I Have a Question: Ao Zirui

Ao Zirui: Partner of One Universe Culture Co., Ltd.(Beijing)

CGGE: Animation World Network

The Emperor: An IP content operated by the company, including extension and commercial authorization.

CGGE: When was the image of the Emperor created, where did the inspiration come from and how is its current development?

Ao Zirui: The author of this cartoon image is Bai Cha, an illustrator who has spent 10 years working on this realm until he created the image of The Emperor and Ba Zhahei and had his own IP. The Emperor is a proud, finicky, overbearing kitten. It has a good friend called Ba Zhahei, a gluttony, adorable and loyal pug. Our company was set up in 2016 and had been operated for more than 2 years. Yet these two images originated from the Internet in the second half of 2014. Our first illustrated book came out in May of 2015, with its Volume One published for 2-3 million pieces. Up to now, it has issued 3 volumes. This year, we will publish the second edition of Volume One and Volume Four of the illustrated book. This IP image is successful domestically in both business and content, with 3-4 million followers on our We Media, microblog and Wechat public account. On WeChat we are a very hot theme. Our articles have over 100 thousand times of reading and 8000 times of “Like”, which ranks No.1 of all our products. We have cooperated with many Super Brands within China. Many of the Fortune Global 500 are our clients. Innisfree, KFC, Panasonic and Hair are our clients and Licensees.The domestic audience of The Emperor is targeted at 18 years old to 39 years old. And we also cover children and crowds above 39. They like the Emperor for its identity as an Adorable pet, the family concept it conveys as well as the interaction between humans and animals.

CGGE：Will you consider choosing CGGE as a platform for overseas communication?

It is a great pleasure to know CGGE at the Annecy Exhibition. As a cartoon brand in Chinese mainland, CGGE can help us export our images. As there used to be many foreign cartoon images within China, our Licensees have gotten used to using classic foreign cartoon images. Now that the domestic contents and creative ideas of cartoon images have been developing, there emerge some New Media, including products of our own platform that have a large amount of user traffic. We hope that we could export these products so that we could have cultural communication with foreign countries.

CGGE: What do you think of the future prospects of the Emperor and Ba Zhahei?

Ao Zirui: I think they have great potential to be one of the cartoon images that could represent China. Not only do they have Chinese ink painting style, but their contents feature Chinese culture, love and care between family members and between people and animals. We hope that we could transmit these concepts between people and animals to the globe, so that we could have more foreign licensees other than domestic ones. This way we could build an international cartoon image that could better represent China.

CGGE: How did you manage to deal with the infringement on your images by a shopping mall in Xin Jiang a short time ago?

Ao Zirui: We were quite shocked at that time as we did not expect the mall would infringe on the legal authorization rights of the cartoon images in such a way. Later this mall communicated with us, yet we have not reached agreements on some key issues so we will protect our rights and interests through legal means. The people in charge of the mall thought it weird that we came to them for this issue as they went away with several piracy and infringement of cartoon images from the Disney or Japan. We wanted to settle this in private at first yet had to resort to the court for a trial of this in the end. We do hope that characters from comics and animation with content and creation inside them could be protected by the law and win more respect on markets, as the origin of the creations are precious. Now China are putting more and more efforts into protecting intellectual property and creative contents, so that creators could remain enthusiastic in their creation and come up with better works.