A 60-Year-Old Animator Made a Cyberpunk Short Almost by Himself. Millions Are Watching
Zhao Bin, a veteran animator of nearly four decades, used AI tools to make a 20-minute animated film that racked up millions of views in days — and he says the soul of the work is still human.
For nearly forty years, Zhao Bin worked in the part of Chinese animation that the audience never sees: storyboarding, key frames, the patient labor between a script and a finished scene. This month, at sixty, he became the kind of creator who gets chased across the internet for the next episode.
Under the name "Sixty-Something Old Zhao," he uploaded "Cyber Hero Chronicles," a 20-minute sci-fi short with a neon cityscape, kung-fu-adjacent fight choreography and a knowing pulp sensibility. Within five days it had passed ten million views across platforms, landing in Douyin's top five and Bilibili's top three. The comments section, that reliable engine of online affection, was full of one demand: give us the next part.
The material details matter here. Zhao made the film using generative AI tools that have, in the last two years, collapsed the cost of animating a scene from a studio-sized budget to a subscription and a lot of patience. That makes him a symbol of something Chinese creators have seized on faster than almost anyone: AI not as a replacement for auteurs but as a debt-financing exodus for the people who already knew how to make things.
And Zhao is clear-eyed about where the line sits. The AI drew the frames, but the shot choices, the pacing, the jokes and the feel of the thing — the "soul," as he put it — belong to the person who spent forty years learning what a good cut looks like. It is the rare viral story where the moral is delivered by someone who actually has standing to deliver it.
There is a melancholy undercurrent, too. China's animation industry went through a long, lean stretch after the 2012-era glut, and people of Zhao's generation often left the craft or settled into outsourced work. Now the tools that once threatened to erase their skills have handed them back a funny kind of leverage: the ability, late in a career, to finally make the thing they always knew how to imagine. The crowd, at least, wants more.