By Jinying Li In the first two decades of the 21st century, we witnessed a widespread cultural movement of geekdom that went global and mainstream simultaneously. While American media were announcing “it’s hip to be square” and “geek is chic,” their East Asian counterparts were embracing otaku and zhai as trendy labels to identify a … Continue reading Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: From Astro Boy to China’s Zhai Generation
By Mengxue Wei Pan Jian’s book, Trajectory: The Development of Animation Industry and the Evolution of Animation Art in China (Guiji: Zhongguo dongman chanye fazhan yu donghua yishu yanjin), primarily focuses on the development of the Chinese animation industry from 2004 to 2021. Written in the form of a chronicle, it extensively analyzes the Chinese … Continue reading Trajectory: The Development of Animation Industry and the Evolution of Animation Art in China, by Pan Jian. Science Press, 2023. 253 pp.
By John A. Crespi The Hundred Flowers Movement, launched in May 1956 and culminating in Mao Zedong’s call to critique the Chinese Communist Party during the Rectification Movement of May and June 1957, was a bonanza for China’s manhua. During that span of about a year, China’s cartoonists were granted free rein to take aim … Continue reading A Parting Shot: Liao Bingxiong’s “Slippery Poem-Pictures” and the 1957 Rectification Movement
By Yanyun Chen Her gilded brownness is infinite. Who is her body? Long Live the New Fle$h, 2020 Gold is a crime. The story begins with an accusation of vandalism—of land in gold. It is no surprise that this coveted nugget, which has triggered … Continue reading Animating Gold: The Works of Priyageetha Dia
By Cassandra Xin Guan In the opening sequence of The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu Weihushan 智取威虎山 2014), an overseas Chinese student, “Jimmy,” walks into a karaoke parlor in Manhattan’s Chinatown trailing a suitcase. He mingles with a noisy group of young Asians, until the incongruous sound of Peking opera and the vision of a … Continue reading What Happens to the Index in Animation? The Case of The Taking of Tiger Mountain
Download PDF 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? … Continue reading Failed Animation, Limited Theory: Feminist Reflections in a Transnational Context
By Jingyi Zhang The beginning of the millennium was important for Chinese animation. It not only began the rejuvenation of the Chinese animation industry, which embodied “the promise of the modernization of Chinese visual culture,”[i] but also saw the creation of a surprising range of works that can be categorized as independent animation. Additionally, it … Continue reading Is There a Chinese New Wave in Animation? An Examination of Student Animation in China
By Qiu Liwei; translated by Yixing Li This essay reviews the evolution of Taiwan animation, from the golden age of overseas subcontracting in the 1980s, to the creation of original content in the early 21st century, and the market orientation in the current age. The focus of this discussion is the interdependence and balance between … Continue reading Taiwan Animation: From Subcontractor to Creator
By Yiyang Hou Panpan Yang’s PhD dissertation, Animating Space: Towards a Poetics of Chinese Animation, fosters a dialogue between cinema studies and the study of visual art. In this study, Yang offers an interdisciplinary and critically-engaged examination of the poetics of Chinese animation from the 1920s to the present. Taking the history of Chinese animation … Continue reading Animating Space: Towards a Poetics of Chinese Animation, Ph.D. dissertation, by Panpan Yang, University of Chicago, USA, August 2020. 286 pp.
By Yomi Braester In this essay I hope to provoke scholars of animation into considering the role of time, both cinematic time and historical time. Like other genres of the moving image, animation often has at its core the disappearance of the image — an anticipated, even planned obsolescence. I examine here works exhibited as … Continue reading Animation, the Obsolescence of the Image, and the Disappearance of Hong Kong Architecture