WAGA / ART ANIMATION

WagaAnime CO-OP

It's all nothing much.

WagaAnime Co-op is an art-animation co-creation collective making serious animation for difficult, heavy stories. We work slowly, with precision, toward images that refuse comfort.

PROJECT RESERVE

Concepts still underwater.

Pre-WAGA, unproduced concepts and studies shown here for WAGA's weight and tone.

PRE-WAGA / RIGHTS HELD UNPRODUCED CONCEPT 01

Etched in the Stone (aka We Must Go Down in History)

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 / 助理编剧 / Script Assistant: 小牛半边

A group of proud Republican-era art-college students risk moral outrage to introduce a Western life-drawing class, hiring a rural woman named Chen Shao'ai as their nude model. A conservative woman student, Tie Zhengzheng, believes art should serve the people and tries to stop the class, but the so-called new art tide of science, reason, freedom, and openness prevails. After one day as a model, Shao'ai jumps into the river under the pressure of tradition and family. Believing her own sabotage caused the death, Tie returns with students from the women's school and an unexplained gun, trying to force the academy to destroy every drawing of Chen Shao'ai and restore her innocence. Instead, a fire consumes the school and the proud works of its young artists.

PRE-WAGA / REFERENCE ONLY / PARTIAL RIGHTS HELD UNPRODUCED CONCEPT 02

A Person Drawn by Maliang

导演 / Director: 小刍 / 角色 / Character: 廖心悦 / 场景 / Background: 66 助理场景 / Background Assistant: 小牛半边概念美术 / Concept Art: 雷谨如、王之璇、曾胜蓝、甚的八百万、小刍、廖心悦

Tugou (working name), a retired infrastructure engineer from the Nation of Art, studies how to paint a person alive out of two entangled desires: to revive his dead wife, and to become famous through that revival. His basement fills with portraits of her: some missing limbs, some dripping paint, each trying to capture not only likeness but expression, movement, capillaries, even the motion of cells. At the annual Great Exhibition, he thinks he has succeeded, until the painted wife screams, scratches her own face, leaves marks, and falls still. Maliang appears and says: “In fact, I never painted a real dragon either... because a real dragon has thoughts of its own.” Life has its own will; even the most precise representation cannot truly control it.

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 / 助理角色 / Character Design Assistant: 小牛半边

Which News (报忧社) — crow silhouette concept sheet

Which News is a realist manga / image-note IP concept built around regret, courage, and understanding. It is not a fan-service account, but an ordinary world narrated by animals, objects, and the smiling traces of their survival.

Which News (报忧社) — character concept sheet

Residents of the mountain, fragile beings.

The plan follows animal residents living on “the mountain,” using their weaknesses, obsessions, and defects as anchors to draw out the real human parts inside them. Daily notes should stay light but not frivolous; special chapters will carry heavier feelings and memories.

One glass, two parallax views.

The project's first idea is simple: a glass of water sits on the table, and two people say different things. One says the glass is half empty; the other says it is half full. Which News chooses to stay inside that disagreement. It does not force sadness into optimism, nor turn weakness and ugliness into a moving spectacle. It looks at the most ordinary wound from both sides, until courage, understanding, and kindness all become possible.

NOTE / We Must Go Down in History: storyboard and screenplay rights held by WAGA. A Person Drawn by Maliang: reference only; no copyright claim. Which News: all rights held by WAGA.

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 look down on the crowd and flatter yourselves inside your own little circle, don't you?

From the outside, yes. But we are not building a club for superiority; we are looking for art-animation workers willing to do slow, brutal, invisible work without applause. Contempt is neither a method nor a goal. It is an undeniable effect, the remaining warmth of things most people have abandoned but that have not disappeared. No one has to like WAGA, but WAGA has to exist as itself.

How do you know you can make money? Isn't that too naive?

We do not pretend we can already make money, or turn that into a success-story forecast. We can stay small, even if that means one person. But we will never let a budget rewrite a film. I believe an organization that must generate income from its work can, in the end, make work that keeps itself alive.

CONTACT / LETTER

The door is half-closed, waiting for your knock.

In fact, this is not a job opening. WAGA is not yet entering full operation. The half-open door is here to find like-minded friends: animators, artists, writers, and others who think of animation as a serious art form. Before the work fully begins, we are waiting for the right people to gather. 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 animation as art, especially Chinese animation?

HALF-OPEN