The audience came back. The money didn’t follow. A closer look at Malaysia’s animation blind spot.
The market itself is not the problem. Total local box office came close to RM250 million in 2025, a new all-time high, and it has been climbing steadily since the 2022 reopening. The audience come back. The slate did not diversify with it.
Perhaps fiction didn’t meet the vibe check? I’ve been told that’s a thing. Meanwhile, I thought it was about economic growth and opportunities.
For reference, this is what RM25.7 billion buys. RM25.7 billion is more than 44 times everything FIMI has paid out across its entire 13-year existence, its full RM580 million in rebates to 243 projects, combined. It is more than double the entire cumulative digital creative export revenue Malaysia has earned since 2011. It is over 100 years of 2025’s record-breaking local box office. It is 2,141 fully-funded animation features at Kappa’s RM12 million budget. This is not an abstract policy cost. It is a decision, repeated annually, to leave this money on the table.
Why are we stuck on animation?
In 2025, two animated features finished among the top three local films of the year. Ejen Ali The Movie 2 and Papa Zola The Movie each out-grossed every live-action title except one, Blood Brothers: Bara Naga. Two animated films, two of the three biggest local releases of the year. And both were bootstrapped, primarily self-funded, still connecting bridges to further distribution channels on their own studio’s costs. A studio in the intellectual property (“IP”) game walks a lonely road: reliant on long-term, boss-level friends and perpetually learning a new system of government support/criteria with every change of season. The irony: Malaysia is geographically the same year round, with a likelihood of rain within the few days.
When it rains, it pours and we have leaks in our industry that affect everything. Based on my experience playing admiral to a group of artists, if we continue overlooking exportable films and original animation, we will be losing out on chunks of cash, on talent retention, and the right window of opportunity. Animation is created for long-tail revenue; which means in the long run, it’s not only profitable but valuable.
Not every animation title works, but the ones that do are usually backed by a streak of artists, talents and believers signed on during the development and pre-production phases. These are the ones crazy enough to offer their gifts at-cost or free to push forward the dream of seeing a product of ours go global. Made in Malaysia, by Malaysians. I believed in this and poured decades of our collective storytelling and publishing expertise into building universes as a transmedia. We published our first game and self-funded a marketing campaign in Portuguese that reached Brazilian players on Fortnite Island in 2024.
We never closed the funding gap. We figured it out anyway.
Next part, we go looking for the leak. We take a closer look at the funding schemes creating the production gaps in the first place.