Donghua Is Booming — and the Fight Over Whether It 'Counts' as Anime Misses the Point

Ten years ago, "donghua" was a word you mostly heard inside a small circle of fans trading subtitles for Chinese web-novel adaptations. Today it's attached to the highest-grossing animated film ever made. That shift deserves to be taken seriously — and so does the tired argument about whether donghua belongs on the same shelf as anime.

First, a definition

"Donghua" (动画) is simply the Chinese word for animation, the same way "anime" is the Japanese one. In the West, both terms narrowed: anime came to mean "animation from Japan," and donghua now means "animation from China." (Korean animation gets called "aeni.") None of these are genres. They're passports.

The receipts are piling up

The case for donghua isn't sentimental anymore — it's on the ledger. *Ne Zha 2* opened in China in early 2025 and grossed more than $2 billion, becoming the highest-grossing animated film in history and the first movie ever to clear $2 billion in a single market. That's not the fluke of one blockbuster, either.

On the series side, *Link Click* (*Shiguang Dailiren*) delivered a time-travel thriller with tighter emotional plotting than most of its Japanese peers. *Fog Hill of Five Elements* stunned action fans with hand-crafted, ink-wash fight choreography. *Scissor Seven* — a scrappy, hilarious assassin comedy — has been on Netflix for years. Sprawling cultivation epics like *Mo Dao Zu Shi*, *Heaven Official's Blessing*, and *Soul Land* pull enormous audiences on bilibili and Tencent Video. The craft ceiling has clearly risen.

The "it's not real anime" argument

The objection is real, and it isn't purely gatekeeping. Anime is a specific national tradition with decades of studio culture behind it, and slapping the word onto everything with big eyes flattens that. Plenty of donghua also wear their Japanese influence loudly — some early titles were animated partly by Japanese studios, and the visual grammar is borrowed openly.

But "it's derivative" was said about anime itself for years. Osamu Tezuka, the godfather of the medium, took cues from early Disney. Influence is how animation traditions grow. And the best donghua no longer read as imitation: the xianxia and wuxia genres, the mythology behind *Ne Zha*, the ink-wash aesthetics — those are distinctly Chinese, not Tokyo cosplay.

Why the shelf should just include it

Here's my actual position: the fight over the word is a distraction. Viewers don't organize their watchlists by the passport of the animators. They organize them by "what will I love." If you finished *Jujutsu Kaisen* and want more gorgeous, high-stakes action, *Fog Hill of Five Elements* is a better recommendation than the next forgettable seasonal anime — full stop.

Keeping donghua in a separate, quarantined section treats country of origin as more important than quality or taste. A good catalog should label things honestly — yes, this is Chinese animation, here's the original language — and then let the work compete on merit. Purists can still use the label to filter. Everyone else gets a bigger, better menu.

Donghua doesn't need to be "counted as anime" to belong next to it. It needs to be good, and increasingly, it is.

Where to start

If you're donghua-curious, ease in with *Link Click* for tight storytelling, *Fog Hill of Five Elements* for jaw-dropping action, or *Scissor Seven* for comedy. Then work your way up to the big cultivation sagas.

AnimeSphere exists to make it easy to find great animation you can watch legally and for free — without pretending a hard border runs down the middle of Asia. Browse the free, legal catalog, sort by whatever you're in the mood for, and let the animation, not the passport, decide what you queue up next.