Watch the First Trailer for China’s ‘Little Door Gods’

Light Chaser has told Cartoon Brew that the studio plans to qualify the film for the feature animation category of this year’s Academy Awards, which would likely make Little Door Gods the first homegrown Chinese animated feature to compete in the category.

At a press conference in Beijing yesterday, Wang and producer Yu Zhou talked about the “artistic craftsmanship” that went into the making of Little Door Gods, making clear that the film is different from other homegrown Chinese animated features, which are typically produced on fast schedules and low budgets compared to their Western counterparts. Wang explained that a team of 160 people spent two-and-a-half years producing Little Door Gods, while the script went through 30 versions of continuous refinement.

Zhou said that the film required 80 million CPU render hours, comparable to American films. Both the music and sound effects were produced in Dolby Atmos, a first for a domestic Chinese movie production. Little Door Gods also marks the first time that a Chinese animation studio has worked with Skywalker Sound.

Wang’s reputation in the tech sector has garnered investment from some of China’s biggest Internet giants, including Baidu and Tencent. The film will be released by Alibaba Pictures, the fledgling film arm of e-commerce giant Alibaba. It is the first time that those three Internet companies — Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (collectively known as B.A.T.) — have jointly invested in a single film. Other major co-financing partners include China Film and Gewara.

Little Door Gods will begin playing its roadshow on October 3rd in Qingdao, Changchun, Changzhou, Zhengzhou, Kunming, Foshan, and Taiyuan. No American distribution is set at this time.