China's Sora-like Vidu breaks into Hollywood with deal to produce GenAI anime series
A Chinese text-to-video generation start-up said it has signed a deal with a US animation studio to produce an artificial intelligence (AI) generated anime series, in the latest example of Hollywood moving to embrace this fast-developing technology.
Vidu, a Sora-like AI model developed by Chinese AI firm ShengShu Technology and Tsinghua University, has formed a "strategic partnership" with Aura Productions, an American studio founded by Chinese-American actress Luo Yan and creative director D.T. Carpenter, according to a statement from ShengShu.
The partners will launch a 50-episode short science-fiction anime series on "mainstream global social media platforms" in 2025. The first trailer for this series will be released globally in the coming days, it said.
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ShengShu co-founder Tang Jiayu unveils the Vidu video tool. Photo: Ben Jiang alt=ShengShu co-founder Tang Jiayu unveils the Vidu video tool. Photo: Ben Jiang>
The deal comes as Chinese video-generation models are gaining attention for their capabilities, opening opportunities for downstream applications. Vidu 2.0, unveiled in January, claims the ability to generate high-quality videos in just 10 seconds.
The production deal will leverage Vidu's "multi-subject consistency" feature to "blend Asian anime elements with Hollywood creativity" to create works that "resonate with young North American audiences", according to the statement.
Vidu was used to generate a Chinese trailer for the 2024 film Venom: The Last Dance. Separately, last September Baidu's large model platform Qianfan integrated Vidu into its platform.
ShengShu also teamed up with the China unit of US AI chipmaker AMD to help in "accelerating the launch of AI personal computer applications", according to a press release issued in March 2024.
The partnership with Aura Productions is the first project since ShengShu Technology poached Luo Yihang from ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. Luo, the former head of AI solutions at ByteDance's cloud unit Volcano Engine, joined the start-up as chief executive to oversee research and development, product management, commercialisation and team management. Luo and Aura founder Luo Yan are not related.
Luo Yihang said on Monday that he expected the new collaboration to "further push the boundaries of anime production".
Video generation is seen as an important application of generative AI (GenAI) technologies.
Video generation is seen as an important application of generative AI technologies. Around 204,000 jobs in the entertainment industry - including film, video gaming and music - are poised to "undergo significant disruption" between 2024 and 2026 due to the implementation of GenAI, according to a report by Los Angeles, California-based consultancy CVL Economics.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2025. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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New York Post
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