During a visit to Paris a few years ago, Gary Wang saw some "tea pets"－porcelain figures usually placed on tea trays－displayed in an antique shop there. It reminded Wang of his early years in Fuzhou, East China's Fujian province, where one of local pastimes was to drink tea and "raise" such pets.

The figurines, a part of China's tea culture－usually in the form of animals or ancient Chinese－need to have tea poured over them. And the longer this process continues, the more valuable they become.

"I could not stop thinking about what would happen if those little statues came alive," he says during an event in Beijing.

Wang has turned his thoughts into a 3-D animated movie, Tea Pets, his second directorial feature produced by the Beijing-based studio Light Chaser Animation.

The movie will open in Chinese mainland theaters on Friday.

The film, which was screened at the 2017 Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France earlier this year, is now seeking international distributors for an overseas version. But producer Yu Zhou did not reveal the details.

Meanwhile, the studio's first animated feature, Little Door Gods, also rooted in Chinese culture and myths, has an English version done by Hollywood stars such as Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.

As for Tea Pets, the film set in a picturesque city in China is about a group of tiny statues in a tea shop that come to life when left alone.