Animation is Booming. Why Not in Hong Kong?

Animation has always been a popular format — but 2025 was a particularly huge year for it. The year started off with Chinese record-breaker Ne Zha 2, continued with Japanese anime Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man and closed with Disney’s Zootopia 2; just the four of them earned a combined US$5 billion in ticket sales. 

The global animation industry was worth US$413 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow 117% by 2034, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Perhaps not surprisingly, though considerably more modestly, Hong Kong’s box office winner for the year was Tommy Ng Kai-chung’s Another World, the first animated feature to hit local screens since Toe Yuen Kin-To’s The Great Detective Sherlock Holmes: The Great Jail-Breaker (retitled as Sherlock Holmes and the Great Escape) in 2019.

For all its booms and busts, Hong Kong’s film industry has demonstrated little in the way of an animation scene. Currently, it seems as if Ng and Yuen, who made a splash with My Life as McDull in 2001, represent the entirety of the city’s animation sector.

Soul String by Shek Hoi-ching and Lee Man-sui, WUAA, 2025_zolima

Visual artist Kongkee often includes animation in his installations, such as “Warring States Cyberpunk” and “Future Jataka.” At a stretch, there’s also Hong Kong native Raman Hui Shing-ngai, best known for his work as a supervising animator on DreamWorks’ Shrek, and later as the co-director on its sequels and spin-offs, and then of the live-action CGI/animation hybrid Monster Hunt. Hong Kong has a well-established manhua tradition, though when the film industry started booming in the 1960s, those comics were adapted not as animation but as kung fu cinema — quite the opposite of Japan’s vibrant manga-to-film culture. But that’s not the whole story. Hong Kong indeed has its own animation trailblazer: Lo Che-ying. Like many Hong Kong kids, Lo grew up absorbing Japanese anime and Disney, and eventually went to work for RTHK before establishing his own studio, producing shorts Dreamland Express, Blue Moon and Robots in the 1970s and 80s, part of what he describes as “very small-scale” animation production in the period after World War II. “Most of it was special effects and film title [sequences], animated commercials, and so on,” he explains. 

The first feature length animation from Hong Kong was Old Master Q in 1981. Directed by Che Gam-tiu, Wu Sau-yee and Tsai Chih-chung, the film was based on the popular (and still running) comic strip, which has been spun off into a series of sequels. Lo is now perhaps the foremost scholar on Hong Kong animation (his books on the subject include Frame After Frame) as well as its loudest cheerleader. He is a jury member for the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s IFVA competition — which was temporarily suspended when its 28th edition ran afoul of censors — as well as an animation teacher, and a jurist for last year’s inaugural World University Animation Awards (WUAA) hosted by Hong Kong Metropolitan University (MU). It begs the question of where the next generation of Los is lurking.

“Animation is still dominated by large, powerful companies and industries in the United States and Japan,” says Timmy Chen Chih-ting, assistant professor in cultural studies at MU’s School of Arts and Social Sciences. Chen was part of the organising team that realised the WUAA, in part to raise the school’s profile but also to provide a space for young animators to show off their work. “When the IFVA announced the suspension we thought there was no longer a place for animation awards in Hong Kong, because it’s not just about funding, it’s also about encouraging local animators and giving them a platform.” 

The first WUAA welcomed 42 animated films from over 1,700 submissions, and students from 20 countries including Iran, Czechia, Sri Lanka and Botswana. Hong Kong was well represented in sections spotlighting next generation filmmakers and emerging talent, among them ArDaFun (Melancholic Twilight), Chan Ka-lam (Pink Pupil) and Ng Kit-man, Shek Hoi-ching and Lee Man-sui (Soul String), all works that bathed in the city’s visual landscape and looked like nothing else from around the world.

In The Beginning was produced by Sophie Colfer

A lot going on

To Chen’s mind, half the battle is in awareness. Regardless of the dearth of local features, there is plenty of activity. For anyone who cares to look, there are scores of casual and regularly scheduled outlets and programmes showcasing and supporting local work. In addition to the new, biannual WUAA, events like the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival have curated a programme dedicated to Hong Kong shorts and animations, collectives such as Videotage and M+ regularly spotlight alternative film formats, and the newly launched SOOOP screening series was purpose-built for spotlighting animation. 

Hong Kong-born English-Japanese animator and curator Sophie Colfer (who produced the surreal allegory In the Beginning that premiered at SXSW in March) established SOOOP as a way to bring local professionals and emerging talent together and to get animated shorts in front of audiences. She’s confident this kind of collaboration and stumping can only help. 

Melancholic Twilight Railways by ArDaFun

“We would love the opportunity to celebrate and grow animation as a whole in Hong Kong, particularly animation-focused events. I would encourage those who would like to promote their own events to reach out to us,” she says, taking a moment to point out platforms like Instagram account Onion Ghost that features takeovers by local Hong Kong animators, Tai Kwun’s Innerglow series and M+ as regular supporters of home grown animation in all its forms. Pointing out that animation by definition includes any art form that moves, Colfer argues that it “can only be beneficial to artists and to the wider animation scene” if the full diversity of the medium is showcased — not just anime or Disney-style animation, but also “experimental animation, installation, kinetic sculpture and short film selections.” It’s important, she says, to encourage “a wider appetite” for these less commercial types of film.

It just so happens that there is a new feature animation on the horizon. Yuen’s new film, A Mighty Adventure, a dialogue-free saga of three insects fleeing the big city, bows at HKIFF in April after premiering at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Film Festival. And the production rumour mill went into overdrive when it appeared Shrek’s Hui would be returning to Hong Kong to make his next feature. 

Those remain rare instances, however. As it stands, most Hong Kong animation studios function as outsourcing options for overseas producers. The city’s behemoth is Enchanting Studio, which contributed to Hui’s Monster Hunt, Starbeam for Netflix and Ready Jet Go! for PBS. “Apart from them, there’s us, and then a few others with 10 to 20 staff,” explains producer Ruth Sik at Simage Animation, which created art for Yuen’s Detective Sherlock Holmes. “Then we have a whole world of studios that are two to six people. Many are fresh graduates who started a studio and mainly survive on commercials and Instagram reels.” 

Sik isn’t looking down her nose at the tiny workshops. Simage, now 20 years old, got its start servicing children’s television from Europe and North America, and also earns its living animating outside content, for commercials, games, narrative sequence inside games or promotional shorts that provide backstory. European and American clients come to Hong Kong because it’s cost effective.

“We’re not competitive compared to other Asian countries, but we are competitive compared to the US or Europe,” says Simage founder and managing director Matthew Chow. “Our history also makes it easier to connect with Western producers on a philosophical level.”

The wind goes on by Lee Ka-yin

Current challenges 

It should come as no surprise that the biggest challenges facing the development of a larger animation sub-sector are familiar. Ironically, one is cost, followed closely by a lack of training options for budding animators, plus the insistence of generative artificial intelligence. 

In the same way filmmakers lament the disappearance of intern programmes and on-the-job training directors, animators are missing much-needed mentors. “We had an animation industry a long time ago, and that no longer exists,” says Eric Lee Ka-yin, animation director at Morph Workshop. “So there is no systematic training.”

Sik agrees, citing the growth of animation everywhere in the world except Hong Kong, which she chalks up to a labour problem. “Training or government subsidies haven’t created a local workforce that can create a full animation.”

But the large budgets required by feature animation remain the biggest hurdle. Public funding is available from the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency’s Animation Support Program, which grants funding to 30 local animation enterprises for original work each year. The Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) added an animation initiative in 2025 to “support and promote animated feature film projects,” including Yuen’s film — though HAF declined to specify to us what exactly its support means beyond professional facilitation, post-production funding or distribution assistance. The Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association established its HKDEA ICT Awards to recognise communications technology excellence, and the IFVA relaunches for its 30th edition in June 2026. 

Of course, animators and artists say there could be more. “Our independent animation communities are very talented and highly enthusiastic. Yet we rarely see successful commercialisation of their original work,” laments Lee, whose Wind Goes On, a painterly and human portrait of transience of a public housing estate, won Digital Entertainment Grand and Digital Entertainment (Animation and Visual Effects) Gold prizes at the HKICTA this year. He points out that suitable infrastructure supporting animated work is lacking, keeping it niche, but also cites the success of Another World as a case study of what should be duplicated.

“I think we need producers who understand the process and are capable of creating schemes and campaigns — the bridges from the creators to the parties with the resources, and the public,” he says. “It’s rare but I hope Another World can open a new horizon for all of us. They’ve shown us how things work.”

Making matters more difficult is the private sector’s failings. Traditional film companies and investors remain relatively unfamiliar with animation as a product and are reluctant to sink an average of three years into making a single movie. “It’s expensive, so they need to count on overseas markets, [which] they’re also unfamiliar with,” says Yuen. “I think the success of Ne Zha will give Chinese animators some hope, but I don’t know what that means here.”

The great detective by Toe Yuen Kin-To

What is Hong Kong animation?

There’s also a recognition element at play: Hong Kong is known for crime thrillers and kung fu action movies but not animation. When Another World was released, Ng went on record theorising that the lack of feature animation in the past is probably the greatest hurdle to Hong Kong developing a clear visual voice. Simply including a tall building should not define any Hong Kong aesthetic; form should follow function, as it were, with “the spirit and philosophy behind our stories” defining animation.

Lee agrees, pointing out that without that systematic training, animation falls to “personal vision and preferences,” he says. “Creators who are exposed to Japanese anime will definitely be inspired by that. Japanese animation language has influenced overseas creators too. However there is still a lot of room to develop personal style under such a framework. The way Hong Kong creators think is always unique due to our cultural backgrounds.”

Chen thinks Hong Kong’s thin history of animation is a crutch that needs to be dispensed with, and that the cityscape on its own is indeed a critical element to a distinct Hong Kong animated voice. “The Kowloon Walled City was a source of inspiration for Japanese animators, the skyline inspired Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner. Influence is not the issue; we’re all influenced by each other. When people see your work, they want to see you. Hong Kong animation needs the hand of the artist to show its aesthetics.”

The way forward

If animation in Hong Kong is to have any future, it’s through collaboration and by tapping resources around the region and beyond. “The problem is that current cultural production in Hong Kong is too short-sighted, and an animated feature can take years,” says Chen. “There are plenty of talented animators here, but whether their shorts can be translated into feature production is the more difficult problem.”
Yuen’s funding for A Mighty Adventure came from Malaysia and Taiwan as well as Hong Kong; Another World’s budget was cobbled together from the Philippines, China and Japan after it began life as a popular short at Annecy. For that matter, the 2024 Oscar winner for animated features, Flow, was a Latvia-France-Belgium co-production; 2024 nominee The Red Turtle was Japan-France; and the list goes on.

“Coproduction is absolutely necessary,” states Chow. “We cannot do it on our own. We have to collaborate with other countries, which is actually a good thing. Animation is a more universal format and it leaves more room to retain rights for your work and ensure a release in the home market.” 

Ultimately, even if Hong Kong never breeds its own Studio Ghibli or Pixar, the talent exists for a rich and diverse animated tradition to continue. But like any movie in 2026, it’s incumbent upon audiences to go out and ensure that continuation. “There is a great scene for animation and moving image in Hong Kong, spearheaded by talented and passionate artists,” insists Colfer. “For it to thrive, further visibility among the wider public through institutional support and press spotlights and further funding and sponsorship opportunities are what are needed to inspire growth and allow artists to keep producing great work.”