Poster for The Autobots. [Photo/Agencies]

The Autobots, a Chinese animated children's film, is being labeled by Chinese netizens as a shameful copycat of Cars since it hit the cinema last Friday.

Netizens say the animation strongly resembles that in Cars, which was produced by Pixar Animation Studios, not only in character design, but also in its film poster.

"The leading character in The Autobots looks exactly like that in Cars; how shameless the director is," criticized Yaqing, a netizen on Douban.com.

"The poster's Chinese title is almost the same as Cars; aren't they afraid that they will be sued?," netizen NuoWeiYaoYang said, adding that on the poster, a car wheel obscures the Chinese character 人 (ren, people). That could misguide audiences, who will assume that that this film is a third installment of the Cars franchise. The Autobots' director, Zhuo Jianbing, disagreed.

"Why can't we have the same Chinese name? It was not illegal after all. And the look only means that we've got a superstar appearance," he said in a telephone interview with sina.com.

According to Zhuo Jianbing, The Autobots is only for the innocent kids, not for the cynical losers. He also said that his animation is quite different from Cars in terms of the storyline, in that it is the positive thoughts and attitudes in the movie that matters.