When the live-action short drama is rolled to the extreme, low-cost animation short dramas with unlimited special effects quietly rise: Bilibili smashes money, Kuaishou pushes stars, Douyin opens IP, and AIGC allows a small team of 10 people to watch interstellar wars every week. The outlet of two-dimensional + short dramas is approaching the critical point of the outbreak.
In the short drama market in 2025, the heat is still high, and the fierce battle is still unstoppable. As of the middle of the year, the market of short drama users has further expanded, and the competition from all parties has continued to increase. According to the “2025 Panoramic Ecological Traffic Semi-Annual Report” released by Quest Mobile on July 15, the monthly active users of Hongguo free short dramas in May have reached 199 million, and the monthly active scale of Hippo Theater has also reached about 40.96 million.
At the same time, in addition to the soaring App side, the short drama mini program also attracts a large number of users with its convenient advantages, and the traffic of the TOP10 short drama WeChat mini program has exceeded the 20 million mark, and the traffic of the TOP10 short drama Douyin mini program has reached more than one million.
Image source: Quest Mobile
Correspondingly, in order to compete for the attention of hundreds of millions of users, short drama practitioners are fighting hand-to-hand on the content battlefield, high-frequency iterations in all aspects of production and broadcasting, and the male and female frequencies are “killing red eyes”. It is worth noting that just as the competition for short dramas tends to be fierce, animation short dramas that are different from live-action interpretations are rising in another “dimension”.
According to the data previously released by the Giant Engine, in the fourth quarter of 2024, the number of viewers of animation short dramas will exceed 2 billion, and the payment scale will reach 26 million, and the fourth quarter will increase by 123.91% month-on-month compared with the third quarter, with a revenue growth rate of 204.11%, and the entire comic drama market can be described as entering a period of rapid expansion. Nowadays, as more and more platforms and creators enter the game, a new round of short drama war has begun.
01
The origin and opportunities of comic dramas For the audience, anime short dramas look both familiar and unfamiliar. In fact, long before “comic dramas” became popular with the trend of short dramas, the majority of audiences had already seen similar national comic products, the so-called “dynamic comics”.
To put it simply, dynamic comics are in the middle between comics and animation. It will re-process the comic pictures, such as adding dubbing and dynamic effects, to get a new version of the video.
Obviously, compared with animation in the traditional sense, dynamic comics reduce the cost of drawing, modeling and other links, and the production cycle is much shorter. If it is based on a mature comic work, then its delivery efficiency is actually very high.
In the past, many well-known online IP IPs, including the “Breaking the Sky” and “Douluo Continent” series, have included dynamic comics in their development territory.
Continuing the comic grid of “Fighting the Sky” dynamic comic, the picture source Tencent Video However, in the eyes of many users, dynamic comics are quite tasteless – it is said to be dynamic but the amplitude is limited, not only the fluency is difficult to compare with pure-blood animation, but the picture accuracy also depends entirely on the basis of comics.
Therefore, dynamic comics have always faced ridicule from the audience community that they are “not as good as PPT”, and it is difficult to exert additional commercial monetization capabilities, and the market performance has always been tepid. Fortunately, with the rise of short dramas, dynamic comics have finally ushered in a turning point. Earlier, in the animation coordinate system, the lightweight, fragmented, and low-cost attributes of dynamic comics failed to translate into sufficient competitiveness, but in the context of the short drama industry, these characteristics are very appropriate.
From a content point of view, the text source on which local dynamic comics rely is in the same vein as live-action short dramas, and the plot structure is born from Chinese online texts. In other words, dynamic comics do not lack the fantasy themes and counterattack narratives that are popular in live-action short dramas, and it is not difficult for the audience to accept them.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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In terms of market feedback, in the consumption scenario dominated by vertical screen short video content, audiences often do not regard the quality of long animation as the default yardstick, and the acceptance of dynamic comic visual effects is naturally higher. Moreover, the various business models explored in the development process of the short drama industry can also provide a clear commercialization path for dynamic comics.
In this way, the rising concept of “comic drama” has successfully reversed the embarrassing positioning of dynamic comics as an “animation replacement” for a long time. According to data from the DataEye-ADX industry version, in the first half of 2025, the number of dynamic comic dramas online will exceed 1,000, and there will be as many as 214 new dynamic comic dramas in May alone.
When the supply expanded, a number of comic drama hits came out. For example, the short dramas “I Was a Zombie at the Doom” and “The Woman Who Kiss the Crack at the Beginning” in the form of dynamic comics have been played more than 150 million and more than 63 million respectively in the first season of the Douyin end.
Image source: Douyin
In the process of frequent examples, the product scope of comic dramas itself has also been continuously expanded. In addition to dynamic comics based on hand-drawn comics, there are more and more UGC comics on the market.
They are mainly set in the game editor, and the familiar “Reverse Water Cold” and “Great Song Movie” are representative of them. What’s even more remarkable is that the ever-changing AIGC wave has added fire to animation short dramas. Thanks to the rapid development of large model technology, multi-modal capabilities such as Wensheng Picture and Tusheng Video have continued to evolve, and the cost of creating animation content has dropped significantly.
According to the “2025 China Micro Short Drama Market Development Insight Report” released by Dawn Oriental, AIGC short dramas can effectively reduce labor costs, and are expected to control the team of more than 50 people required for traditional short drama projects to less than 10 people, and the process cycle can be shortened from monthly to weekly.
Source: Dawn Oriental “2025 China Micro Short Drama Market Development Insight Report”
In this way, many small and medium-sized teams have gained the opportunity to enter the game, and the supply of AIGC comics is bound to rise significantly, and the market vitality of the entire animation short drama will also be further burst out.
02
Reasons for platform competition For video platforms, animation short dramas have gradually become a battleground. This summer, the competitive trend is particularly conspicuous. As a blockbuster player in the field of national innovation, Bilibili has released a very clear incentive signal.
In March 2025, Wen Yufei, head of Bilibili’s micro-short drama business, said at the 2nd Shanghai Micro-short Drama Conference that animation and short dramas will be an important exploration direction for Bilibili this year, including the animation of live-action short dramas.
Not long ago, on June 19, Bilibili officially released a special project to support animated short dramas called “Awakening Plan”, providing 30% to 100% of the cost coverage ratio and a maximum of 80% of the share ratio for UP owners, MCN institutions and animation short drama production companies. According to reports, Bilibili is focusing on promoting copyright cooperation with online platforms, and more IP is ready to go to comic dramas.
Coincidentally, Kuaishou has also accelerated the pace of layout for comic dramas this year. In February, Kuaishou officially set up a special team to generalize the original dynamic comic business into comic dramas and further enhance the priority of animation and short dramas. Then, Kuaishou Magnetic Engine also launched the “Comic Star Comic Project” at a critical summer node.
The program aims to incubate high-quality comic dramas, mainly providing resource support for the first vertical screen dramas with beautiful picture quality, smooth dynamic effects, and meeting the needs of duration and volume. In addition, Kuaishou Magnetic Engine will also launch the “Summer Super Comic Drama Season” activity, inviting multiple vertical experts in the station to participate in topic co-creation.
Image source network
Similarly, Douyin is not absent from this grand competition. In March, Wang Shuo, head of the operation of the giant engine download and consumer goods industry, said at the “Comic Galaxy” giant engine comic creation and business theme exchange meeting that the platform will fully support creators and tilt traffic resources and operational support for high-quality comic dramas released on Douyin or distributed on multiple platforms.
For example, in order to solve the pain points of insufficient original ability and long production cycle, Giant Engine and technology companies have launched a “material library + tool chain” solution, opening up 35% of the undeveloped online text IP library to creators, and providing them with AI character generation, dynamic storyboard tools, etc. Ideally, small and medium-sized teams will have the opportunity to significantly reduce costs and quickly produce high-quality comic dramas.
Image source: Huge Engine
From the perspective of user needs, it is easy for us to understand the decisions of major platforms to bet on comic dramas one after another. On the one hand, under the premise that the production cost is controllable, animation short dramas are probably the category that can provide the most visual stimulation in lightweight content. Especially for popular themes such as fantasy, science fiction and even apocalyptic thriller, it is difficult for live-action short dramas to completely solve the cost problem of setting and fighting special effects.
Even the long drama projects that have been invested heavily on the long video platform may not always be implemented smoothly, and short dramas that pay attention to small and broad are of course even more difficult to control. The emergence of animation skits can provide a solution to this problem. From the vast desert to the vast universe, from the ancient wilderness to the future city, the animation short dramas with the blessing of AI have more free set options, and the cost performance to meet the spectacle needs of users is far more than that of live-action short dramas, and the market increment is self-evident.
On the other hand, the two-dimensional attributes of comic dramas themselves can also broaden the consumer base for video platforms. According to the data disclosed by the DataEye Research Institute, taking the Kuaishou platform as an example, the proportion of users who watch animation short dramas has a vertical first-level interest of the second dimension is as high as 76.79%. Pan-two-dimensional users are precisely one of the most concerned, active and potential consumer groups in recent years.
According to the “2024-2025 China Millet Economic Market Analysis Report” released by iiMedia Consulting, the size of China’s pan-two-dimensional and surrounding markets will be 298.3 billion yuan in 2019, rapidly increase to 597.7 billion yuan in 2024, and is expected to reach 834.4 billion yuan in 2029. The outbreak of the pan-two-dimensional market has become the consensus of the industry.
Source: iiMedia Consulting
In the face of such amazing growth expectations, animation short dramas that can improve the stickiness of the new generation of users and brew a two-dimensional ecology will of course become a sweet spot in the eyes of the platform.
03
AI and IP achieve competition Looking at the overall situation, there are not many industrial roles that can find opportunities from this boom. In addition to video platforms with incremental categories and small and medium-sized CPs given chips by AI, the local comic platforms we are familiar with are undoubtedly highly competitive participants. Fans of national comics may have noticed that the head comic position has moved.
Taking Tencent Animation as an example, after opening the App, we can find a special comic channel and click the “Chase Drama” button on the homepage to see a series of newly launched anime short dramas. They are uniformly arranged under the name of “Quick Brush Theater”, including fantasy, suspense, romance and many other strong categories of national comics.
Image source: Tencent Animation App
At present, most of the comic drama works launched by Tencent Animation are based on existing IP development, and the lineup is quite luxurious at a glance. For example, the short drama “My Name is Bai Xiaofei” adapted from the well-known original comic “Corpse Brother”, the short drama “The King Spares Life” from the starting point Chinese Internet male frequency IP, and the short drama of the same name adapted from science fiction comics “Iron Princess Steel Soldiers” and so on.
Specifically, these comic dramas include works that follow the traditional dynamic comic path, such as “Celebrating More Than Years”, which has extremely fruitful IP development results, and new forms of comic dramas that combine AI technology, such as the new “Iron Princess Steel Soldiers” short drama.
You must know that “Iron Princess Steel Soldiers”, as a rare domestic science fiction comic, has a very grand original structure, the character commands the interstellar fleet in the vast universe, and the war scenes are even more huge.
It is conceivable that these settings will inevitably bring a lot of difficulty in adaptation, and the influence of “Iron Princess Steel Soldiers” outside the comic book circle will be limited. And this time, according to Tencent Animation, “Iron Princess Steel Soldiers” is defined as a “super special effects comic drama”. When the story was adapted into a short drama through AI technology, the first episode of the opening episode made big scenes such as monster attacks, army assembly, and interstellar battles, and almost every picture was filled with explosive special effects.
Although there are still certain shortcomings in the AI-generated character demeanor, the overall flaws are not hidden, and the mass entertainment value brought by three-dimensional visual effects is obviously more solid than that of ordinary dynamic comics.
Image source: Tencent Animation App
In addition to “Iron Princess and Steel Soldiers”, Tencent Animation is also developing some AIGC comic dramas such as “No. 13 Mink Street” and “Mr. Marvel of China” at the same time. Their commonality is that they absorb the help of AIGC on the basis of inheriting the IP heritage, so as to give full play to the production advantages of light cost and weight excitement, and expand the influence of IP to more users.
From the perspective of the platform, this “AI+IP” creative idea is essentially to use the IP stock that has been precipitated for many years to realize tomorrow’s commercial increments. For Tencent Animation and its closely related China Literature Group, if the short drama adaptation model can run through, then their massive online texts and original comics can further pre-develop IP, achieve visual adaptation at the lowest cost, and then further screen and add notes based on market feedback.
It can be said that in the increasingly hot comic drama market, the original content position, including the national comic platform, has ushered in a new opportunity to turn around and dance. Nowadays, not only Tencent Animation has quickly entered the game, but many companies such as Tomato Novel and Chinese Online have quickly stepped on the stage with good stories, the former linked up with Hongguo to test the waters and opened the male frequency IP adaptation of the comic drama “Fantasy: Starting from Pulling Erhu”……
Tomato Novel is online on the comic drama channel, picture source Tomato Novel App
Driven by the source of content, mainstream distribution platforms, large and small creative teams and external technological revolutions, animation short dramas have shown signs of an outbreak that should not be underestimated. The next super national comic IP may not be born in the short drama industry.
