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Filed as animation: China's first AI feature reaches cinemas
GAC Editorial · October 1, 2026
Sanxingdui: Future Memories opens across China on 23 October, the first AI-generated feature to reach the country's theatrical circuit. It cleared review as an animated feature — because no category exists for what it actually is.
Sanxingdui: Future Memories opens nationwide across China on 23 October. It is the first AI-generated feature to reach the country's theatrical circuit, and the release date was announced on 27 September.
Bona Film Group's AIGMS production centre made the 90-minute film with ByteDance's Jimeng AI, working with a team of more than a hundred people over roughly two years. Every character is an original digital creation; no performer was digitally replicated. Bona describes the division of labour as human-led throughout on creative concept, narrative direction and artistic judgement, with AI carrying generation and execution.
The film received its public screening licence — the 龙标 — from the National Film Administration on 28 April. It cleared both content and technical review, which answers a question the industry had been asking out loud: whether AI-generated work could pass a national censor at theatrical standard. It can, and it has.
It was approved as an animated feature. Not because anyone mistook it for animation, but because the regulator has no category for an AI-generated film, and an existing box had to be used.
Writing on WeChat, 「AI探知君」 — the account that first carried the story in Chinese — put the stake plainly: AI will not make films cheaper, it will make good stories more expensive, because once the technical barrier falls away audiences will only pay for what genuinely moves them.
GAC Perspective
A classification is not an administrative detail. It is how an industry states what a work is — which review it receives, who is credited for making it, what an audience is told before buying a ticket, and which standards it can be held to afterwards. When a form has no category, every one of those questions is answered by analogy to something it is not.
China has now approved an AI-generated feature for its cinemas without having a name for it. The approval is the achievement; the borrowed label is the gap. And the gap will not stay small. The second AI feature will be filed as animation because the first one was, and precedent will harden into practice long before anyone writes a rule.
This is the case the Council exists to make. Recognition frameworks should arrive before the works that need them, not be improvised afterwards from whatever category is nearest to hand. A film that credits no performers, that was generated rather than photographed, and that was reviewed as a cartoon is not a scandal — it is a reasonable decision taken in the absence of any better option. The absence is the problem worth fixing, and 23 October is the date it becomes concrete.