Kuaishou 2026 CNY Spring Festival Micro-Drama: Light Up the New Year Village

01

Seven venues: how do you tell them as one story?

Kuaishou's brief was clear: a 16:9 horizontal AI animation with the plot and interaction of a short drama; a tone of “strong visual impact + a warm story at its core”; the three Kuaishou CNY IP characters, Xiaokuai, Xiaoliu and Xiaoma, as the leads; and the most important events from each venue built in.

With so many venues and such a mix of events, the biggest risk was ending up with an event catalog.

We tied them together with two things: a countdown and a collecting quest.

From 12 noon to midnight is exactly 12 hours. Each venue gets its own time slot: the temple fair and short dramas in the afternoon, the ice rink at dusk, New Year's Eve dinner and the gala after dark, and the Star Gala late at night. Every stop follows the same rhythm: a riddle, an event, a totem, then off again.

Each venue's main event gets plenty of screen time, while secondary events pass in a shot or two. By the time the audience has followed the three heroes all the way around, they have toured all seven venues.

02

A scroll map that always shows the audience where they are

The original script had just one line for this: place all the totems in the grooves of the bonfire platform to break the seal.

We added a prop to make it work: the illustrated scroll. The scroll shows a map of Kuaishou Village, with eight stops around a round altar in the center and the countdown in the lower right. Each time a totem is collected, a beam of golden light flies into the scroll and lights up a stop.

This way, every time the scroll opens, the audience sees three things: the riddle for the next stop, the places already visited and how many hours are left.

The riddles all come from the venues too: the yangge fan at the temple fair, sunflower seeds at the cinema, the trophy at the ice race, speed skates at the Winter Games, dumplings at New Year's Eve dinner, couplets at the gala and red envelopes at the Star Gala. Finding each answer means taking part in that venue's event.

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03

Three heroes, seven journeys, always the same characters

The seven venues were produced by separate teams. The biggest risk was the heroes “looking different” from one segment to the next.

So before work began, everything that runs through the whole film was locked down: turnarounds of the three heroes, the carriage, the totems and the map. Xiaokuai has no mouth, Xiaoliu has a mouth and blush, and Xiaoma has a plush texture and a red scarf; even whether Xiaokuai and Xiaoliu have tails and who is taller when the three stand together went into a single set of checking standards.

Every segment's images were checked against these standards, and any details AI couldn't fix were handed to an illustrator to repair by hand.

New characters join the ride at every venue: the yangge troupe, Briar and Bramble, gala performers... The fire horse pulls the sleigh with the three heroes up front and each stop's new companions behind. By the time they return to the bonfire platform at the end, everyone they met along the way is there.

04

All the totems collected, one step still to go

If collecting the totems instantly broke the seal, “reunion” would be just a slogan at the end.

We left one last challenge at the bonfire platform: Xiaoma places the scroll, sparks flash, then fade. The Village Chief says, “Let's all lend a hand.” Everyone they met along the way presses their hands to the stone platform, and only then does the golden pillar of light shoot into the night sky.

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Ribbons of light flow along the rooftops back into the village, and the streets fill once more with people celebrating. The old reunion photo from the opening finds its answer here: the New Year spirit isn't something you collect; it's something people create by coming together.

05

Bonus scene: one long scroll that revisits all seven venues

After the main film ends, an illustrated scroll unrolls from the clouds. We painted each venue as a 2.5D Guochao-style illustration, created the images in eight sections with a unified color grade, then stitched them into a single 43520 × 2286-pixel panorama.

The camera travels horizontally for one minute, passing the temple fair, the cinema, the ice rink, New Year's Eve dinner, the gala and the Star Gala in turn. The streets and stalls there was no time to linger on in the main film can all be seen clearly here.

06

One main film, versions for every screen

The film had to play in many places: vertical phone screens, TV, large outdoor screens and cinemas.

Alongside the 16:9 horizontal main film, we delivered a full vertical version, a 4K HDR 50 fps version, and short versions including 10-, 15- and 30-second bonus-scene cuts; cinemas used a 2.35:1 DCP format, and LED screens a 16:9 version.

After launch, the main film was announced by Kuaishou's official trending account and released on Kuaishou; the 15-second version aired on Liaoning Satellite TV; clips were used as filler before the Spring Festival Gala livestream on Kuaishou and screened in cinemas as a promotional film. Views across platforms passed 100M.

07

What this project achieved

For the brand, the film turned a very long list of events into an adventure audiences want to watch to the end.

The countdown keeps the pace moving forward. The riddles turn each event into plot. The scroll map keeps the audience from getting lost. And that final moment of “everyone lending a hand” brings the New Year spirit back to people.

AI made it possible for us to build an animated world of seven venues and more than a hundred shots in a few weeks; but what makes it a film is deciding first how the story unfolds, then making every frame serve that path.