A cinema specialising in screening cartoons run by the Vietnam Cartoon Ltd Company will be open from January 9, the first of its kind in the country.

Locates in the company's headquarters at 7 Tran Phu Street, right in downtown Hanoi, Thanh Giong cinema offers 150 seats and is equipped with modern digital technology standard.

After the opening ceremony tomorrow, the cinema will offer free screenings to audience on Saturdays and Sundays in two weeks. After that tickets on Saturdays and Sundays will be sold at cheaper price while the week shows will be spared to schools with wholesale contracts.

According to Dang Vu Thao, chairman of the company's Executive Board, the company has produced hundreds of animated films in the past few years, only 50 of which have been published in DVD forms while the most have not been screened yet.

Thao said the company produced dozens of animated films every year according to the State's order, most of which have not been screened yet.

"We [the animated film makers] sometimes feel very sad as most of our films cannot reach children," he told The Thao & Van Hoa (Sports&Culture newspaper), "No television station agree to broadcast animated films, which doesn't bring along much profit.

"For example, in order to broadcast a foreign animated film, TV stations have to buy copyright and be responsible for the copyright. In the mean time, an enterprise, who wants to advertise a product, would be willing to buy the copyright of a cartoon to broadcast on a TV channel and order the station to insert the advertisement in the middle of the cartoon.

"So, by that way, the TV stations don't have to buy copyrights and still have profit from advertisements," he explained.

Thao said the company had screened free to children in remote and mountainous regions and given free DVDs to local TV stations.

The company will screen also foreign cartoons and even movies at the newly-built cinema.