China’s Huace is set to produce the animated series and planned theatrical franchise Journey to the West using Utopai Studios’ PAI storytelling AI system.
Journey to the West: The Lost Five Hundred Years tells the famed mythological story of the legend of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. Utopai Studios will hold all distribution rights outside China.
The animated series is intended for distribution across broadcast, streaming, and digital platforms, with the broader franchise developed for future theatrical expansion. This is the first project moving forward under Utopai Studios and Huace’s strategic pact for the Chinese studio to use PAI.
“Journey to the West is not only one of China’s most beloved cultural treasures—it is one of the great mythological universes in world entertainment,” said Cecilia Shen, co-founder and CEO of Utopai Studios. “With Huace, we have the opportunity to build a bold new interpretation of this story, beginning with the untold emotional origin of Sun Wukong and the companions who would one day change the course of the journey west. This is exactly why we built Utopai Studios: to help partners unlock iconic IP, expand worlds at franchise scale, and bring ambitious stories to life in ways that were not possible before.”
Binxing Fu, CEO of Huace Group, added, “Journey to the West is a story Chinese audiences have lived with for generations, and it deserves to be reintroduced with scale, emotion and imagination. By partnering with Utopai Studios, we can bring this mythology into a fully AI-generated animated format while preserving the cultural depth, emotional power, and sense of wonder that have made the story endure for hundreds of years. This partnership also gives us a path to build the property across animated series and theatrical opportunities for audiences around the world.”
For the series, PAI will be deployed to support mythological world-building, character continuity, stylized action, multi-episode storytelling, and digital assets that can be used for future seasons, and theatrical extensions.
