Scenes of the 3D animation, Beyond the Ocean, which follows Jianwen, a timid crown prince in a fictional dynasty, who's haunted by his fear of being killed. He undertakes an adventure with a group of whale riders in search of a lost Buddhist island. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Picture perfect

But it is no easy feat to turn a few words into a breathtaking 3D scene. And Ma jokes that he also worries his imagination had run too wild to be portrayed in simple pictures.

"Say I write 'The fleet blocks out the sky and the sun, and swarms over the horizon,' in the novel," he explains. "It may take a month's work to realize this one sentence on screen."

It took animators 15 months to make the first 12-episode season of Beyond the Ocean.

"It was really tough to make the first episode, for example," Liu Weicong, a co-director of the series, says. "I had to quickly introduce the characters to the story, make the details vivid and portray the big scenes from the novel all at once. But it's worthwhile to take on such a challenge."

Yang Xiaoxuan, vice-president of iQiyi in charge of animation, says that 15 months is a short time frame for adapting a story that contains such complex worlds. But she believes the end result is a meaningful attempt at raising the bar for production levels in the Chinese animation industry.

"We initially considered making it in the 2D format, but we finally chose 3D because we thought it was better to get the whole animation industry to adopt this technique," Yang says.