Poster of Fruit Robo: The Great Escape. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Enlight Media, the country's largest privately-owned film studio, will release its first 3-D animated feature, Fruit Robo: The Great Escape, across mainland theaters on Saturday.

Produced by Coloroom, a company subsidiary, the film revolves around the adventures of an ailing little boy and an orange that dreams of becoming a kung fu master.

Enlight, which aspires to be the Chinese equivalent of California-based animation giant Pixar, had earlier announced that Coloroom would produce 22 animated titles, including Fruit Robo, in the next few years.

Wang Wei, the new film's director, said at a recent media event in Beijing that it took four years to get the script ready and two years to make Fruit Robo.

Calling it a "fantastic" work of fiction, in which "fruits can talk, move and even fight like aces of martial arts", singer Wei Chen, voice of the "orange" in the film, told the same event, the "colorful and astounding imagination in some sense makes the Chinese title a bit like a Hollywood production".