Street of Tears: AI cartoons collect millions on social networks and change the animation market

AI animated series about the relationship of messengers, vegetables and fruits have captured social networks. While major industry players are talking about a decrease in minutes produced, an increase in production costs and the lack of their own software, viewers are opting for unusual content. On Russian Animation Day, Izvestia talks about how the industry lives today, what problems major studios face, and how directors compete with neural networks.

Scenario hunger and market glut

For the first time in recent years, Russian animation has faced a decline in production. If the studios released about 170 minutes in 2024, then 130 minutes in 2025. This was announced by Yuliana Slashcheva, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Soyuzmultfilm, at a meeting of the State Duma Committee on Culture. According to her, the market is simultaneously shrinking and becoming more expensive: TV channels and platforms are lowering purchase prices, and production costs are rising due to salaries and the tax burden on individual entrepreneurs, who make up a significant part of the industry.

Representatives of the CTC Media animation department told Izvestia that the key challenges for the industry today are not so much related to technology as to the structure of the market and viewing habits.

— The audience is changing rapidly — even preschoolers are increasingly consuming content in a short, clip format. This reduces the depth of engagement and makes attention retention one of the main tasks for manufacturers," the holding noted.

At the same time, experts note the oversaturation of the market. Global platforms offer content for every taste, which increases competition for viewers, shortens the life cycle of projects, and increases promotion costs.

Against this background, the entry threshold for new animation brands is also noticeably increasing. Creating a project of the "Three Cats" level requires not only high-quality content, but also strong distribution, multi-channel presence and significant marketing investments at the start. Scenario hunger complicates the situation. According to experts, the industry lacks strong authors, original plots, and thoughtful character arcs.

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Promts and cartoons about messengers

Meanwhile, vertical cartoons created with the help of artificial intelligence flooded social networks. This is a local version of the microdramas from the ultra-short episodes. Only instead of actors, there are synthetic characters, instead of a film crew, there is one person and a set of neural networks.

The plots are extremely simple: These are life stories about betrayal, poverty, sudden wealth, generational conflict, revenge, and moral choice. A sudden approach, a conflict, a turn and a break in mid-sentence, so that the viewer automatically scrolls to the next episode.

Dmitry Bezrukov, founder and creative director of Mango Production, has been involved in AI animated series for about six months. And his project "Forbidden School", where famous messengers and social networks became the heroes, literally stirred up the public. The videos are shown in schools and institutes.

— For me, this project is not just a cartoon, but a kind of technological showcase. The series sets a high standard for quality, showing potential customers how AI can be used to create complex animated worlds faster and more efficiently than classic production. The idea was prompted by the very agenda of social networks — I wanted to make the universe understandable to everyone by personalizing the applications that everyone uses every day," he told Izvestia.

Such work does not require a classical education as an artist or animation director. According to him, the director's vision, watching and the ability to write competent promptings are much more important. For texts and storyboards — ChatGPT and Claude, for videos — Google AI Studio. The characters will be created by Nano Banana 2. And the videos will be generated by several networks at once.: Veo 3, Grok and Kling. The series is usually also voiced by AI — Grok or ElevenLabs, and the background music will be written by Suno. For the final installation, AI creators use CapCut.

At the same time, Juliana Slashcheva insists on creating her own software for professional animators. As CTC Media told Izvestia, the technological base in Russia remains generally comparable to the global one: studios operate in the same 2D and 3D animation programs as their foreign counterparts. However, accessing them can be accompanied by organizational difficulties, from licensing to updates and payments. These factors do not block production, but create an additional burden on the industry.

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Vegetable drama and doll Bulgakov

Animation is a laborious, collective, and energy—consuming product. So, it took several years to create the 20-minute animated film Bulgakov by Stanislav Sokolov: two years for the preparatory period, a year for filming. The dolls were made by art students, and the pencil-drawn scenes on tracing paper were made by experienced animators. In 2024, Sokolov asked for financial assistance on a crowdfunding platform. Today, the film has received two major cinematic awards — the Golden Eagle and Nika.

At the same time, AI cartoons are usually created by one person. So, for one episode of Forbidden School, Bezrukov takes from 10 to 20 hours from the script to the final editing. And AI creator Anastasia Tsapenko, whose online thriller melodrama about the relationship between Grushan, Hurmella and Vish has gained a total of 6.5 million views, spends from three to seven hours along with the script for the series.

Timekeeping is also subject to an algorithm: most often, one episode lasts from 30 to 60 seconds, less often — up to one and a half minutes. During this time, the viewer has time to give the exposition, the climax and the groundwork for the sequel. The camera is always vertical, the installation is aggressive, the picture is bright and saturated. But the heroes can be not only people, but also human-like vegetables, fruits, graters and vegetable cutters, animals and construction tools.

— The trend was popular even before me, moreover, even in other countries. I just picked it up, but I suspect that the key lies in the mixture of the absurdity of the picture and life situations. This keeps the viewer away and forces them to comment on what the video promotes," Anastasia Tsapenko told Izvestia.

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How much does it cost to create an animated series

Animation has always been an expensive process. Whether it's an author's animation or a big TV series project like "Three Cats" or "Smesharikov." The prices for AI animated series are much lower. They are mainly tied to the number of requests in special programs.

— The cost of one series is from 10 to 15 thousand rubles. In AI production, there are a lot of defects and unsuccessful shots that go into the trash. To get one high-quality second of video, sometimes you have to go through dozens of options, and each such request to the neural network costs money. The commercial cost of creating one series averages 25 thousand per minute of turnkey finished material," explains Bezrukov.

The main difference between these cartoons is their replicability. If classical animation is piecemeal, then the logic of flow applies here: the same plot is easily cloned in dozens of variations, only faces and voices change. In this sense, short AI cartoons have become not so much a new genre as a new form of mass production - fast, cheap and almost endless.

But the question remains, what will be the long-term consequences of the audience's fascination with such content. And won't children who grew up on AI animation become less susceptible to artistic imagery than the generations who watched Yuri Norstein's "Hedgehog in the Fog"? No neural networks can make a project of this level yet.