WAGA / INDEPENDENT ART ANIMATION

WagaAnime CO-OP

It's all nothing much.

WagaAnime Co-op is an independent animation collective making serious, hand-led animation for difficult stories. We work slowly, with precision, toward films that refuse easy comfort.

SELECTED WORKS

Works, still underwater.

Pre-WAGA, unproduced concepts and visual studies shown for gravity, tone, and pressure.

PRE-WAGA / RIGHTS HELD UNPRODUCED CONCEPT 01

Etched in the Stone

导演 / Director: 小刍 / 分镜 / Storyboard: 甚的八百万 / 美术 / Art: 月寸 / 角色 / Character: 廖心悦, 王宇轩 / 场景 / Background: 66

In a Republican-era art academy, a group of young students try to force a Western life-drawing class into being, convinced that art and fame can outrun consequence. A rural woman is hired as their nude model. When shame, ideology, and ambition collide, the school becomes a furnace for everything they thought would make them immortal.

PRE-WAGA / REFERENCE ONLY UNPRODUCED CONCEPT 02

A Woman drawn by Maliang

导演 / Director: 小刍 / 角色 / Character: 廖欣悦 / 场景 / Background: 66

In the Nation of Art, buildings, clothes, and food can all be brought into being by brush and pigment. A retired engineer studies how to paint his dead wife back to life, mistaking likeness for soul and mastery for love. The question is not whether art can imitate life, but whether it can ever possess another will.

PRE-WAGA / IP CONCEPT UNPRODUCED CONCEPT 03

Which News

Project study: 报忧社 / Realist manga IP concept

导演 / Director: 小刍 / 角色 / Character: 廖心悦雷谨如曾胜蓝王之璇

Which News (报忧社) — crow silhouette concept sheet

A realist manga-and-image-note IP built around regret, courage, and understanding. It is not a fan-service account, but a sad ordinary culture carried by animals, objects, and small marks of survival.

Which News (报忧社) — character concept sheet

Mountain residents, fragile lives.

The plan follows animal residents on a mountain, using their weaknesses, obsessions, defects, and persistence to approach real human stories. Daily notes stay light; special chapters carry the heavier emotional memory.

The same glass, seen twice.

The project's first question is simple: a glass of water sits on the table, and two people describe it differently. One sees what is missing; the other sees what remains. Which News stays inside that disagreement. It does not force grief into optimism, or weakness into spectacle. It looks at ordinary wounds from both sides until courage and understanding become possible.

STATUS NOTE / Etched in the Stone: storyboard and screenplay rights held. A Woman drawn by Maliang and Which News: reference only; no copyright claim.

QUESTIONS WORTH ASKING

Before joining, ask harder questions.

These are the questions a serious viewer, animator, or collaborator should probably ask first.

Isn't “serious art animation that refuses the audience” just a polite name for work nobody wants to watch?

Maybe. We're not trying to be unwatchable — we refuse to be watchable on cheap terms: cute, loud, flattering, neatly resolved. If the price is a small room, we'll pay it. We'd rather be the thing a few people can't forget than the thing everyone half-likes and forgets by dinner.

If “it's all nothing much,” why act as if only you can make this?

Both are true and they don't cancel. No one here matters more than anyone else — we all bleed the same. But the work itself, the kind almost no one will slow down enough to make, is barely being made. That's not a boast about us; it's a complaint about the field. The thing is rare because people won't do it, not because we're special.

You use AI tools. Doesn't that make “hand-led animation” a lie?

No — the romance of “everything by hand” is its own vanity. The question was never hand versus machine; it's control: how precisely you can bend the result to what you meant. We draw by hand what has to be, and use the machine where it earns its keep. What we won't do is let the tool make the decision.

Looking down on the crowd, turning most people away — isn't this just a clique flattering itself?

From the outside, probably. We're not building a club to feel superior; we're filtering for people who'll do slow, brutal, invisible work without applause. The contempt isn't the goal — it's what's left over when you still care about something most of the field gave up on. You don't have to like us. We're not for everyone, and we've stopped pretending otherwise.

How do you survive without selling out — and isn't “the money will come” naive?

We don't assume it comes. We refuse to let it steer. Stay small, keep other income if we must, never let a budget rewrite a film. A collective that needs to eat off the work will, in the end, make the work it can sell. We'd rather not be hungry in the room where the decisions get made.

CONTACT / LETTER

The door is half-open.

This is not a job opening. WAGA is not yet entering full operation. The half-open door is an invitation to find like-minded friends: animators, artists, writers, and others who care about animation as a serious art form. We are waiting for the right people to gather before the work fully begins. If this speaks to you, write a plain letter; no resume template is required.

EMAIL
chizhu1208@163.com

PLEASE INCLUDE

Why do you want to join us?
What do you expect from Chinese animation as an art form?

HALF-OPEN