Made-in-China animations have seen what many consider a "golden period". People still talk about some Chinese animations. Take Uproar in Heaven, the international-award-winning animation of 1961, for example. Its every scene looks like a fine painting, because the production team used such methods as stamp mark technique in Wuxi Paper Horse (woodblock color or black-and-white paper prints used for folk sacrifice from East China's Jiangsu province), and learned from the murals in Yongle Palace in Shanxi province, North China, to design every character and weapon to present millenniums-old Chinese culture.

Even in the past decade, Chinese animations held some promise thanks to the government's subsidy policy to help develop the animation industry. China even overtook Japan in 2011 as the top producer of cartoon films in terms of total length. But the situation remained unsatisfactory when it came to quality.

Despite its good intentions, the policy designed to subsidize productions by the minute also has attracted and been exploited by quite a few money-minded speculators. With no authoritative organization that can effectively supervise the animation industry and identify copycat productions, people can use the policy to simply plagiarize to cut costs and still go unpunished.

This plagiarizing tendency is also associated with the social environment where intellectual property and originality don't get due respect. Thus, those choosing the easy way out can make more profits easily in the short term while good animators continue to suffer.

Worse, even in the long run the existing social environment could make it difficult to safeguard good animators' legitimate rights and interests. More often than not, independent illustrators whose original works are "stolen" after being posted on the Internet have tried to use social media like micro blogs to seek justice, but the copycats, despite facing online criticisms, have rarely apologized or received proper punishment.

Back to The Autobots. According to its director, it is designed to encourage children to think independently and pursue creativity and innovativeness. But what the director and his team have done is just the opposite and set a bad example to follow.

The author is a writer with China Daily. xiaolixin@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 07/11/2015 page5)