The concept of AI animated short dramas continues to heat up in the capital markets. Industry insiders believe that AI animated short dramas have become the fastest-growing segment within the micro-short drama industry and are expected to be a significant commercial application point for AI technology.
The creative process has been substantially simplified. Animated short dramas, also known as animation micro-short dramas, are seeing their traditionally complex production workflows transformed by AI technology. Utilizing a model of "automated tools and low-threshold operation," the process is now streamlined into an efficient chain of "idea input, AI generation, and manual refinement."
This transformation is believed to not only lower the barrier to creation but also highly align with current fragmented consumption trends, showing potential for rapid expansion through content fission. Data from the "2025-2026 China AI Animated Short Drama Industry Trend White Paper" released by iiMedia Research indicates that the scale of China's animated micro-short drama market reached 18.98 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 276.3%, and is projected to exceed 85 billion yuan by 2030. As an emerging sub-sector of micro-short dramas, AI animated short dramas demonstrate significant commercial potential.
The deep integration of AI technology has fundamentally rewritten the production logic of animated short dramas, yielding notable results in cost reduction and efficiency gains. From a creation standpoint, AI's core impact is clearly centered on lowering costs and boosting efficiency. It can reduce the cost of short drama content by 70% to 80% and compress production cycles to a matter of days. Furthermore, AI promotes creative democratization, allowing ordinary individuals to participate and significantly lowering the industry's entry barrier. It also enables rapid IP adaptation, diversified styles, and quick content iteration, allowing for swift responses to market and user demands.
Listed companies are competing to establish a presence in this area. AI animated short dramas are creating greater imaginative space for industrial development, prompting related listed firms to actively strategize their layouts. For instance, since 2025, Huanyu Century Co., Ltd. has continuously optimized its core business structure, achieving breakthrough progress in new ventures like short dramas, AI animated short dramas, and interactive video games. The company's strategic transformation is gradually yielding substantive results, carving a path toward sustainable development within the film and television industry. A representative from Huanyu Century revealed that the company, in collaboration with Shanghai Jieyue Xingchen, co-established the "Lin Yue" AI Joint Laboratory. This integrates cutting-edge AI technology into core aspects like content creation and image generation, enhancing production efficiency and content quality, thereby building a solid technical foundation for the mass production of short dramas, interactive video games, and animated short dramas.
Films such as "Boonie Bears: Annual Bears," "Pegasus 3," and "Starry Dream," invested in and produced by Hengdian Entertainment Co., Ltd., are scheduled for the 2026 Spring Festival档期. A representative from Hengdian Entertainment previously disclosed that the company is capitalizing on the trend of AI animated short dramas, having organized a professional team for development and production. It is currently incubating AI animated short dramas based on IP like "Chronicles of the Nine Provinces: Herding Clouds." From a cost perspective, AI technology is expected to significantly reduce the per-minute production cost of animated short dramas and markedly increase output efficiency.
On February 5th, A-share listed AIGC software company Wanxing Technology Group Co., Ltd., together with Shengshu Technology, successfully held a strategic investment and cooperation signing ceremony in Shenzhen. During the event, Wanxing Technology announced an intensified focus on its AI animated short drama strategy, investing tens of millions of yuan in Shengshu Technology, an AI innovation enterprise specializing in multimodal general large model research and development. The two parties also formally entered into an in-depth strategic collaboration. This partnership will focus on ecosystem-level co-creation around "large models + tools + scenarios," aiming to establish a new paradigm for the industrial-scale production of AI animated short dramas.
Industry observers suggest that the AI animated short drama market began entering a phase of large-scale commercialization in the second half of 2025 but is still under exploration. The industry is currently in the early explosive stage characterized by traffic红利, with technology initially achieving commercial application and the industrial chain's framework basically formed. In the future, the focus for AI animated short dramas will shift from scale expansion to quality enhancement, alongside achieving audience breakout and format integration. "Going global" is also expected to become an important development direction. From a long-term perspective, the industry still needs to address challenges such as content homogenization and user aesthetic fatigue. The key to sustained growth lies in the stable supply of high-quality content.
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