By Karen Redrobe
I write with some informal responses to three questions posed by Daisy Yan Du as part of her invitation to give a lecture in the Association for Chinese Animation Studies’ series: “Why did Animating Film Theory [published in 2014] not cover China or Chinese animation? A gap for future scholars? Will Chinese animation be important for animation theories?” These are good and challenging questions that identify one of the limitations of that edited collection and I am grateful for their provocation. I enter this conversation in the spirit of what British feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose describes as “an ethics of failure” in her important essay, “Why War?” There, she describes a relationship between being willing to fail, “resisting the conviction of absolute truth,” to the avoidance of war and warlike violence.[1] Within Rose’s war-resistant ethics of failure, recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge helps to make more conscious the things one did not even know one did not know in ways that make space for the limitations of others. As such, failure has relational potential that demonstrates little interest in moving toward triumphalist completion. No doubt my introduction to Animating Film Theory should have made the limits of its roots, frameworks, and concerns more explicit. Although we cannot travel backwards in time, the composited nature of animated time, like feminist theoretical critiques of linear and unidirectional temporalities, invites what Patricia White has described as “retrospectatorship.”[2] In trying to address Du’s questions, I am keenly aware of my lack of expertise in the area of Chinese animation theory; this project has helped me to think more deeply about how we define fields and subfields, and how we do or don’t foster dialogue across such categories of knowledge.
Rose’s “ethics of failure” resonates with the innovative scholarly paradigm Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon foreground in their recent edited collection, Incomplete: the Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (2023), where the editors consider “unfinished projects as both projections and projectiles, pitched forward in time and space to new worlds, even as they manifest so clearly how the old worlds could not, or would not, sustain their development.[3]” I also hear a resonance between the ethics of incompletion, and Baryon Tensor Posadas’s discussions of science fiction and its affinity with what Arjun Appadurai calls “the ethics of possibility,” which requires us, Posadas suggests, to “break open the continuity of the present.”[4] Animation, with its frequent use of frame-by-frame and variable frame rate processes, is particularly adept at challenging linear time and inventing temporal visualizations that offer different ways to conceptualize and express time, and this inventive quality has sometimes been seen as limiting its utility for engaging the past and historical time. In “Animation, the Obsolescence of the Image, and the Disappearance of Hong Kong Architecture,” Yomi Braester registers a distinction—one that he suggests is “bound to fail”—between “medial time” and “historical time,” and asks, “Is animation especially equipped to address the link between medial time and historical time?”[5] In this paradigm, the “craft of the single frame” is linked to “pushing aside historical time” in favor of “fantastic temporalities,” but Posadas’s work on science fiction, along with other theoretical work I’ll discuss in these reflections, suggests that non-fantastical temporalities, more predictable and predetermined outcomes, are just as fabricated, just as much the product of particular imaginations of the future, as more fantastical variants. In short, I think there is exciting work to be done at the intersection of transnational animation studies, genre studies, intermedial animation studies (including between animation and built space), and the philosophy of history. Scholars of Chinese animation are among those playing a leading role in thinking across these areas.
For Beeston and Solomon, the incomplete enables scholars to turn “backward and forward in time, sideways and elsewhere in space.”[6] This suggests a link between Beeston and Solomon’s “incomplete” and what Du calls “suspended animation,” a term that opens out onto both aesthetic and labor-related questions, or to “limited animation,” in which a repeated image marks the passage of time, offering a different kind of still-moving, same-different, a pause for thought within a linear temporal structure.[7] Writing about the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, Rose suggests that, “For Winnicott…not to know whether something is real or not (whether you have made it up), to leave the questions in suspense, is a form of creativity. It is the fundamental characteristic of transitional space.”[8] How would Cinema and Media historiography be impacted by a methodology that, without affirming historical denial and a world of fake news, left more open to thought than we do the nature of the relationship between medial and historical time, and that left in suspension the tension between the real and the made-up as a provocation for a renewed engagement with the relationship of animation, and theory, to history?
As I reflect on the juxtaposition of feminism, animation, and theory, on retrospection, gaps, occlusions, and future directions, questions come into view about: the relationship between individual and collective scholarly practices, the geopolitics of animation aesthetics and film theory, and of how overlapping fields that engage “animation” understand the objects of study the term suggests. One essay, one scholar, cannot satisfactorily address such big topics, but I share my thoughts as part of a broader dialogue about how Chinese animation theory might impact broader conversations in the field of film and media theory.
Limitations, Missed Opportunities, and Blindspots: Animating Film Theory in Context
I have been considering the intellectual roots of Animating Film Theory as well as the moment in which it appeared, and what possible connections to Chinese film and animation theory were missed or foreclosed as a result of both those paradigms and that moment. In Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (2015), Victor Fan insists that the increased attention to Chinese film theory be considered not within a national paradigm, but rather as the comparative conversation that film theory has always been, albeit in unevenly reciprocated ways. Fan writes, “Chinese filmmakers and critics between the 1920s and 1940s always conceived of their works as part of a cross-cultural dialogue with their peers in Japan, Europe, and America, an understanding that has, unfortunately, never been reciprocated.”[9] Fan criticizes any cross-cultural effort that would seek only to complete Anglo-European theories, using the example of Bazinian ontology, and noting the problem of asking scholars of Chinese film theory to fill in the gaps or to function, as Fan puts it, as “‘native informants’” who might “provide the raw materials that Euro-American theorists use to reaffirm a body of knowledge that has always been considered unchallengeable.”[10] When editing Animating Film Theory, geopolitical frameworks were not consciously central to my project, and certainly a deeper engagement in the book’s introduction of film theory’s universalizing assumptions and of the impact of comparative geopolitical frameworks on any theorization of animation would have been useful. Such thinking is, however, clearly present in the individual contributions of scholars, including Yuri Furuhata, Marc Steinberg, Thomas Lamarre, and Bishnupriya Ghosh. Their contributions, among others, challenge the universalizing assumptions that underlie some of the book’s film theoretical premises, even if not from a Chinese animation perspective. If the presence of universalism reflects the biases of my background and education, which it is my responsibility to address, they also reflect something about the timing of the book’s publication in relation to what might be called the global film theoretical turn.
In their 2017 volume, Media Theory in Japan, for example, Marc Steinberg and Alex Zahlten trace the long history of theoretical exchange between Japanese and German thinkers, which perhaps helps to make Japanese film and media theories more familiar to scholars working within Anglo-European paradigms. I can see retrospectively that I saw a fit between the Animating Film Theory I was imagining and Yuriko Furuhata’s contribution to it, a discussion of the Animation Group of Three and the Sogetsu Animation Festival, in part because, among other things, Furuhata addresses the Japanese translation and reception of an essay by Walter Benjamin that was familiar to me. This does not change the fact that I also found, and still find, Furuhata’s comparative contribution to be brilliant, but it might illuminate something about how familiarity might inform editorial choices. Over the past fifteen years, comparative methodological innovations such as Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010) and more recently, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Takushi Odagiri, and Moonim Baek’s edited collection, Theorizing Colonial Cinema: Reframing Production, Circulation, and Consumption in Film in Asia (2022) have foregrounded the generativity of disrupting bi-national paradigms to avoid what Chen describes as “uninterrogated notions of Asia” or of “the nation-state.”[11] This methodological approach, so visibly at work in many examples of comparative Asian media studies, underscores both, as Chen puts it, the fact that “the West has no essence and no unity” and the need to “de-universalize, provincialize, or regionalize the West.”[12]
But this was not how I was thinking when I was doing the groundwork for Animating Film Theory, when I was focused instead on how animation pressures the way that Anglo-European film theories had articulated cinema’s relation to the world, drawing on thinkers such as André Bazin and Stanley Cavell, including the distinction Cavell’s description of animation as generating “a world” rather than “the world” as a shared phenomenon.[13] Here I missed the chance to think more deeply about the implications of the assumption of a single, shared “world,” and the repercussions of this concept in many areas, including those involving race, gender, ability, generation, sexuality, environment and the non-human. The productivity and originality of the work of the Association of Chinese Animation Studies in transnational and transmedial ways makes clear that animation’s distance from singular and shared worldviews presents a powerful lever for prying open some of the geopolitical and imperial biases of film and media theories and histories across the board.
Fan’s work on the geopolitics and asymmetrical reciprocity of early film theories and the importance for scholars of film theory to pay more attention to informal modes of writing about experiences of cinema recalls Dai Jinhua’s earlier reflections on the state of Chinese film theory in a 1997 conversation with Zhou Yaqin (translated by then Ph.D. student Wang Yiman). I raise this resonance to extend this reflection on what Chinese animation and film theories have to offer each other into feminist film theory, another sphere whose universalist assumptions have rightly come under critique from anti-colonial theorists. Dai notes, “In retrospect, I think we have only managed to introduce Western film theory into China in a systematic fashion and apply it to reading Chinese films. That does not constitute our own film theory.”[14]
Though this idea of “our own film theory” is something Fan encourages readers to leave behind, I think it is useful to recall this earlier work because of the way Dai recognizes, albeit via a negative framework, the long existence of an informal, fragmentary, non-academic film discourse in China: “As in many places in the world, in China film theory began in a fragmentary way when enthusiasts began writing impression pieces that weren’t particularly systematic or academic.”[15] Today, seen retrospectively through the lens of the field’s conversations about community-based, feminist, queer, and global media theories, these informal discourses that often have not been taken up in dominant Anglo-European film theory anthologies not only undoubtedly “count” as theory, but represent some of its most exciting areas of study. Paying attention to these informal discourses transforms the past, present, and future of film and media theory, including animation theory as scholars across subfields have made clear. Such informal discourses, often located in the private not the public realm, also raise methodological and ethical questions. Here, I think of a non-animation example: Diana W. Anselmo’s A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (2023), which looks at early 20th -century queer girls’ scrapbooks and private experiences of film culture. These scrapbooks break open new trajectories for our film histories and theories and bring different media participants, and different spaces, including the bedroom, into view. Are all private materials fair archival games for film and animation theorists? This question of archival ethics comes into focus alongside the recognition of how the field’s valuation of private, experiential, and affective writing about media in comparison with public, authoritative, and intellectual writing has altered, especially since 2015. Negative observations in earlier work might now serve as positively useful guides for further research. Instead of looking for complete or systematic theoretical models, Fan stresses the “aporia” in dominant models that become visible through comparative methods, and I am excited to follow the impact of feminist, queer, deimperializing, anti-ablist, and incomplete approaches to theorizing animation within intermedial and comparative and critical geographic and historiographic frameworks.
The question of vocabulary is quite important here too, and again, Fan’s introduction of terms such as xi-ju (play-drama), rensheng (life) and rensheng de taidu (attitude of life), bizhen (approaching reality), and ying (shadow or image) seem to hold great potential for comparative media and animation studies, although I am not qualified to speculate on how the nuances of such terms might be taken up.[16] My brilliant colleague Zhou Chenshu expands upon the contributions of Zhang Yingjin and Yeh Emilie Yueh-yu in Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (2021). Zhou notes the usefulness of what Yeh, using the genre-related example of “wenyi,” calls “reverse assimilation” as a counterpoint to “colonial assimilation” models.[17] Zhou also describes “(Western) theory,” however, as “unavoidable” and so calls less for working around it than for the development of “a better, more productive relationship with theory,” one that moves past the model of “Western theory vs. Chinese materials.”[18] For Zhou, this results in a greater inclusion of protagonists who are often marginalized in media histories and theories. Her adoption of ethnographic methods and attention to off-screen phenomena bring the voices and memories of women, and of the very young and very old, into transnational, China-rooted media theoretical conversations. We see this, for example, when Zhou cites a 1951 article from Mass Cinema about open-air cinema that is written by the 16-year-old female projectionist Li Shukai, who notes the way audiences stared at her and thought, “How come even a woman can be a film projectionist nowadays? And she is only sixteen.”[19] Zhou rejects the assumption that Euro-American theorists will “not be interested in any ‘China-centered’ theory” and asserts an optimism on this issue.[20] In these grim times, perhaps optimism is itself an important intervention.
Du’s invitation has also caused me to reflect upon the blind spots caused by a too-rigid understanding of the relationship between teaching and research, something that I think/hope has loosened (like my skin!) with age. Looking back over email exchanges about animation going back to 2010, I found missed opportunities to engage Chinese animation’s relation to theory, and I have been reflecting on how that happened. For example, in 2011, I was fortunate enough to have a visiting scholar, Professor Yundong Duan, from Southwest University’s School of Art in Chongqing participate in a seminar I was teaching entitled “The Art of Animation,” where we were thinking through some of the materials I was engaging in preparation for Animating Film Theory. Yundong Duan had come to study in the United States because, the emails reminded me, he was working on a project that involved thinking about Chinese animation in relation to film theory, and had already translated essays by animation scholars, including Maureen Furniss and Paul Wells. In 2005-6, he was really ahead of his time and Animating Film Theory did not benefit from Yundong Duan’s foresight as it could have. During the course of the semester, he shared examples of Chinese animation with our class, including Te Wei and Tang Cheng’s 1960 short film, Little Tadpoles Looking for Their Mother, made in the Shanghai Animation Film Studio and winner of the Silver Sail at the 1961 Locarno International Film Festival, and Te Wei’s film Feelings of Mountain and River, produced in the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1988. Why did I not do more as an editor with the great opportunity I had as a teacher as a result of Yundong Duan’s presence? Perhaps there is much to learn from reflecting critically on roads not taken, although it is not so comfortable to do so. Du’s discussion of Little Tadpoles Look for Mama confirms my sense that my theoretical frameworks and knowledge were inadequate for interpreting what I was being shown with these films.[21] Perhaps my worry about what I did not know as the person teaching the class prevented me from imagining a better response to the experience of not-knowing. I think I was hampered in part by: a known-in-advance and too-unidirectional syllabus; a too-rigid separation between research and teaching, book and classroom; a too-narrow sense of what scholarly output would look like (argument-driven essays rather than exploratory conversations about what we do and do not know); and a failure of imagination that is related to the way institutional resources are assigned (or not) in response to language-training limitations and hard-to-bridge knowledge gaps. I am currently thinking with Kartik Nair and other scholars about what we can learn about our field when teachers think about themselves as students in the classroom through a new co-edited collection, and a collaborative approach to editing constitutes one check on the limitations of any single point of view.
The intellectual paradigm roots of Animating Film Theory, which I began to think about around 2010, were shaped by the concerns of two publication projects that appeared in print that year: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, coedited with Jean Ma, and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis. Both engaged the relationship between the still and the moving, the single and the multiple image, the photographic and the cinematic. Indeed, the cover of Still Moving is taken from the artist Nancy Davenport’s photo-animation Weekend Campus, which uses still photographs to recreate a famous tracking shot from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967). I spent the year 2010-11 academic year in Berlin, where I collaborated with both Oliver Gaycken and Erna Fiorentini on a two-part conference entitled Enchanted Drawing, and my physical location as well as the conferences’ emphasis on evidentiary proof and scientific visualization also informed the prevalence of French and German film theory in Animating Film Theory. These shared concerns were charged by the rapid changes that digital technologies were enacting within the aesthetic and intellectual landscape, and much of my focus was on how photography-rooted medium-specific questions, ones that at the time seemed uninflected by geography, would be impacted by a notion of animation that took on new prominence in the light of the digital, and sometimes even as a placeholder for the digital.
I was then unaware of Paola Voci’s 2010 work on animation in her book China on Video: Smaller-screen video realities, an example of how earlier English-language work on Chinese animation at times appeared under banners other than animation, such as screen size, although in the book I’m currently completing, Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War, Voci’s notion of an expanded animation that travels under the label of “para-animation,” has proved to be particularly useful for works I consider that stretch the definitions of this already labile term, “animation.” These definitions often fail within medium-specific theoretical paradigms (as even the most rigid medium-specific paradigms often do), but in ways that might take our overlapping fields in new and interesting directions. Here, we might note the importance of Teri Silvio’s Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (2019) for the way it, like Donald Crafton’s earlier Shadow of A Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making (2012), introducing different histories and theories of performance into the animated realm. But this was not how I was thinking about things in 2014, even though Crafton participated in one part of the Enchanted Drawing conferences and even though I was collaborating around this time with performance artists who used animation. This shows how research frameworks can both structure and limit our thinking.
In the 2010s, I was deeply dug into early 21st century digitally-inflected reconsiderations of cinematic time, framed both within and in opposition to the same Bazinian ontologies whose aporias Fan would highlight one year after Animating Film Theory. Some of the key terms for of this conversation had been set presciently by feminist film scholar Mary Ann Doane, whose 2002 book The Emergence of Cinematic Time brought new attention to questions of the index, the instant, the evidentiary, the historical, and contingency; by Laura Mulvey in Death 24x A Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006); and by Jimena Canales in A Tenth of a Second (2011), all of whom historicized and contextualized modernity’s way of grasping, measuring, and theorizing time and the instant in relation to photography, cinema, and emerging technologies. But this moment also saw the rise of a strand of film theory that weaponized feminist theorists’ critical self-reflections on psychoanalytic film theory in dismissive and reductive ways.
As medium specificity conversations took center stage, postcolonial feminist scholars in particular were simultaneously reframing how we might think about time, history, memory, and media. Bliss Cua Lim in Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (2009) and Jean Ma in Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema (2010), like Priya Jaikumar in her later 2019 volume Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space, developed ways of thinking about media time, historical time, subjective time, and genres that were inextricably bound to generative postcolonial considerations of mediated space that continue to be incredibly generative in the field. There is more to do with this work in dialogue with transnational animation theory.
Shortly after the publication of Animating Film Theory, I was invited to participate in a 2015 special issue of Frameworks journal dedicated to the topic “Geopolitics of Film and Media Theory,” guest edited by Masha Salazkina. I was ill-equipped to write that essay, and the invitation immediately showed me some of the limitations of the collection. Fortunately, one book does not have to do all things. 2015 was a turning-point in the field for all kinds of reasons. In a paradigm-shifting throw-down, Salazkina, in her introductory essay, links the institutionalization of Cinema and Media Studies to increasingly rigid narratives about cinema; challenges the universal claims of Anglo-European film theory; insists on the need to find better ways to foster dialogue between Cinema and Media Studies and Area Studies; advocates for multidirectional and well-funded translations; and calls for the labor of translation and the necessarily experimental and error-filled process of collaboration across difference to be more highly valued by our fields. Kay Dickinson, writing within the context of the Arab world, questions the costs, financial, cultural, and intellectual, of participating in Anglo-European film theory for those living and working outside of its purview; and Bao Weihong, in a brilliant essay, entitled “The Trouble with Theater: Cinema and the Geopolitics of Medium Specificity,” foregrounds the importance of considering “How the discourse of medium specificity became entwined with the geopolitics, which eventually points to the geopolitics of film theory” (Frameworks 56.2 (Fall 2015), 351). Bao’s book, also 2015, is not primarily focused on animation; but its discussion of the fire scene in Princess Iron Fan involves a political, production, and reception history of the film, an engagement of the film’s relation to American animation, and a reflection on how Eisenstein’s theory of plasmaticness and pyromania takes on new dimensions in the context of wartime Shanghai (Bao, 368-373). Bao suggests the potential of such images to alter the relationship between “the perceiving subject and the overwhelming environment that undermines their boundary and the very stability and identity of the spectator,” and notes the resonance of this undermining of identity with the impact of war (Bao, Fiery Cinema, 373). Bao’s attention to affect resonates with the richness that both Fan and later Zhou find in the off-screen space and the space between spectators and image. But Bao uniquely links that unstable space, so important to a Chinese film theory that reveals something about the limits of Bazinian ontologies, to the plasmaticness Eisenstein finds in animation. Perhaps there is more to do in this area.
In thinking about this question, I have found a couple of deeply helpful surveys of the state of the field. One is Thomas Lamarre’s “The Animation of China: An interim report,” which was published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas in 2017. Another is the one Panpan Yang offers in the early part of her 2020 dissertation, “Animating Space.” There, she notes that she had published a 2014 literature review on Chinese animation in the journal Film Art (Dianying Yishu), the same year that Animating Film Theory appeared, and I would love to read a translation of where the Chinese scholarship on animation stood at that moment. She notes that before 2014, publications on Chinese animation “exist either as articles in a discrete fashion or as book-length collections of Chinese animated films and relevant materials. Informative as they might be, the majority of Chinese-language books on Chinese animation are intended to be exhaustive in scope, yet fall prey to a linear historical narrative and a preoccupation with the national style (minzu fengge).”[22] In that same year, 2020, chapter 15 in the second volume of Sun Lijun’s The History of Chinese Animation, concludes by noting, “Chinese animation has already achieved fruitful results in art practice, but its theoretical research is still relatively weak.”[23] Du’s Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s is important to mention here, not only because both the book’s theorization of Chinese animation along with its rich bibliography show that this area, by 2019, is quite robust, but also, more specifically, because Du’s work challenges fixed binary thinking about national and transnational animation in the Chinese context. As Du puts it, “[T]he history of Chinese animation was international before it became national and subnational. Even the national, as represented by ink-painting animation, was created in an international context during the Cold War. Although the Chinese School of Animation might proclaim ‘the more national, the more international,’ this slogan can be reversed by asserting that in the history of Chinese animation, the more international, the more national. In conclusion, national identity constructed through Chinese animation did not emerge from a vacuum of cultural purity; it was never stable, unchanging, homogenous, or impermeable. Instead, it continuously contested multidirectional flows of culture.”[24] Du’s work suggests the importance of putting Chinese animation theory into more active dialogue with Cinema and Media Studies conversations about the geopolitics of theory more generally, and shows that the circulation of Chinese animation between 1940 and the 1970s transnationally challenges the idea that Chinese films of this period can only be considered within a national context unless they are to be considered through a marker of absence.
For example, in Salazkina’s recent book, World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (2023), the author notes that the book’s focus on the Tashkent film festival from the late 1960s through the 1970s results in “the absence of China and the larger cinematic and ideological sphere with which it becomes associated in the period of the 1960s and 1970s. While Chinese cinema was quite actively integrated into the global socialist cinematic circuits of the 1950s and into the early 1960s, after the Sino-Soviet split and the advent of the cultural revolution, it came to occupy a rather isolated position vis-à-vis many of the cinematic developments described herein.”[25] Would more of a focus on animation have helped this situation? I don’t know enough to answer this question, but this seems like an interesting avenue for conversation, and I know that Salazkina offers the book precisely as an invitation for further thought and collaborative research.
To turn attention specifically to Chinese Animation Theory, I think there is great promise at the intersection of some of these conversations—realisms; medium specificity; national/transnational/global paradigms; postcolonial gender and sexuality studies; and incomplete and informal objects and discourses. We can see that promise realized in the work of many contemporary scholars, including Yang’s 2020 dissertation, where she seeks to work with animation as a thinking thing and to understand “how animation thinks.”[26] Yang’s methodology imbricates materially-specific aspects of different forms of Chinese animation with spatial and temporal concerns. She writes, “I see this history as a layered one, an animation stand of time and materiality, wherein the unlikely connections between different media might be discovered anew, and the spatial unfolding of historical dynamics constantly surprises us. Putting parts of the history of Chinese animation in space, as if they were movable, translucent celluloid sheets or layers stacked together, allows me to see them in their wholeness, to analyze their inter-connections, to read one layer through another, and to unveil history’s continuity and discontinuity, patterns and disruptions that are often less evident when compiling chronicles.”[27]
The outstanding 2017 double special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, entitled Animating Chinese Cinemas, represents another vital contribution to the English language scholarship. It highlights what a focus on China contributes to animation theory. This includes editors Li Guo and Li Jinying’s emphasis on: animation not just as a category or genre, but as a method, expanding film theory’s concerns; the impact of political and ideological demands; the expanded media fields through which animation can be understood; and Lamarre’s insistence, informed by the work of postcolonial feminist thinkers such as Rey Chow, Ani Maitra, and Gayatri Spivak, on the need to “disaggregate China” and recognize that “Chinese animation begins anew in different places and times.”[28] This process of disaggregation may involve not only thinking about Chinese animation happening in a variety of places and times, but also Chinese animation being viewed and thought about in a variety of places and times and from a variety of perspectives.
In February 2024, Olga Bobrowska announced to the Society of Animation Studies listserve the publication of the second of two books by Bobrowska on the topic of Chinese animation, the first entitled Chinese Animated Film and Ideology, 1940s-1970s. Fighting Puppets (2023) and the second, Chinese Animated Film and Ideology. Tradition, Innovation, and Interculturality (2024). Tze-yue G. Hu responded by congratulating Bobrowska, but also commented, “It is not easy to study some other nationality or ethnic group’s cultural output especially if you face language barrier and likely will have to learn its official language of communication. There must be passionate reasons for one to transcend, cross borders, leap over vast lands, seas and oceans to study the other.”[29] Although Hu congratulated Bobrowska on the publication, this response contains echoes of the first of several critiques Masha Salazkina, seeking “new approaches and modes of address,” identifies as common responses to transnational approaches, a concern that “Transnational research produces superficial knowledge, the product of scholars with a relative paucity of knowledge about certain cultural, historical, and linguistic regions.”[30] Bobrowska responds at length to Hu’s expressed reservations about the complexities of “distant observation,” noting, among other things, the value of displacing an Anglocentric theoretical paradigm: “Eastern European perspective on Chinese area studies is (for reasons which exceed this discussion) less recognized in Anglo/American-centric academia. Yet, it is worth noticing that since 1945 the connections between the PRC and countries such as Poland or Czechoslovakia were interestingly cultivated in the field of arts (e.g., let us recall the visit of Jin Xi at Jiri Trnka’s studio), while in the 1980s the exchanges between the researchers in economy occurred between the PRC, Poland, and Hungary.”[31]
In the above-cited introduction to the Frameworks special issue on the geopolitics of film theory, Salazkina, drawing on John Mowitt’s prescient insights, links the field’s crisis of the object to the shift from a postcolonial to a globalization and liberal multiculturalist agenda. She critiques the field’s “failure of actual pedagogical and institutional practices to adapt to the propositions raised by decades of scholarly developments, those which traversed the heated debates on Third Cinema in the 1980s, to the critical work of Orientalist and postcolonial frameworks, which finally cleared the ground for discussions of World Cinema, Global Cinema, and, indeed, Transnational Film and Media Studies in recent years.”[32] The special issue notes the importance less of adding a particular country than to attending to what Salazkina calls “the place from which knowledge is created.”[33] The impacts of this limited knowledge include, Salazkina argues, a Euro-American “theory” that is presented as universal; a separation of film studies and area studies; a prioritization of English, French, and to some extent German language publications; and a colonial mindset governing translation decisions. Salazkina makes many recommendations in that special issue that, while I won’t repeat them here, are, I think, pertinent for the conversation Du’s catalyzing questions open for our collective reflection.
In thinking about all of this and in reading more deeply in the area of Chinese animation studies than I have done before, I have found myself asking questions that I feel unqualified to answer, but I share them in case they are generative for dialogue across areas of specialization:
1) How and where does the question of feminism, of gender and sexuality, enter the picture? Too often in film theory’s history, gender-marginalized voices and labor disappear when either medium specificity or geopolitical questions take center stage. Here, Belinda Qian He’s 2017 essay, “Animating herstory? Stillness/motion, popular cinephilia, and the economy of the instants in the post-cinema age” is important, not just for its specific discussion of the popular video, The Founding Women (2016), but for its invitation to think about frame-by-frame filmmaking’s preoccupation with stillness and motion as related to concerns about both gender oppression and entrenched historical and theoretical narratives. He argues that these concerns can’t really be thought apart. This recalls Hannah Frank’s Frame By Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (2019), which invites readers to translate the labor-intensive process of animation production into a labor-intensive method of looking and theorizing animation.[34] Doing so often brings the labor of forgotten women into view. Both of these projects take Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x A Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) as an inspiration, suggesting that feminist concerns persisted as feminist film theorists shifted their attention from female bodies on screen to medium-specific questions and questions of time. Put otherwise, time, and therefore the frame-by-frame construction of it, is a feminist issue.
2) How can we think across questions of animation, life, and human/nonhuman ideologies within transnational frameworks? Victor Fan argues that the early 20th century Chinese film theorists Gu Kenfu and Hou Yao were particularly invested in what Hou calls “the human Spirit” as a result of a concern with “the dignity of Chinese life that seemed to be lacking in Hollywood’s image of China and its people.”[35] This disrespect of Chinese people was strongly present in early American animation, and JS Wu’s dissertation, “The Animating Inbetween: Productions of Race in Popular Animation” (2024) brilliantly explores the relationship between racist stereotypes and the evolution of animation production techniques. Building on the work of Siane Ngai and Nicholas Sammond, among others, Wu puts Animation Studies in dialogue with Asian-American Studies and Black Studies, reminding us, as does Du’s work on minorities in Chinese animation history, that the nation is never one. It may be productive to consider the different ways in which the concept of “life” and “spirit” are acknowledged or denied across these distinct conversations.
At the 2022 SCMS conference, Tess Takahashi challenged animation scholars to think more expansively about the relationship between animation and race, and this challenge seems particularly rich in a transnational framework that involves nonsingular nations. While Fan does not write about animation, he does offer different ways of thinking about “life” or rensheng de taidu, and he gestures to links between what he calls “time undead” in contrast to Bazin’s “change mummified,” and the media-induced and repeatable affective experiences in our digital present, as when he states, “we might want to think about time afresh with concepts such as transposition, transference, reflection, inflection, inversion, reversion, shuffling, recomposition, counterpoint, and resequencing.”[36] It would be interesting to extend Fan’s “time undead” into the realm of Chinese animation theory, and I am guessing scholars I’m unaware of have done this. But to do so brings an anthropocentric way of thinking media centered on the “human spirit” into proximity with a realm, animation, where, representationally speaking, lively nonhumanity often rules. This is not necessarily solely a question of representation, although it is also that, and the resonance of this line of thinking probably alters depending on whether the discussion is nationally or transnationally framed. For example, Du, in dialogue with Akira Lippit, Thomas Lamarre, Jason McGrath, and others, explores the relationship between animality and animation, considering questions of ethnic minorities, revolutionaries, and gendered others within China, while also emphasizing how these Chinese animations travel and are viewed by audiences outside of China. This raises complex questions about how different audiences may interpret the “overanimatedness” Du discusses.
For example, Wang Yiman, working within in a transnational feminist context, activates Una Chauduri’s notion of zooesis, to consider the stop-motion animation in relation to nonhuman life, including animals and “jettisoned vegetables and fruits,” in “The Mortal Animation and the Techno-animated life—Chen Qiang’s Experimental Zooetic Animation Trilogy, Cut Off (2007, 2008, 2010)” (2017).[37] Wang’s contribution here is rich not only for its exploration of animated nonhuman liveliness within a Chinese context, but also because this thought path becomes available to Wang through Noel Carroll’s “piecemeal theory” (212), another limited or incomplete theoretical mode that possesses structural affinities with frame-by-frame filmmaking processes in its composition from fragments. Yang also adapts Carroll’s “piecemeal” theoretical approach, linking its affordances explicitly to Lim’s critique of linear temporal models in Translating Time. In both of these cases, a scrappy, frame-by-frame, modular, or incomplete theory that is intimate with genres or modes considered lowly or marginal by dominant film histories—animation, experimental film, the fantastic—invites creativity, refusals, and connections across hitherto separate discursive realms.
3) Western Humanism and Theoretical Aspirations: Pao-chen Tang’s work in progress, titled Modern Shamans: The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema, promises to challenge the limitations of thinking about ecological challenges within ethical frameworks derived from Western humanism, a humanism that is deeply implicated in, and perhaps inextricably linked to the justifications of, the devastations wrought by colonialism and imperialism (these are my words, not Tang’s). Animation, understood as both a technology of filmmaking and a way of thinking about life and liveliness, might then function as a bridge between transnational East Asian media theories and ecological conversations outside of animation studies’ paradigms. Particularly important here seems Rey Chow’s discussion of the imperial implicatedness of what she calls “French Theory in America.” Chow describes this America “as the successor to and advancer of Europe and European imperialist intentions and tendencies over the course of modern history[.]”[38]
As Rizvana Bradley writes in her 2023 book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, “[B]lackness is completely occluded from questions of ontology.”[39] How we collectively think about media ontologies, humanity, and definitions of “life” are impacted by this claim. While Bradley refuses the idea of redeeming or fixing the ontologies that undergird Anglo-European theories, possibilities still lie, she argues, in the realms of the unfinished (122), the not-quite (74), the “discorrelated” (54), the “disfigurement” (30). Such work encourages us to linger in the suspended, collaborative, and not just unfinished but unfinishable spaces, spaces that are at odds with many existing academic frameworks of “success.” These often “suspended” or not-quite spaces challenge us to determine these frameworks’ possible affinities with both life-destroying and/or life-supporting systems, one messy, (in)animating conversation at a time.
[1] Jacqueline Rose, “Why War?” in Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA, 1993): 15-40; 36 and 25.
[2] Patricia White, “On Retrospectatorship,” Uninvited: Classical Hollywood and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 194-216.
[3] Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon, eds., Incomplete: the Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 24.
[4] Baryon Tensor Posadas, “ ‘Confront the Cruelty of the Future’” Coloniality, Ecology, and Futurity in Abe Kobo’s Inter Ice Age 4,” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 48.3 (Summer 2021): 496-516; 497 and 514.
[5] https://acas.world/2023/05/23/animation-and-the-obsolescence-of-the-image-on-hong-kong-cityscape/.
[6] Beeston and Solomon, eds., Incomplete, 24.
[7] Daisy Yan Du, “A Theory of Suspended Animation: The Aesthetics and Politics of (E)motion and Stillness,” Discourse, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Winter 2022): 42-77.
[8] Jacqueline Rose, “Why War?,” 30.
[9] Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 2.
[10] Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 4.
[11] Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 215.
[12] Chen, Asia as Method, 217-8.
[13] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), Enlarged edition, 167-170.
[14] Dai Jinhua, “Rethinking the Cultural History of Chinese Film” in Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, eds. Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 247.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 24, 29, and 33.
[17] Chenshu Zhou, Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 8.
[18] Zhou, Cinema Off Screen, 9.
[19] Zhou, Cinema Off Screen, 69.
[20] Zhou, Cinema Off Screen, 9.
[21] Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019), 114-151.
[22] Panpan Yang, “Animating Space: Toward a Poetics of Chinese Animation,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2020, 8.
[23] Sun Lijun, ed., The History of Chinese Animation (volume 2) (New York: Routledge, 2022), 208.
[24] Du, Animated Encounters, 26-7.
[25] Masha Salazkina, World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 13.
[26] Yang, “Animating Space,” 2.
[27] Yang, “Animating Space,” 1.
[28] Thomas Lamarre, “The animation of China: an Interim Report,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 11, number 2 (2017): 123-139; 125.
[29] Society of Animation Studies listserve, February 21, 2024.
[30] Masha Salazkina, “Introduction: Film Theory in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Volume 56, Number 2 (Fall 2015): 325-349; 328 and 327.
[31] Society of Animation Studies listserve, February 22, 2024.
[32] Salazkina, “Introduction,” 333-334
[33] Salazkina, “Introduction, 334.
[34] https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.65/.
[35] Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 36.
[36] Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 42.
[37] Yiman Wang, “The Mortal Animation and the Techno-animated Life—Chen Qiang’s Experimental Zooetic Animation Trilogy, Cut Off (2007, 2008, 2010),” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2017): 210-226.
[38] Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 14.
[39] Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 10.
Bio:
Karen Redrobe is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, and editor of Animating Film Theory. She has co-edited three volumes, Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma, On Writing with Photography, with Liliane Weissberg, and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures with Jeff Scheible, which won SCMS’s Best Edited Collection Award. In addition to completing Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminism, and the Art of War, she is collaborating with Kartik Nair on a co-edited book about teaching cinema and freedom in the classroom.
