Two AI Series Break into Cannes: Jellyfish Intelligence Aims to Be the Breakthrough Player in the Industrialization of AI Content | Project Report
Two fully AI-produced vertical dramas from Waterdrop Intelligent’s studios were selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Fantastic Pavilion, marking a
Analysis
Background
The article frames Cannes selection as more than a publicity win: it is presented as an industry coming-of-age moment for AI-made vertical dramas. Two works, The Golden Tomb Seeker and Series Tower, were chosen as two of only 21 officially screened vertical productions from over 1,000 entries spanning 120 countries. The symbolic weight matters because AI comic dramas had previously been seen as disposable “electronic junk food,” associated with crude visuals, sensational plots, and low cultural value.
The central claim is that in roughly one year, AI vertical drama moved from a chaotic, low-end growth phase into a stage resembling the maturation that took traditional short drama five years to achieve. That acceleration is the article’s core thesis.
The Industry Shift
The article identifies a sharp transition between 2025 and 2026.
In 2025:
- The sector produced over 50,000 works in a year.
- Only a few hundred were truly profitable.
- Most companies survived by:
- taking outsourced orders,
- maximizing output volume,
- chasing trends.
This led to predictable failure modes:
- broken visuals,
- melodramatic and formulaic writing,
- deformed characters,
- mass takedowns by platforms.
By 2026, the environment changes decisively because platforms and technology stop rewarding quantity alone.
Platform pressure
After the integration of Douyin and Hongguo, platform policy explicitly favored premium AI content:
- realistic AI dramas received revenue-sharing multipliers up to 60 times those of live-action drama,
- low-quality content lost traffic support,
- borderline or vulgar content was removed.
This means the earlier “volume stacking” strategy becomes structurally unviable. The article suggests that platform incentives are now shaping aesthetics and production standards, not just distribution outcomes.
Technological pressure
Seedance 2.0 is described as another decisive force. It upgrades AI video from:
- single-shot assembly,
to - continuous multi-shot narrative,
while also improving:
- image quality to 1080P,
- facial expression realism,
- camera movement rhythm,
- scene precision.
Technology here is not treated as an abstract improvement but as a production threshold. Once technical standards rise, leading companies lock in:
- computing power,
- concurrency capacity,
- portrait-rights whitelists.
This creates what the article calls a technology arms race, making survival dependent on integrated capability rather than casual experimentation.
Why Waterdrop Intelligent Stands Out
The article positions Waterdrop Intelligent as succeeding because it did not build itself as a simple production vendor. Its model is explicitly “tools + production + talent cultivation.”
1. Tool-building
Waterdrop developed:
- the domestic platform Chushou AI,
- the overseas platform Animeshorts.ai.
These tools cover the entire workflow:
- topic selection,
- IP screening,
- script generation,
- storyboarding,
- image generation,
- video generation,
- post-production.
This matters because the company is not merely using AI tools; it is building infrastructure for AI content production. The article reinforces this with market proof: Animeshorts.ai became Product Hunt’s product of the day and gained nearly 100,000 paying creators in Japan alone.
2. IP control
The company also avoids dependence on generic trend-chasing by signing major writers such as:
- Tianxia Bachang,
- Gaoyang,
- Pan Haitian,
and securing 350 licensed IPs through partnerships with major novel and film/TV IP platforms.
This is significant because the article sees the future not in isolated viral shorts, but in IP-based long-term content ecosystems.
3. Talent and standards
The company is also involved in:
- national AIGC job standards under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology,
- founding the country’s first AI design industry-education integration consortium,
- bringing courses into hundreds of schools.
This is a deeper strategic layer. While competitors lack people, capacity, and standards, Waterdrop is trying to stabilize supply at the source. The article’s argument is that industrialization requires not only tools and capital, but trained labor and standardized workflows.
From Traffic Supply to Real Content Creation
One of the article’s strongest ideas is that AI content is shifting from producing “high points” and addictive hooks to carrying heavier genres and stronger thematic ambition. It explicitly mentions:
- science fiction,
- suspense,
- Eastern cosmologies.
This is framed as the key leap from traffic supply to content creation. In other words, the value of AI is no longer measured only by how cheaply it can generate attention, but by whether it can support tone, worldview, narrative continuity, and aesthetic coherence.
That is why Cannes matters in the article’s logic: it functions as external validation that AI vertical drama can acquire international language, taste, and thematic seriousness.
Strategic Endgame
The article says the endgame of AI comic drama is no longer “short, flat, fast cash.” Waterdrop’s next bet is on three directions:
- IP universe building
- premium globalization
- serious content
The company is building an “Eastern Jianghu universe” around writers like Tianxia Bachang and Gaoyang, planning around 30 interconnected works with cross-title character interaction, explicitly compared to a Chinese version of Marvel. It is also signing top science-fiction IP writers such as Pan Haitian, Wu Shuang, and Han Song, using AI to realize stories that were previously too expensive to film.
This reveals an important economic point: the article treats AI not just as a cost reducer but as an enabler of previously unfilmable genres, especially science fiction.
Data, Feedback, and Commercial Logic
The article also points to a less visible advantage of AI industrialization: fine-grained content and audience data, combined with knowledge-base-driven agent self-evolution. This can improve outcomes for:
- producers,
- writers,
- production teams,
- investors.
The implication is that AI content production may become a more iterative and feedback-rich system than traditional film and television. Commercialization improves not only because production is cheaper, but because decision-making becomes more data-responsive.
Global Significance
Waterdrop’s overseas push is presented as long-term rather than opportunistic. The company claims an early and strong position in Japan and uses Animeshorts.ai to export both:
- AI creative tools,
- Chinese stories
to Japan, Korea, Europe, and the US. This dual export model is notable. The article suggests that the real strategic ambition is not merely selling content abroad, but exporting Chinese AI production capability together with Chinese narrative IP.
Significance
The article’s deepest message is that AI lowers the production threshold, not the creative threshold. Story, aesthetics, and values remain decisive. That statement helps reconcile the article’s enthusiasm for automation with its insistence on authorship and cultural ambition.
Ultimately, Cannes is used as proof that AI is becoming new infrastructure for content, not a substitute for content itself. The article argues that the winners of the next cycle will be those who can transform AI from a cheap-content engine into a disciplined system for premium storytelling, IP expansion, and global cultural distribution.
Disclaimer: The above content is generated by AI and is for reference only.