Utopai & Huace Co-Produce AI-Animated Journey to the
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- Utopai Studios and Huace Film & TV are co-producing "Journey to the West: The Lost Five Hundred Years," a fully AI-generated animated series built on Utopai's proprietary PAI system.
- The series reimagines the origin of Sun Wukong's 500-year imprisonment and is designed as the opening chapter of a planned theatrical franchise.
- Under the deal, Huace produces the series using PAI while Utopai retains all distribution rights outside China; the first season targets broadcast, streaming, and digital platforms.
- This is the first new series to move forward under Utopai and Huace's previously announced strategic partnership, under which Huace selected PAI as its engine for long-form narrative creation.
- Cecilia Shen, CEO of Utopai Studios, called "Journey to the West" one of the great mythological universes in world entertainment and framed the project as a way to "unlock iconic IP" at franchise scale.
- Binxing Fu, CEO of Huace Group, said the partnership preserves "the cultural depth, emotional power and sense of wonder" of the source material while bringing it into a fully AI-generated animated format.
Why it matters: Huace selected PAI as its long-form narrative engine and is now putting it on one of China's most beloved cultural IPs as the first concrete project under that strategic partnership. The split-rights structure is the deal's real architecture: Huace produces in China, Utopai owns every market outside it — giving both companies a defined revenue lane and giving PAI a flagship commercial deployment at franchise scale.
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