{"id":5545,"date":"2025-05-25T22:18:28","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T14:18:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acas.world\/?p=5545"},"modified":"2026-02-27T12:28:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T04:28:22","slug":"toward-a-locational-theory-of-chinese-animation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acas.world\/cn\/2025\/05\/25\/toward-a-locational-theory-of-chinese-animation\/","title":{"rendered":"Toward a Locational Theory of Chinese Animation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daisy Yan Du<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wrote this short article in response to Prof. Karen Redrobe\u2019s essay \u201cFailed Animation, Limited Theory: Feminist Reflections in a Transnational Context,\u201d<\/a> published on the ACAS website on March 14, 2024. Her essay was based on an invited lecture she delivered in February 2024 for the ACAS Distinguished Lecture Series at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Given that the lectures in this series are expected to be somehow related to China or Chinese animation and Prof. Redrobe is not a China or Chinese animation scholar, it would perhaps be impracticable for her to conduct in-depth research about Chinese animation for the lecture in the short time she had to prepare. I therefore suggested that for convenience\u2019s sake, she could link some ideas in her edited book Animating Film Theory<\/em> (2014) to China or Chinese animation. Even though the topic of Chinese animation is absent in that book, there is still certainly much she could say about it, such as the role of Chinese animation for theorizing animation. I want to clarify that my suggestion is by no means a gesture of criticism. In other words, the absence of Chinese animation in that book should not be taken as a failure, nor the editor\u2019s negligence, nor a limitation of that book. In fact, I have been using that groundbreaking book for my graduate courses over the past decade and I do regard it as a milestone in animation studies, a classic indeed. Chinese animation was absent in that book largely because the topic was still invisible in the English academia at that time. When Prof. Redrobe embarked on that book project, I was still writing my PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was the first in the West.[1]<\/a>    <\/p>\n

Later I was invited by Prof. Redrobe to give a lecture for her graduate class Global Film Theory at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2025. Since I had no clue of what I could say to meet the needs of that class, Prof. Redrobe suggested that I speak about the status of \u201ctheory\u201d in Chinese film and animation studies. Since my own publications are largely based on archival and historical research, which is a common practice in area studies, or China studies to be specific, we must ask: What\u2019s the role of theory in Chinese film and animation studies? Is theory important for Chinese film and animation studies? If so, what does theory allow for and reveal in Chinese film and animation studies? I wrote this essay to address her questions as well as some of my own.                 <\/p>\n

First, let me answer this question: What is theory? People may have different understandings, especially depending on their disciplinary location and background. Most people would probably associate \u201ctheory\u201d with big names such as Deleuze, Derrida, Freud, Lacan, and Baudrillard. Theory has often been understood as the abstraction of ideas that can transcend socio-historical specificity and can be applied to explain many cases from different contexts. As such, theory, due to its universal appeal, has been largely treated as an antithesis of socio-historical concreteness. Here arises the different approaches in film and media (especially digital media) studies in Film and Media Departments and area studies in East Asian Departments. While scholars based in East Asian studies, often called the old-fashioned \u201csinologists\u201d who frequent the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), guard the socio-historical territories by frequently using prepositional phrases like \u201c???? in China\u201d or \u201cChinese ????\u201d in their work, Film and Media Studies scholars, who often attend the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), tend to critique such kind of essentialist sounding phrases for they suggest a bounded area shared by the same language, culture, history, and identity. Digital media scholars are especially critical of such boundedness as they argue that digital media can transcend socio-historical identities and resist geopolitical capture. In \u201cWhat\u2019s \u2018in\u2019? Disaggregating Asia through New Media Actants,\u201d Ani Maitra and Rey Chow point out that \u201cnew media,\u201d or digital media is often associated with \u201cnotions of rootlessness and placeness, as borne out by the decentered nature of rhizomatic networks that transcend spatial and temporal constraints.\u201d[2]<\/a> Digital media has the propensity to resist \u201cbeing clearly defined, held, or captured.\u201d[3]<\/a> Due to the different approaches, film and media scholars, especially those working on theory, are skeptical of the socio-historical concreteness of the scholarship produced in area studies as such solidness and rigorousness may suggest an inability to theorize, over-generalize, universalize, abstract, and think beyond case studies and raw materials. As a result of their archival\/historical approach, scholarship in area studies has sometimes been devalued by media theorists as pure intellectual labor. On the other hand, area studies scholars are often intimidated by and remain skeptical of pure abstraction and pure theories, questioning them for their universalizing tendencies and the lack of socio-historical groundedness.<\/p>\n

The discrepancies between the two approaches are more pronounced in Chinese film studies than in Japanese film studies. Discussing area studies and film\/media studies for their different approaches to Japanese cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto asks, \u201cWhy can the Japanese cinema be so easily incorporated into theoretical discourses of Anglo-American film studies, while theory seems to become problematic in the analysis of, say, the Chinese cinema?\u201d[4]<\/a> Yoshimoto explains that it is because of Japan\u2019s double identity, as Japan is \u201cperceived to be sufficiently different from, but have some common elements within, Western capitalist nations.\u201d[5]<\/a> Unfortunately, China does not have this double identity, as it is often perceived by the capitalist West as the Other that is radically different, a trend that is further exacerbated under the reign of Donald Trump.              <\/p>\n

I am aware of the two approaches, and I think we should combine the two, for each side has its own strengths and together they can amplify one another. If we only adopt the method of \u201cthick description\u201d in area studies and just pile up the cases and raw materials one after another without any critical engagement and interpretations, our scholarship will likely become what Charles Baudelaire calls \u201ca riot of details.\u201d[6]<\/a> If we think in terms of pure abstraction and project universals out of nowhere, our theories may become groundless and too homogeneous, resulting in a self-referential system that has no relevance in our world. I therefore propose a locational theory, which is an argument that is based on critical engagement with socio-historical materials. It is a grounded, bottom-up theory coming from somewhere yet still has the universal power to explain, or at least be applied to, some cases in other contexts. As I explain to my graduate students, \u201cIf you make a list of all kinds of wild cats in Hong Kong, it is raw data. But if you, after closely examining these cats, argue that the wild cats in Hong Kong are descendants of Siberian tigers in northeast China, then it becomes a theory, a theory distilled from empirical data.\u201d     <\/p>\n

My term \u201clocational theory\u201d draws on Susan Stanford Friedman\u2019s concept of \u201clocational feminism,\u201d which she uses to refer to third-wave feminism. Third-wave feminism emerged to respond to the problems of second-wave feminism. Unsatisfied with the universalizing tendency of second-wave feminist theory, where the homogeneous concept of \u201cglobal sisterhood\u201d under the same patriarchal oppression was based on the experience of middle or upper-middle-class white women and then applied to all women in the rest of the world, third-wave feminism advocated for the concept of \u201cintersectionality\u201d to account for women\u2019s differences in terms of location, race, nationality, class, age, and other important factors. Friedman\u2019s locational feminism is \u201cbased not upon static or abstract definition but rather upon the assumption of changing historical and geographical specificities that produce different feminist theories, agendas, and political practices.\u201d[7]<\/a> Virginia Woolf\u2019s famous statement, \u201cas a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world,\u201d has often been cited as a manifesto of feminist cosmopolitanism that resists geopolitical capture. In \u201cNotes toward a Politics of Location,\u201d written in 1984 to address the pitfalls of the second-wave feminism, Adrienne Rich contends, \u201cAs a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or by saying three times \u2018as a woman my country is the whole world.\u2019\u201d[8]<\/a> Rich thus calls for a feminist struggle against dislocation and the \u201cidolatry of pure ideas,\u201d for the female bodies are always already differently located. Further, Rich argues that \u201cTheory\u2014the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees\u2014theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn\u2019t smell of the earth, it isn\u2019t good for the earth.\u201d[9]<\/a> <\/p>\n

My call for a \u201clocational theory\u201d resonates with what Judith (now Jack) Halberstam calls \u201clow theory,\u201d a concept that Halberstam derived from Stuart Hall in his essay \u201cGramsci\u2019s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,\u201d \u201cWe expose ourselves error when we attempt to \u2018read off\u2019 concepts that were designed to operate at a high level of abstraction as if they automatically produced the same theoretical effects when translated to another, more concrete, \u2018lower\u2019 level of operation.\u201d[10]<\/a> Here \u201chigh theory\u201d is associated with a high level of abstraction, a top-down theory, while \u201clow theory\u201d is linked with historical concreteness, a bottom-up theory. Prepositional phrases, such as \u201cChinese animation\u201d and \u201canimation in China\u201d seem to have the power to lower the level of abstraction and align the topic within area studies confined in a bounded territory, thus limiting the universal appeal of a theory.          <\/p>\n

A \u201clocational theory\u201d acknowledges the necessity of abstraction and universalization, but it also affirms the historicity and social groundedness in theorization. To explain, I will provide a few examples of what I mean by \u201clocational theory\u201d in Chinese film studies. Victor Fan\u2019s Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory<\/em> (2015) is a locational theory. He uses a localized Chinese term bizhen<\/em> (approaching reality), which was frequently employed by Chinese film critics between the 1920s and 1940s, to critique and negotiate the film theories by Bazin, Kracauer, Agamben, and Deleuze, generating a unique localized Chinese film theory grounded in the analyses of Chinese films and society. In a similar vein, Zhen Zhang\u2019s monograph An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1986-1937<\/em> (2005), Weihong Bao\u2019s monograph Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945<\/em> (2015). Jason McGrath\u2019s monograph Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from Silent Era to the Digital Age<\/em> (2023), Jie Li\u2019s Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China<\/em>, Chenshu Zhou\u2019s Cinema off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China<\/em> (2021), and Ying Qian\u2019s Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China<\/em> (2024), all demonstrate the tendency to theorize Chinese film based on concrete socio-historical context. They are both theoretically informed and historically situated, striking a balance between abstraction and particularity.         <\/p>\n

Here I want to mention a few pioneering books on Chinese film, which some film and media theorists may see as fully historicized yet insufficiently theorized, such as Jay Leyda\u2019s book Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China<\/em> (1972), Paul Clark\u2019s classic Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949<\/em> (1988), Poshek Fu’s Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas<\/em> (2003), Yingjin Zhang\u2019s Chinese National Cinemas<\/em> (2004), and Paul Pickowicz\u2019s China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy<\/em> (2012). Despite potential qualms from film and media theorists, these pioneering books introduced Chinese cinema to the English world, and they indeed opened the field of Chinese film studies to English academia. They laid a solid foundation for the rise of more theoretically engaging volumes written by the younger generation of scholars, as mentioned in the previous paragraph. Outlining film histories is often the first step toward more theoretical engagement with the topic.<\/p>\n

Now, of course, we must also wrestle with the vexing question of applying Western theories to Chinese film studies. There is a clear uneven power relationship between the West and China in that Western scholars invent theories, and they are then applied to the Chinese case studies. As for the whiteness of theories (white people write widely applied Western theories), Adrienne Rich writes, \u201cThat only certain kinds of people can make theory; that the white-educated mind is capable of formulating everything; that white middle-class feminism can know for \u2018all women\u2019; that only when a white mind formulates is the formulation to be taken seriously.\u201d[11]<\/a> To be able to theorize and taken seriously in that theorizing is thus a privilege of white people in the West. This framing follows that Chinese minds can only engage on a lower level of thinking: apply Western theories to Chinese cases or get stuck and lost in historical concreteness and unable to see the forest.       <\/p>\n

There is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of approach. In my own teaching and research, I use Western theories. I offered a graduate course Animation Theories, and the theoretical writings I use for that course are mostly from white scholars, mainly located in the U.S, such as Prof. Redrobe\u2019s book Animating Film Theory<\/em>, Thomas Lamarre\u2019s The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation <\/em>(2009), Marc Steinberg\u2019s Anime\u2019s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan<\/em> (2012), plus the works of Tom Gunning, James Lastra, Sianne Ngai, V.I. Pudovkin, Colleen Montgomery, Barbara Johnson, Paul Wells, Kristin Thompson, Miriam Hansen, Vivian Sobchak, Scott Bukatman, Laura Mulvey, Neil Postman, Lev Manovich, Nicholas Sammond, Daniel Morgan, Hannah Frank, Kristen Whissel, Shilo McClean, Lea Jacobs, Jayne Pilling, Henry Jenkins, James Welker, Jane Bennett, Mely Chen, Ursula K. Heise, Michelle Smith, Karen Warren, Alice Crawford, Maureen Furniss, Mark Langer, Alan Cholodenko, Annabelle Honess Roe, Rayna Denison, Suzanne Buchan, Pauline Moore, Stephen Gould, Colleen Montgomery, Joanna Bouldin, Gunnar Strom, Alex Zahlten, Diane Lewis, Sharon Kinsella, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Susan Napier, Hiroki Azuma, Shunsuke Nozawa, Akira Lippit, Yuriko Furuhata, Christine Yano, Rey Chow, Haiyan Lee, Weihua Wu, Paola Voci, Teri Silvio, Jason McGrath, Lai-kwan Pang, Lydia Liu, Jin Fuzai, Dai Jinhua, among others. In fact, I even think that graduate students in Hong Kong, or in Asia at large, need to be trained more in theory. Here in Hong Kong, most of our graduate students are from mainland China. They are very knowledgeable about the history and society of China, and they are already well-trained in archival and historical research methodologies, but they know little about film theory. Introducing film theory to them is thus necessary in my role as an educator. I welcome more graduate courses on film theory in Hong Kong, and I always encourage my graduate students to step out of their comfort zones to take these theory courses. I also actively urged my department to hire new faculty members who can teach film and media theories at the graduate level.        <\/p>\n

I am not against the practice of citing and applying Western theories to Chinese or Asian cases. On the contrary, I think that Western theories can be used as a powerful tool for us to explain and understand Chinese or Asian cases from a theoretical perspective. For instance, in the spring of 2023, I taught an undergraduate course titled Anime, in which we discussed the famous Japanese TV series Evangelion<\/em> (1995). Most of my students, who were anime fans, were interested in the character Gendo, the authoritative commander and father of the boy protagonist. I, however, directed my students to pay attention to the role of the vanished mothers, who become liquid in Eva, the mega fighting machine created under the leadership of Gendo. Here I introduced Prof. Redrobe\u2019s monograph Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism<\/em> (2003), in which she engages with Laura Mulvey\u2019s famous discussion of the male gaze and cogently argues that even when women\u2019s bodies vanish and move away from the male gaze, they are still subject to patriarchal oppression and violence. The mothers in Evangelion<\/em> vanish and become liquid (something like amniotic fluid in the womb) inside the mega fighting machine to revitalize it and establish a kind of communion between the mega machine and its pilots, who are their young sons and daughters. At this point in the course, I connected the vanishing mothers with a real incident that happened in Hong Kong at the time of the course: the murder of Abby Choi. On Feb 21, 2023, Abby, a beautiful model in Hong Kong, was murdered by her husband, father-in-law, and brother-in-law, assisted by other in-law family members. Her corpse was dismembered and cooked into a soup. She became liquid in a pot like the mothers in Evangelion<\/em>. In both cases, men became the powerful magicians who made these Asian women vanish and liquefy at their will. As such, Prof. Redrobe\u2019s theorization of the \u201cvanishing women,\u201d although based on Western materials, does have an explanatory power here in the Asian context.<\/p>\n

Of course, we should not apply Western theories blindly and neglect the local specificities endemic to the object of study. Otherwise, we will be reduced to what Rey Chow calls the \u201cpostmodern automatons,\u201d the third-world feminists, who, controlled and ventriloquized by first-world feminist theories, can only speak in the voice of first-world feminists and are unable to address the real issues faced by their local sisters.[12]<\/a> Some Western theories, though powerful in certain contexts, may lose traction in certain Asian cases. Sergei Eisenstein\u2019s widely cited concept of \u201cplasmaticness\u201d is probably one of the earliest and most well-known animation theories. Based on his examination of early Disney animated shorts, Eisenstein argues that the medium of animation demonstrates a tendency toward fluidity and malleability, of what he calls \u201cplasmaticness,\u201d defined as \u201ca rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form.\u201d[13]<\/a> The animated characters have elastic outlines, prone to bodily transformation and metamorphosis. I have frequently cited Eisenstein\u2019s \u201cplasmaticness\u201d in my discussions of Chinese animation. However, after I talked to many Chinese animators, I realized that Eisenstein\u2019s \u201cplasmaticness\u201d cannot account for all Chinese animated films. In the summer of 2017, I interviewed Dai Tielang (1930-2019), the \u201cfather\u201d of the TV animation series Police Chief Black Cat<\/em> (1984-1987). I asked him why the protagonists are not plasmatic and do not change their body forms like they do in American and Japanese science-fiction animations. Dai Tielang replied by saying that while \u201cplasmticness\u201d is a typical feature of American animation, it is not part of the Chinese way of animation.[14]<\/a> He deliberately distanced his work from the American animation style. During my numerous conversations with Duan Xiaoxuan (1934-), a woman animator in charge of animation technology in socialist China, Duan reiterated that Chinese ink-painting animation tends toward \u201cinaction,\u201d \u201cslowness,\u201d \u201cquietness,\u201d and \u201clyricism,\u201d thus marking its difference from American animation characterized by hilarious movements, plasmatic body forms, and eventful plots. If the characters in Chinese ink-painting animated films become plasmatic and transform their bodies, the Chineseness and the flair of ink-painting animation will be lost.  <\/p>\n

At first, I thought that perhaps these veteran socialist animators, who flourished during the Cold War, had a nationalistic take on \u201cplasmaticness,\u201d having perhaps categorized it as American and other. But after I mined the archives, I found that even during the Republican era when American culture was welcomed in China, similar arguments already existed. In an essay published on September 15, 1942, the author (anonymous) argues that the contrast between Chinese and American animated cartoons arises from Chinese and Americans\u2019 different preferences for forms. Chinese people tend to prefer squares, not circles and roundedness. For instance, Chinese-designed houses are often built with many square shapes with angular eaves, and Chinese characters are also squares, with many fold lines, not curved lines. Such a style is reflected in Chinese animated cartoons, which exhibit a distinct form and aesthetics different from American animated cartoons that are drawn with more rounded, curved lines prone to metamorphosis and plasmaticness.[15]<\/a> Although Eisenstein\u2019s concept of \u201cplasmaticness\u201d is a powerful theory that can be universalized, it still cannot be used to analyze all Chinese animated films, as many of them are characterized by a resistance to plasmaticness.           <\/p>\n

We need to be aware of the unequal power relationship between Western theories and Asian cases. Why are Western theories so often applied to Asian cases, and not the other way around? Are the Asian minds situated on a lower level of thinking, prone to get stuck in details and figurative trees, making them unable to theorize and see the forest? Is it possible to generate a theory based on an Asian context that is also applicable to Western cases? Paul Pickowicz, one of the earliest historians of Chinese films active since the late 1960s, asks, \u201cIs there no Chinese theory? Is there no Asian theory? \u2026 Some will complain that theory is \u2018universal\u2019, so there is no reason why Jameson\u2019s theories about capitalist societies cannot be applied to China. But why are all the \u2018universal\u2019 theories of European or American origin? How would Europeanists or Americanists react if \u2018universal\u2019 theories based on empirical studies of China were applied to the European case? I suspect that they would not like it at all.\u201d[16]<\/a> I once wrote a theoretical essay about \u201csuspended animation,\u201d which argues that political power and aura decreases with one\u2019s increasing physical movements and emotions.[17]<\/a> The theory is mainly based on Chinese animated films, but I conceptualized it with the goal of addressing a more universal context. I developed the theory many years ago but only got the time to write it during the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. I used it to argue that Donald Trump was losing political power and aura because he was very much animated, with excessive physical movements (he even danced during a formal speech!), exaggerated facial expressions, and fervent emotions. Perhaps it was no surprise that Donald Trump was made into the protagonist of a TV animation series titled Our Cartoon President<\/em> (2018). Was Trump the most animated, and thus the most depowered American president in history? For the sublime figures of (in)animation, to be animated means to be depowered, according to my theory.    <\/p>\n