Donghua has been levelling up fast, and if your anime diet is still mostly Japan-only, Polygon’s latest list is a pretty useful wake-up call.
The site highlighted 10 Chinese animated series and films worth checking out, covering everything from cultivation fantasy and sci-fi action to gaming comedy, time-travel mystery, and emotional slice-of-life stories. For Malaysian and SEA anime fans, this matters because the gap between “anime fan” and “donghua fan” is getting smaller every year. More titles are showing up internationally through platforms like Netflix, Crunchyroll, and other streaming routes, which means the old excuse — “hard to find lah” — is slowly disappearing.
The big appeal is that donghua doesn’t always play by the same rules as Japanese anime. A lot of these stories lean heavily into Chinese mythology, immortal politics, cultivation systems, and huge fantasy worlds that feel like they have centuries of history behind them. If you enjoy the lore density of games like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, or any wuxia/xianxia-inspired RPG, this is probably your lane.
Polygon’s list includes Swallowed Star, a sci-fi action series based on a web novel, following Luo Feng in a post-apocalyptic 2056 where humanity survives inside protected strongholds while mutated monsters dominate the outside world. What starts as a survival-warrior story eventually expands into interstellar conflict, with big cosmic-scale battles and 3D animation doing the heavy lifting.
For gamers, The King’s Avatar is probably the easiest sell. It follows Ye Xiu, a top-tier player in the fictional MMORPG Glory, who is pushed out after refusing commercial endorsement work. Starting again with a new character sounds painful to anyone who has ever rerolled in an MMO, but Ye’s deep game knowledge becomes his real weapon. SEA players who grew up on Dota, Ragnarok Online, MapleStory, or modern esports will get the appeal immediately.
On the more chaotic comedy side, Scissor Seven follows Seven, an amnesiac assassin on Chicken Island trying to pay medical debts while uncovering his past. It is already five seasons deep, with season six in development, so this one is more than just a quick weekend test.
Polygon also points to Lord of Mysteries, a steampunk detective-fantasy story about Zhou Mingrui, a Chinese software engineer who wakes up as Klein Morett in an alternate Europe filled with supernatural Beyonders, cults, potions, ancient gods, and Lovecraftian horror vibes. If you like isekai but want something darker and weirder, this sounds like the one to watch.
Gaming culture gets another funny angle with The Richest Man in the Game, where developer Pei Qian tries to create bad games because of a profit-conversion system that rewards him personally only a tiny amount from successful projects. Naturally, his “terrible” ideas keep becoming hits. Painfully relatable if you’ve ever watched the games industry reward the most cursed decisions.
Then there’s Link Click, one of the biggest modern donghua breakouts. Cheng Xiaoshi can enter photos and possess the photographer’s body, while Lu Guang helps him navigate timelines. Their work fixing clients’ regrets slowly turns into a darker mystery about the danger of changing the past. Polygon notes that the first part of season 3 begins in July, with part two expected in 2027.
For something slower, Flavors of Youth uses three short stories across different Chinese cities to explore nostalgia through food, clothing, and transport. Meanwhile, Fog Hill of Five Elements brings mythological elemental guardians, demons, and jaw-dropping animation from director Lin Hun and Samsara Studio.
Action fans get Super Cube, about Wang Xiaoxiu gaining cosmic powers from a mysterious cube, while The Legend of Hei offers a more heartfelt nature-versus-humanity story centred on the cat spirit Hei, with its films acting as prequels to the 2011 webtoon The Legend of Luo Xiaohei.
For Malaysia’s anime crowd, the takeaway is simple: donghua is no longer “that niche thing people mention sometimes.” It is becoming a serious part of the wider animation conversation, especially if you want fantasy worlds, game-adjacent storytelling, and action scenes that can stand beside the big Japanese names.
Source: Polygon