Leading stars Ge You and Zhang Ziyi at a Beijing event to promote The Wasted Times. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Ever since Monkey King: Hero Is Back became the highest-grossing domestic animated film of all time, China's leading studios are looking overseas for manpower to ride the wave. Xu Fan reports.

Huayi Brothers, one of China's most successful studios last year, has also joined the rush to recruit Hollywood talent.

At a recent event, the studio said that its newly launched animation subsidiary had hired veteran animators from the United States.

Its wholly owned unit, Huayi Brothers Win Animation, has appointed DreamWorks Animation's former executive Joe Aguilar as its chief executive officer.

In addition, Markus Manninen, a visual effects veteran who was behind Oscar-nominated Kung Fu Panda, has been hired as the firm's art director.

Wang Zhonglei, the president of Huayi Brothers, says that globalization of the movie industry has pushed the studio to seek world-class talent and companies.

Win Animation plans to make four animated movies every year and the first one will be released across the country in 2017.

Aguilar says the movies will have a global appeal.

Though details are yet to be released, Aguilar says Win Animation's first title is an animated sci-fi action feature, supervised by Kung Fu Panda 3's Chinese director, Teng Huatao.

Wang says the North American market shows that animated films attract audiences more easily regardless of culture or age, and there is a greater possibility of the movies developing into long-running franchises.