Stephen Chow characters return as AI cartoons at 98% less cost

A venture tied to Stephen Chow is rebuilding his film characters as AI-generated cartoons, and its spokesperson says the cost of a minute of animation dropped from about 300,000 yuan to as little as 3,000 yuan.

Malay Mail reported the project on November 3, quoting an interview that Shin Shin Legends spokesperson Ignatius Yong gave to the South China Morning Post. Shin Shin Legends is tied to Bingo Group, Chow's entertainment and investment company. It is rebuilding characters from Kung Fu Hustle, God of Cookery and CJ7, with new storylines, merchandise and licensing planned.

Yong's cost figure is the precise part. Animation production cost fell from about 300,000 yuan per minute to between 3,000 and 5,000 yuan per minute, he told the South China Morning Post. Malay Mail carries the same figures and converts the old one as RM184,000 a minute. The China Foreign Exchange Trade System put the yuan at 6.715 to the dollar on November 3, 2026.

Converted, a minute of hand animation cost about $44,700. A generated minute now runs from about $447 to about $745.

The reduction is about 98% at the top of the new range and 99% at the bottom.

A hand-animated minute and an AI-generated minute are not the same product, and the comparison sets one against the other. The old figure is what a studio paid for drawn animation, built frame by frame. The new one is what one venture pays to generate cartoons with AI, a different pipeline with different labor. Yong's numbers cover his own project, not the animation business as a whole.

The characters keep their shapes and lose their plots. The team is writing new backstories and personalities for the Kung Fu Hustle landlady, the God of Cookery, the CJ7 alien and Yu Fa, the cross-dressing schoolgirl from Chow's 1990s comedies. "Our characters are very different," Yong said of the film versions. "I would say they are inspired by the characters in Chow's movies, but they have a totally different backstory. In this way, they are not the same."

The project starts as short-form animation on Douyin, the Chinese short-video app, where RADII reports the Shin Shin Legends account has more than 800,000 followers. Goldscene reports children under 12 are the largest audience group, with viewers 50 and older second. Mainland China is the main market for now. Yong told the South China Morning Post he wants to dub the shorts into English and argues that animation can travel past language.

For independent animators, that is the pitch: if a minute of cartoon costs hundreds of dollars of compute and labor instead of tens of thousands, more people can afford to make one. The catch is the comparison itself, which puts a studio's drawn minute against one venture's generated one.

The Shin Shin Legends shorts run on Douyin now; Yong says English dubs are planned but has not given a date.