Donghua versus Japanese anime: styles, themes and markets compared

Ask an anime fan and they will tell you donghua is stiff 3D adapted from endless novels. Ask a donghua fan and they will tell you anime has been circling the same high school and the same isekai for a decade. Both are wrong in the same way, by judging an industry on its most visible output.

The two animations do not resemble each other because they were not born in the same place. One descends from the manga magazine, the other from the online novel. Almost everything else follows from that.

The word, first#

In Chinese, donghua simply means "animation", regardless of origin: a Japanese film shown in China is a donghua. The word only took on the sense of "Chinese animation" abroad, by symmetry with anime and manhua. In China, domestic production is more often called guoman, "the country's comics and animation".

The source: magazine versus novel platform#

This is the structural difference. A Japanese series usually adapts a manga prepublished in a magazine, sometimes a light novel, occasionally a game. The manga has already proved itself with readers, it supplies a visual breakdown, and the animation studio works from material that is already staged.

A Chinese series overwhelmingly adapts an online novel, published on platforms such as Qidian, where texts of several million characters build a readership chapter by chapter. The studio therefore receives pure text, with no breakdown, and has to invent everything visually.

That difference explains two frequent criticisms of donghua: very long stories, because the novel is long, and sometimes illustrative direction, because nothing prepared the move to images.

Style: 3D is not an admission of weakness#

Chinese animation has invested massively in 3D where Japan stayed with drawing. It is not only a cost question, it is a cadence question. Series such as Soul Land (斗罗大陆) or Battle Through the Heavens (斗破苍穹) release episodes all year round, for years, which no Japanese studio attempts in traditional animation.

The model has its vices, stiff characters, repeated backgrounds, soft fights, and its wins, particularly in energy and flight scenes, where Chinese 3D often beats what an equivalent budget would produce in Japan.

In parallel, China has produced purely 2D work that owes nothing to anyone. Fog Hill of Five Elements (雾山五行, 2020) builds its animation on an ink-wash aesthetic with rarely matched fight readability; Link Click (时光代理人, 2021) shows that a contemporary thriller on a modest budget can travel worldwide.

Themes: what each industry is allowed to tell#

Donghua has a relationship to the supernatural that anime does not, for regulatory reasons. Chinese authorities have for years framed time-travel plots, superstition and depictions of death in content aimed at minors. Writers work around it by moving the action into imaginary worlds, which fed the dominance of xianxia, the tale of immortals and cultivation, and wuxia, the tale of martial chivalry.

Japanese animation built its major genres around the school, the club, the tournament and the workplace. Part of its universality comes from there: high school is a shared experience, immortal cultivation is not.

There is nonetheless a clear convergence. Progression narratives, with tiers, rivals and power-ups, are exactly the same on both sides. Japanese shōnen and Chinese xianxia often tell the same story with a different vocabulary.

Markets: two opposite logics#

The Japanese industry is old, export-oriented and structured by the production committee, that coalition of publishers, broadcasters, toy makers and distributors which shares risk and revenue. The Association of Japanese Animations publishes an annual report in which the overseas share now sits around half of the sector's total turnover.

The Chinese industry is younger and largely integrated, and lives first on its home market. Bilibili, Tencent Video and iQiyi are simultaneously broadcasters, financiers and rights holders, which shortens the chain but concentrates decision-making. The consequence is direct: a Chinese series does not need to please foreign viewers to be profitable, whereas a Japanese series plans for them at the financing stage.

That explains the visibility gap. Donghua is not smaller, it is less exported, and it is exported mainly by Chinese platforms subtitling their own catalogue.

Anime looks for a global audience because it needs one. Donghua can do without, and that is what makes its international arrival so hard to predict.

Where to start if you come from anime#

Three entry points work well for a viewer used to Japan.

• Through auteur 2D: Fog Hill of Five Elements for pure animation, Link Click for contemporary storytelling. These require the least acclimatisation.
• Through cinema: the features of Light Chaser Animation and the Ne Zha films offer production values immediately comparable to Japanese cinema.
• Through xianxia, knowingly: expect long exposition, dense cultivation vocabulary, and seasons counted in hundreds of episodes.

The most common complaint, about dubbing, deserves nuance. Chinese voice acting has professionalised very quickly since the mid-2010s, and recent productions bear little resemblance to those of ten years ago.

Read alsoDonghua: The Rise of Chinese Animation Challenging Japan

The history of Chinese animation, from the Wan brothers to Bilibili-funded studios, is covered in our survey of donghua.

Read alsoC-Drama: The Guide to Chinese Series Captivating the World

Chinese live-action series share the same genre matrix, xianxia and wuxia included.

FAQ#

Does donghua mean Chinese animation? Not in Chinese, where the word means animation in general. It is a foreign usage, convenient for distinguishing Chinese productions from Japanese ones.

Is donghua only in 3D? No. 3D dominates long-running series, but the titles that travel furthest internationally are often 2D, with strong graphic choices.

Why are Chinese series so long? Because they adapt online novels of several million characters, and because platforms prefer a continuous flow to short seasons.

Where can you watch donghua legally? On the international arms of the Chinese platforms, and on Western streaming services that license part of the catalogue.

Do you need to know xianxia to follow along? A few notions help a great deal: cultivation tiers, sects and master-to-disciple bonds structure most plots.

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Photo credits: images in this article come from Wikimedia Commons and are under free licence.