved from profitability to betting on a new product. The team endured immense uncertainty and a dark exploratory period in which it scrapped and rebuilt the product four times. Some people broke down and left because they could see no hope, while others chose to persist—including directors who had won international AI film-festival awards and a recipient of a global top-five medal at the ComfyUI Global Developer Conference, all of whom poured years of delivery experience into the product. Mulan seeks to build an AI intelligent factory that genuinely serves creators, freeing people from the mire of tools and processes so they can focus once again on “telling a good story.”

From one commercial to an entire AI comic-drama business chain

Chen Faling, co-founder & CEO of Yuguang Tongchen, appeared this time primarily as a “comic-drama producer.” The company did indeed begin with film and television advertising, using AI to replace substantial amounts of live shooting and post-production and proving that the technology worked within real budgets and production cycles. What became truly interesting was that after these capabilities moved into comic dramas, they began growing into a more complete content and commercial loop. Yuguang Tongchen was no longer merely making one video for a brand; it began working with platforms including Tomato, China Literature, and Tencent Animation to develop premium comic dramas around IP. Storyboard style, character design, pacing, and emotional design were all polished to the standard of “what mainstream female-oriented / male-oriented audiences will actually watch through to the end.” Many characters that had existed only in text or two-dimensional illustrations were reliably “brought out” through the company’s AI process and turned into serialized comic-drama content suitable for long-term operation.

The crossover collaboration between Yuguang’s original animation “You Shan Ling” and the if brand opened up a commercialization model for comic dramas. Compared with traditional film and television projects, which require long cycles and heavy investment, AI comic dramas offer strong content extensibility, flexible commercial integration, and controllable costs and timelines.

Building on this foundation, Yuguang Tongchen worked with ByteDance Ocean Engine to advance comic-drama commercialization and connect these capabilities directly to the economics of “views × monetization.” At one end are serialized comic dramas and IP operations on content platforms such as Tomato, China Literature, and Tencent Animation; at the other are advertising, brand partnerships, and derivative formats on ByteDance Ocean Engine. A brand is no longer limited to being “inserted into one frame”; it can enter an entire comic-drama world and use characters, plots, and emotional value to communicate over a longer horizon. Chen Faling’s judgment therefore focuses more squarely on comic dramas themselves: AI’s value is not to make images look flashier, but to enable good stories and good IP to be produced more efficiently, operated over time, and tested commercially. Along this path, Yuguang Tongchen would rather see itself as an “AI comic-drama factory + IP commercialization bridge” than as a tool player chasing technical spectacle.

Building AI infrastructure with tangible business results for short dramas going global

Wu Wanxuan, business VP at Xiaoying Technology, has stood at the forefront of the “going global” strategy from the beginning. Since Xiaoying was founded in 2012, it has focused on overseas markets and served more than 2.2 billion users with a portfolio of AI-powered video-creation tools. In overseas short dramas, the company uses “Yinghuo Engine” to provide exporters with multilingual, multi-character, highly emotional voice-cloning dubbing, subtitle reconstruction solutions, and tools for generating AI assets in bulk. They may sound like voice and asset tools, but in essence they are the underlying infrastructure for the entire overseas short-drama chain.

In her account, overseas short-drama demand has evolved through three distinct stages over the past two years. At first, everyone cared about moving domestic hits overseas through translation as quickly as possible, competing for a time advantage. Pure subtitle localization soon became standard, and the industry began pursuing premium dubbed versions. This year, attention shifted again, toward achieving stable monetization on overseas social-media platforms. While building an AI-native drama team, Xiaoying has continually tested data and refined the chain in real operations: it can steadily produce 10 premium 2D comic dramas per month; one AI live-action drama team can generate four finished minutes per day; and one production exceeded 1.3 million organic views for a single episode without any paid traffic. Wu Wanxuan’s judgment is that the overseas native short-drama market remains fundamentally 70% content and 30% technology. A good story is the shared underlying language, while AI makes that language visible faster and at greater scale. For precisely this reason, Xiaoying is shifting its focus toward small teams and individual creators by building an AI content-creation platform, hoping that tools and the platform can lift up people who truly understand users.

Rebuilding the AI foundation of animation with a “workflow + IP pyramid”

Kong Weijian, director of spatial-intelligence solutions at Baidu AI Cloud, began with the broader industry landscape. In recent years, China’s animation industry has grown from a market worth tens of billions to one worth hundreds of billions. New formats such as comic dramas, micro-short dramas, and live-action dramas are becoming new growth engines, while AI is no longer merely about whether a visual style looks good. It is deeply embedded in every link of production, asset management, distribution, and IP operations. Baidu is building the technology stack—from underlying computing power, data, and model hosting to upper-layer tools and Agent capabilities—while working with real film, television, and animation companies to deconstruct workflows and execute projects. It is trying to package a complex set of capabilities into solutions that organizations at different stages can afford and understand.

In his breakdown, Baidu offers three layers of services to the industry. The first is a one-click finished-video tool for startup content teams, providing an end-to-end process from music and scripts to images and video and lowering the threshold for experimentation. The second provides companies that have reached the scaled-replication stage with model hosting, API/SDK access, and workflow codification, allowing them to build their own stylized production matrices. The third consists of intelligent Agent systems built around use cases such as image coloring, refining drafts into polished art, AI highlight reels, and script scoring, helping reduce the cost of decisions and experimentation. Kong Weijian emphasized that these capabilities are meaningless if they remain only at the technology layer; they must connect to an IP pyramid. Channels such as Baidu Baijiahao can validate IP value and amplify leading content, which can then feed back into models and tools on the production side, creating a virtuous cycle between workflows and content assets rather than a pile of one-off projects.

As monthly comic-drama views surpass 6 billion, the industry shifts from “chasing volume” to “building IP”

Zhou Liqiang, general manager of COL Digital Publishing’s AI animation division, made the popularity of comic dramas concrete with platform data. On Douyin, comic-drama views exceeded 6 billion in October 2025 and were still growing rapidly. The source describes paid comic-drama organic traffic on Douyin as reaching the tens of millions daily, with commercial paid traffic exceeding 15 million in November; it does not specify a unit for either figure. Comic dramas on Tencent platforms have a compound annual growth rate above 260%; more than 300 works are approved each day across platforms such as Hongguo and Douyin; and daily production capacity has reached 20,000–30,000 minutes. In other words, comic dramas have evolved from a novel format into a high-frequency, high-output industrial content system.

Against this backdrop, the advantages of AI comic dramas are magnified further. Production once depended heavily on a small number of powerful directors and elite animators; now, models and intelligent storyboarding handle more of the stable mass production, while the truly scarce qualities are a sense of pacing, storytelling, and editorial control. COL Digital Publishing has representative works ranging from the rules-horror title “Guimi Shijie” to the imaginative fantasy “Xuanhuan, Yu Qiang Ze Qiang.” While using its own IP to demonstrate styles, the company is preparing to launch an open platform that integrates story scripts from world-leading IP, large-model capabilities, and its own domestic and overseas distribution systems. More teams will be able to generate comic dramas with one click and connect to a complete distribution network. Zhou Liqiang’s judgment is that the industry is shifting from merely “stacking up quantity” toward “building IP,” and AI is making it possible both to scale that effort and to create Chinese stories with genuine global influence.

From video to virtual space, emotion needs somewhere people can inhabit

Heiyu, founder & chairman of Dayou Space, looked toward a somewhat more distant future—one in which content evolves from flat video into virtual spaces where people can co-create and linger. He shared the example of a hip-hop awards ceremony held the previous year. In a virtual space, interaction between fans and virtual idols was no longer limited to posting comments and tapping “like”; people could walk, pause, and respond within a complete scene. The intensity of emotion and the length of engagement far exceeded what a traditional video could carry before viewers “finish and leave.” In his view, this kind of spatial interaction may well replace standalone video in the context of Web 4.0 and become a new mainstream content form.

To prepare for this change, Dayou Space is exploring AI 3D technologies such as Gaussian point clouds to generate high-precision, continuous three-dimensional spaces at lower cost, allowing ordinary users to have their own virtual stages and virtual idols. It also hopes to use open tools and a next-generation engine to bring in more product managers and engineers to build interactive, real-time generative content infrastructure together. Heiyu’s vision is straightforward: good content in the future will not merely be “seen,” but “lived in together.” Users will be able to stay, co-create, and consume within it. AI’s role is to help creators turn virtual experiences that once required heavy investment and high barriers to entry into an emotional business that can be replicated at scale.

What female-oriented short dramas teach us is to make the emotion clear first

Finally, “AI Xiaolongbao,” once a female-oriented comic-drama blogger with a million followers and now an AIGC short-film creator, brought this discussion of comic short dramas back to people themselves through a highly personal yet deeply insightful perspective. In many people’s eyes, female-oriented short dramas are synonymous with “melodramatic” and “unsophisticated.” But AI Xiaolongbao offered a different analysis: female-oriented content has never served “passersby’s aesthetics”; it is a precisely calculated emotional economy. Its first principle is never how complete the story is or how rigorous the worldbuilding is, but whether it can continuously, consistently, and predictably provide users with high-density emotional value. The market does not reward what is “sophisticated”; it rewards what is “needed.” The hit “Great-Grandmother” is a typical example: a female scientist from Republican-era China travels back in time to set her family straight. The premise may not seem “avant-garde,” but it precisely meets users’ unmet emotional needs to be “seen, chosen, and compensated.” For female-oriented audiences, three things are central. First is emotional compensation: people who are not treated well in reality hope to be chosen unwaveringly once in a story, experiencing an equal relationship and the feeling of being cared for. Second is confirmation of the relationship: security matters more than realism, and the male lead must continually signal, “I will not leave; I will resolve the conflict.” What users want is an emotionally safe zone where “the world may collapse, but the relationship cannot.” Third, the density of gratifying moments must exceed logical completeness: the world can feel unreal, but the emotional supply cannot be interrupted. “I feel terribly wronged now and must be rescued immediately” is the underlying demand. The formula is: low status in reality + emotional oppression, exchanged for an identity reversal + ultimate compensation.

Within this logic, Xiaolongbao distilled her methodology into the “three moves of user thinking”:

Do not begin by thinking, “What do I want to say?” Ask first, “Who is she, what is she feeling when she clicks, and what state does she want to be in when she closes it?” Do not look only at explicit entry points such as “handsome men” and “romance”; uncover the implicit needs to “be recognized, be understood, and ultimately feel safe with him.” Do not fear an old formula; fear only missing the target.

“Pain first, gratification later” and “the male lead comes back” can remain popular for 10 years because the structure of human emotion has not changed. Users have never hated formulas themselves; they hate formulas that fail to hit their pain points. Why did she commit full-time to AIGC? The answer is equally practical: technology keeps changing, but creators’ pain points do not—no time, no budget, no team, and the desire to express something without the means to produce it. For her, AIGC is not technical showmanship but a wrench for loosening the anxiety of limited productive capacity. Whether making AI shorts, planning competitions, judging, or teaching, she has consistently done one thing: stand on the user’s side and translate needs into content and tools. She therefore left every AI-content, short-drama, and comic-drama creator in the room with one conclusion: before agonizing over “which model to use,” first understand “who exactly your user is”—because the market always rewards people who are “needed,” not creators moved by their own work.

Making the map clear—and writing the stories of the people doing the work into it

AI comic short dramas are no longer a fleeting trend. They have become a complete industrial line extending from technology to content, from tools to IP, and from screens to spaces.

Building on this event and more frontline interviews, Unique Research will continue refining its “AI Comic-Drama Industry Map,” systematically cataloging upstream and downstream companies, key tools, and representative cases across the value chain. We will release insights in stages to help more builders see the true terrain of this arena.

We also sincerely invite every company and team related to AI comic short dramas to participate in this research and co-creation. Whether you are a comic-drama producer, a platform or channel, an IP rights holder, an AIGC tool or model company, or an advertising and commercialization service provider, if you are doing concrete work in this field, we hope to include your data, methodology, and story in the more complete map to come. After all, what truly determines the industry’s direction is never the concepts on a PPT slide, but people like those who gathered in Hangzhou that evening—

the builders who have already begun production, already delivered, and are already worrying about the next video.

---

Original publication: https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/src-20251222-01html
On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/src-20251222-01html