The China Film Pavilion has returned to Cannes for the fifth consecutive year, and organizers have arrived with news of a booming domestic market and a slate designed to showcase the breadth of talent back home.

The numbers alone make for compelling reading. The China Film Co-production Corporation reports that, as of May 5, China’s domestic box office had already reached $1.98 billion — around one-fifth of global revenue year-to-date. That follows a 2025 in which the Chinese market collected $7.45 billion, a year-on-year increase of 21.9 percent. Ticket sales across urban cinemas rose 22.57 percent, and the country added 2,219 screens over the course of the year, bringing the total to 93,187 — more than anywhere else in the world.

The five-day May Day holiday, which ended May 5, added around $110 million to that tally, a modest rise on 2025. The top performers were Cheng Wei-hao’s thriller Vanishing Point, followed by the actioner Cold War 1994 ($21.2 million), 20th Century Studios’ The Devil Wears Prada 2 ($6.1 million) and Chen Sicheng’s comedy Being Towards Death ($5.4 million).

At Cannes, the pavilion — which brings together 70 Chinese film companies including China Film Group Corporation, CMC Pictures, Bona Film Group and the Shanghai International Film Festival — has been showcasing more than 180 titles. Among them is the sports comedy Pegasus 3, which collected nearly $649 million domestically, alongside the Yuen Woo-ping-directed martial arts epic Blades of the Guardians, the thriller Scare Out from Zhang Yimou, sci-fi pop idol starrer Per Aspera ad Astra, Boonie Bears: The Hidden Protector (the 12^th in the animated kids film franchise) and the female-focused comedy It’s OK from Lina Yang.

Special screenings on May 13 featured the family drama Shanghai Wonton, the female-focused comedy It’s OK and the artfully animated A Story About Fire — billed as the world’s first hand-painted animated feature made on Xuan paper, the traditional Chinese material prized for its soft texture.

The film earned director Li Wenyu a Crystal Bear nomination at Berlin last year and has become one of the more talked-about titles in China’s animation surge. Li drew heavily on ink painting techniques to achieve the film’s distinctive visual language — a process that demanded an unusual degree of personal involvement.

“After trying many different approaches, I found that ink painting on Xuan paper was indeed the best way to achieve the effects of expressive brushwork and negative space,” he says. “However, everyone handles brush and ink differently, so this method is very difficult to standardize. In order to maintain the film’s overall visual consistency, I had to complete an enormous amount of the drawing work myself. It was a huge challenge, but I managed to do it.”

The film follows a young monkey who discovers his surprising origins on a quest to steal fire from a ferocious beast — a journey that explores friendship, loyalty and the courage to face fear. It arrives at a moment of extraordinary momentum for Chinese animation. Ne Zha 2 became the highest-grossing animated film in history last year with $2.2 billion in global takings, and China’s animation industry is projected to reach $48 billion in value in 2026, up from $41 billion in 2023.

For Li, that growth reflects a broader creative flowering. “Chinese animation today has become extremely diverse in its forms of expression,” he says. “In recent years, China has produced 3D animated features that have attracted worldwide attention, and Chinese animated films have continued to appear in the lineups of major international film festivals. From visual form to subject matter, Chinese animation is now flourishing in many different directions and has reached a world-class level.”

What inspires him most, though, is animation’s capacity to break the rules of conventional filmmaking. “What interests me most is the language of animation itself — the forms of expression that belong uniquely to animation,” he explains. “Graphic expression, transformation and the use of different materials all carry tremendous imagination and can break past the limits of conventional film language. The challenge is how to use these animation languages to tell an animated story, and to use them in a way that is both reasonable and ingenious.”

A screening at the ESRA film school on May 16, followed by a Q&A with Li, will give local students a chance to engage with the film directly. The broader ambition of the pavilion, according to the CFCC, is to “present the vibrant vitality of Chinese cinema to the world through more diverse approaches, and facilitate deeper integration between Chinese filmmakers and global industry resources.”

Li, for his part, keeps it simpler. “My film is about growth and companionship,” he says. “To me, growth is not just about getting older or achieving a certain kind of success. It is about having the courage to face fear.”