wife, Elin Nordegren, that culminated in a career-derailing car crash outside the couple’s Florida home. Details of what transpired are vague—the principals aren’t talking, and no cameras were present. Millions of people who followed the breaking story on CNN, Fox, ESPN, and TMZ had to satisfy themselves with watching file footage of the golfer and his wife.

The incident captured the world’s attention, but no one could actually see it—until an animated reenactment was uploaded to the Web site of an Asian tabloid just hours after it happened. The 96-second videoclip featured Sims-like doppelgängers of the couple and depicted the moments that everyone was clamoring to see: the vehicle colliding with a tree, an unconscious Woods lying in the street as the police arrived, even Nordegren chasing her husband’s SUV down the driveway with a golf club.

Most of Next Media Animation’s videos are about scandals and crimes in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But some of their more ambitious (and surreal) animations are about public figures from America. Here’s a sampling from their videos about Tiger Woods, Steve Jobs, Al Gore, and Sarah Palin.

Someone reposted the clip to YouTube, and the crude, somewhat surreal animation quickly scored 2.5 million views. It was picked up and replayed by many Western news organizations and generated an enormous amount of attention, amusement, and controversy. Mission accomplished for the man behind the video, Hong Kong tabloid tycoon Jimmy Lai. He had launched the CG production house Next Media Animation just a month earlier with the goal of animating the news of the day.

“There’s no better sensation than image. It’s so in-your-face!” the 62-year-old founder of Next Media says. Lai is sitting in the fourth-story office of his headquarters in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, which is the latest outpost of the Next Media empire. He wears a custom-tailored white shirt and a pair of suspenders that hold baggy Ralph Lauren jeans up over his potbelly, giving him a grandfatherly air. But Lai’s beefy face is hard, his eyes fiercely alert. He has the appearance of a man who is always ready to throw the first punch—or the last.

Lai made hundreds of millions of dollars giving Hong Kong readers everything that the more respectable publications wouldn’t deign to present: lurid crime stories, salacious celebrity gossip, voyeuristic paparazzi photos, and scathing political commentary. But by 2007, he was becoming increasingly worried about the future of print, especially its ability to reach a younger audience that grew up with digital media. It also bothered him that his photographers could cover some stories only after the fact. “We had the dead body,” he says, “but we never see the murders.” Was there a way to show things that none of his competitors could?

The idea of cartoonifying the news hit Lai in a brilliant flash. In October 2007, he shared his idea with the rest of his staff. They could gin up exclusive footage of the most bizarre, the most titillating, the most scandalous events of the day. But Lai didn’t want just any animation, he wanted computer-generated 3-D animation, which is notoriously costly, labor-intensive, and extremely time-consuming to create. And they didn’t have a lot of time; the videos had to air while the news was still warm. Lai needed to be able to crank out reenactments of breaking stories in just a couple of hours. “Everybody told me it would be impossible,” he says.

So he decided to build his own CG studio. Lai didn’t know much about animation, but he knew a lot about assembly lines—he made his first fortune in the garment industry. After two years of trial and error, experimenting with various technologies and seeing exactly how many corners it was possible to cut, Lai set up a sort of un-Pixar, an offshore animation factory with a staff of 200 that could storyboard, model, motion-capture, and animate a clip in about the time it takes to watch Toy Story 3. “People said I was nuts to try this,” Lai says, leaning intently over a conference table. “But everybody knows I’m crazy. I never do things the normal way.”

It’s been a blisteringly hot day here in Taipei, but it’s starting to cool off as the workers at Next Media Animation arrive for the 5 pm to 1 am shift in a neighboring building. Before they punch out, they will create more than a dozen CG shorts in the signature style of their infamous Tiger Woods video. The clips will be posted to the Web sites of Lai’s tabloids in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where they typically rack up about 15 million views a week.

That’s a large audience, but it’s not nearly enough to cover the costs of such an ambitious operation. Lai is still searching for a better outlet for this new form he’s created and is casting about for a viable business model. He’s convinced that what Next Media is doing is the future of journalism, and he insists that once you’ve seen his cartoons, you’ll never be satisfied watching a newsreader tell you what happened. “This is like watching a videogame, but it’s the news!”

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Authors: Michael Kaplan

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