Daisy Yan Du is Associate Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She has published articles on animation, film, gender, and popular culture in Positions: Asia Critique, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Gender & History, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her first monograph, titled Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s, was published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2019. She is currently editing a book titled Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspectives (Brill, forthcoming in 2021). She is the editor overseeing Asia for the Encyclopedia of Animation Studies, newly launched by Bloomsbury reference. 

Kellee S. Tsai (Ph.D., Political Science, Columbia University) is Dean of Humanities and Social Science and Chair Professor of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).  She previously served as Head of the Division of Social Science at HKUST; and Vice Dean of Humanities and Social Science and Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.  She is the author or co-editor of several books, including Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China (Cornell 2002), Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (Cornell 2007), and State Capitalism, Institutional Adaptation, and the Chinese Miracle (co-edited with Barry Naughton, Cambridge 2015).  She has published articles in Business and Politics, China Journal, China Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Development Studies, Perspectives on Politics, World Development, and World Politics, among others. Tsai’s research interests include informal institutions, informal and digital finance, endogenous institutional change, political economy of development, and private entrepreneurship. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the impact of migration on local development in three pairs of localities China and India.

This paper approaches Chinese animation from the perspective of film history as media archaeology (Elsaesser 2016). First, we posit that Chinese animation constitutes an alternative archive, which encourages scholarship that departs from the time-honored teleological and organic models and, instead, traces lines of descend rather than origins. In parallel or parallax histories and trajectories, Chinese animation is associative of various artistic media and generative of new visual styles and forms (e.g., ink painting, papercut). Second, the concept of dispositif—involving materiality, bricolage, and assemblages—requires that we examine medium, image, and spectator together in animation studies. The anticipation of the child-like spectator explains the types of images to emerge, but it also allows for “double power”(Du 2019) that interrogates the socialist reconstruction of childhood via violence. In contemplating what, when and why is animation, we see how the increasing importance of experience has transformed animation into an encounter more than an event. An investigation of the medium in animation history shows not so much definitive breaks as playful remediation, oftentimes through pastiche and parody vis-à-vis live-action film and classical narrative. Chinese animation represents a distinct transmedia synergy referencing literature, theater, painting, and music. Third, precisely due to its multiplicity and heterogeneity, Chinese animation does not conform to a single telos despite historical exigency and ideological interpellation. Chinese animation studies should therefore keep “a retrospective and prospective frame of mind at the same time” because, like cinema in general, animation is “still in permanent flux and becoming” (Elsaesser 2016).

Yingjin Zhang (Ph.D., Stanford) is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Studies, and Chair of the Department of Literature at University of California, San Diego. He also holds a Visiting Chair Professorship in Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He is the author of The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford, 1996), Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Center for Chinese Studies, Michigan, 2002), Chinese National Cinema (Routledge, 2004), and Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Hawaii, 2010); co-author of Encyclopedia of Chinese Film (Routledge, 1998) and New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject and Place (Routledge, 2015); editor of China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature (Stanford, 1998), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 (Stanford, 1999), A Companion to Chinese Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016); and co-editor of From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Chinese Film Stars (Routledge, 2010), Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (Brill, 2013), and Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First Century China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). He has co-edited two special issues for Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2008) and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (2018), the latter on “Chinese literature as world literature.” Additionally, he has published ten Chinese books and over 170 research articles in Chinese, English, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Haoliners Animation League, established in Shanghai in 2013, uses a model for multimedia franchising reminiscent of what is loosely called media mix in the Japanese context. Haoliners has adapted a number of Chinese webcomics and net animations into animated television series that resemble anime.  Since the establishment of a Japanese subsidiary, Emon Animation Company, in 2015, Haoliners has launched into coproductions entailing various combinations of Chinese directors and writers with Japanese animators, such as the anime series Fox Spirit Matchmaker (2017) and Evil or Live (2017-2018) and the omnibus film Flavors of Youth (2018).  In an era in which there is increasing emphasis on the part of governmental agencies and filmmakers in both Japan and China on the articulation of a “national style,” Haoliners’ animations may appear somewhat scandalous because they introduce a zone in which national styles are indiscernible. Indeed, common complaints are that these animations are either too much like anime, or not enough like anime, and without Chinese characteristics.

While it is tempting to characterize these multimedia franchises as “convergence culture,” this manner of convergence is not like the American grassroots culture evoked by Henry Jenkins.  It is not a nation-based popular culture or national populism. Such convergence is more like what Miriam Hansen called a “global sensory vernacular” — “with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability” — that might be said to register and respond to processes of regionalization and globalization. In this paper, I propose a closer reading of the “form of content” and the “form of expression” in Haoliners’ animations to consider how they respond to processes of regionalization and globalization related to media circulation, distribution, and translatability. Of particular interest is the paradigm of net addiction in Evil or Live, for it exemplifies an experience of “unbalanced equilibrium” or “equilibrium away from equilibrium” that characterizes the contemporary transmedial situation.

Thomas Lamarre is professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies & East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research centers on the history of media, thought, and material culture, with projects ranging from (Uncovering Heian Japan, 2000), to silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen, 2005), animation technologies (The Anime Machine, 2009) and on television and new media (The Anime Ecology, 2018). Current projects include research on animation that addresses the use of animals in the formation of media networks associated with colonialism and extraterritorial empire, and the consequent politics of animism and speciesism.

He has also edited volumes on cinema and animation, on the impact of modernity in East Asia, on pre-emptive war, and, as Associate Editor of Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, a number of volumes on manga, anime, and fan cultures. He is co-editor with Takayuki Tatsumi of a book series with the University of Minnesota Press entitled “Parallel Futures,” which centers on Japanese speculative fiction. Current editorial work includes volumes on Chinese animation and risk, media, and animality.

Chinese animateurs, I propose, are creators of wonders, contributing to a minor, and yet long-standing and wide-ranging, discourse that seeks an embodied and enchanted relation with technology. They can help us rethink animation and develop a more radically inclusive understanding of the (animated) moving image that challenges film representational and photographic genealogy and re-centers human imaginative and crafting agency.

In this article, I situate my research on the animateur in the current state of the field in animation studies – “animation 2.0”– and in critical dialogue with a renewed scholarly focus on “handmade cinema” and “process cinema.” Taking animateur practices as my departing point, I conceptualize para-animation, an idea of animation based on multimedia materialities and non-medium-specific phenomena, such as embodied gesture, playful technology, slow time, shadow(ing), and morphing of lines and shapes. Referring to a selection of works by Cai Caibei, Cho Pei Hsin, Huang Lian-Hsin, Liu Jiamin, Jennifer Wen Ma and Wang Haiyang, I focus on “the hand on screen” as a gesture that reveals an enchanted reality.

My goal (and larger project) is to retrace multidirectional – across times and places – connections between the (Chinese) animateurs and other enchanters (inventors, artists, performers, storytellers), similarly crossing and morphing boundaries between technology and magic, observation and imagination, science and art, knowledge and pleasure.

Paola Voci is an associate professor at the University of Otago. She specializes in Chinese visual cultures, and, in particular, documentary, animation, and other hybrid digital video practices. She is the author of China on Video, a book that analyses and theorises light movies made for and viewed on computer and mobile screens, and co-editor of Screening China’s Soft Power, a book focusing on the role played by film and media in shaping China’s global image. She has published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, Modern Italy, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, and Bianco e Nero. Her work also appears in several edited collections of essays, such as The New Chinese Documentary Movement and The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Expanding from her conceptualisation of lightness to rethink the past of digital cultures, her current research is on handmade cinema, shadow play and animation and other amateur, vernacular practices and their contribution to the archaeology of the moving image.

In the last two decades, the city has become increasingly central to Mainland Chinese society and culture. While the role of urbanization in literature, feature film and fine art is relatively well-documented, the growing importance of the city in Chinese animation has been neglected within current scholarship. Despite the prevailing view that Chinese animation is a medium which deals with primarily pastoral or mythical themes, a growing body of recent Chinese animation — particularly in the emergent field of independent animation — makes it possible to contest this.

Independent animators make use of a variety of narrative and visual forms, including short film, feature film, documentary, music video, installation and video art, to portray China’s burgeoning cityscapes. Animated cities range from the reflective and nostalgic to the outlandish and futuristic, by way of gritty realism. While these works stand both in relation and opposition to China’s booming commercial animation industry, they also have important links with other areas of China’s cultural and creative industries. Thus, broad academic terms used for identifying trends across recent Chinese visual culture — such as the “urban/sixth generation” and “iGeneration” — prove useful for situating animated works within larger creative networks.

Not only do China’s interconnected, global cities play a key role in the narratives and aesthetics of independent animation: they are also crucial to its creation and distribution. Thus, the cityscape forms the backdrop to independent animation on an intra-, inter- and meta-textual level.

Isabel Galwey is an MPhil student in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. From 2015-2019 she studied Chinese at the University of Oxford and Peking University, graduating with a First. Before beginning her BA she completed a foundation diploma in Art and Design, specializing in moving image. Her research interests include animation studies, urban studies and twentieth-century mass media in China.

In 2013, the online release of the Chinese animated short film Forward, Comrades! (Qianjin, Dawalixi) has provoked highly polarized reactions among its viewers in China and Russia, largely due to the way it entails to assemble the history of socialism. The same can be said about the remediation of the socialist propaganda posters in another independent animated film Have a Nice Day (Da shijie, 2017). But how does Chinese independent animation capture the history of socialism? Do they assume a transcendent position to get out of the capitalist history of nation-states? Since animation has long been regarded as the medium that tends to structure the world differently, this paper seeks to reconsider the relation between animation and history by exploring how Forward, Comrades! and Have a Nice Day strive to assemble the history of difference in the context of the internet-based production, distribution, and circulation of independent animation and China’s socialist aftermath. My analysis of these animations will be centering on how the circulation of affective flow forms a space that could not be reduced to China, the Eastern Bloc, or any given territory that assumes a normative understanding of nation-states. The remediation of documentaries, radio, posters, and photography from the socialist past in those independent animation evokes an embodied experience and desire that has a potential to grasp modern history alternatively.

Hang Wu is a PhD student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include animation and film, critical area studies, the animal and sovereignty, and Chinese socialism and postsocialism. Her articles on Chinese animation and film appeared in journals such as Contemporary Cinema(Dangdaidianying), and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her current research explores the production of special effects (visual and auditory) in Chinese film history in relation to monsters, ghosts, aliens, and supernatural forces, and the question of subject formation and becoming-human.

In Socialist China from the 1950s to the 1980s, magic lantern shows, dubbed “rustic cinema,” were deployed as an important local propaganda tool, yet this prevalent media technology has been largely forgotten in the twenty-first century.  Drawing on film magazines and manuals, memoirs and oral histories, this paper seeks to conduct a media archeological study of lanternslides in Socialist China with a focus on the animated multiple-lens magic lantern shows of the “Three Sisters Movie Team” in Laishui County, Hebei Province. 

Cheap and easy to produce, lanternslides were simple to operate and can be projected using gas lamps in places without electricity.  Besides mass-produced slides, local propaganda artists and film projectionists produced, projected, and narrated their own lantern slideshows, often featuring local heroes and local histories, thereby enabling the creation of local media content when film production was centrally orchestrated. Whereas rural audiences celebrated cinema for being “live” or “animated” (huo de) and slideshows for being “still” or “dead” (si de), innovative experimentation with slideshow animations launched the “Three Sisters Movie Team” to nationwide fame. The movie team invented a slide projector with a single light source but four lenses that animated the slides, so people could see red flag waving, horse running, people walking, birds flying and landing on plum blossoms.  They used different layers, a variety of colors, long shots and close-ups, fade-ins and fade-outs to execute visual animation effects with rhyming verses and a highly emotional performance. 

Jie Li is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. As a scholar of literary, film, and cultural studies, Jie Li’s research interests center on the mediation of memories in modern China. Her first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia, 2014), excavates a century of memories embedded in two alleyway neighborhoods destined for demolition. Her second monograph, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (under contract with Duke University Press), explores contemporary cultural memories of the 1950s to the 1970s through textual, audiovisual, and material artifacts, including police files, photographs, documentary films, and museums. Li has co-edited a volume entitled Red Legacies: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Harvard Asia Center, 2016).Her next book project studies the exhibition and reception of cinema in socialist China, including movie theatres and open-air screenings, projectionists and audiences, as well as memories of revolutionary and foreign films.Her other research projects include a transnational film history of Manchuria and a cultural history of radios and loudspeakers.Li’s recent publications in journals and edited volumes include: “Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Documentaries Produced by the South Manchurian Railway Company, 1932-1940” (positions: east asia cultures critique, 2014); “From Landlord Manor to Red Memorabilia: Reincarnations of a Chinese Museum Town” (Modern China, 2015); “Filming Power and the Powerless” (DV-Made China, 2015); “Are Our Drawers Empty? NieGannu’s Dossier Literature” (Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, 2016), “Discolored Vestiges of History: Black-and-White in the Age of Color Cinema” (Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2012).

By examining puppet animation produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio during the 1950s—a time when the technologies of animation film were still being harnessed and their uses to portray socialist realist worlds were still being debated and shaped—this paper provides critical and historical perspective for the fantastic modes of early PRC’s animation and science education. Here, I pursue questions of the animated technological object, media ecologies, and animated space creation, by engaging with critical work by Gilbert Simondon, Thomas Lamarre, Vivian Sobchack, and Suzanne Buchan. Specifically, thinking of Simondon’s utopian vision of the individual as a central node in a network of machines, I provide close-readings of the puppet animation films The Dream of Xiaomei (Xiaomei de meng) (1954) and The Magic Paintbrush (Shenbi Maliang) (1955). I argue that the social construct of the machine as imagined in these films function on several levels. First, in their aesthetic play with the division of the screen and with the boundaries between 2D and 3D animation—between life and lifelessness—they deconstruct and also fetishize the process of animated technology. At the same time, these films also teach the viewer to become an ideal user of technology and ideal member of a mechanized society by depicting a utopia where machine and society work together hand-in-hand. Rather than mere propaganda, I argue that these films and the discourses surrounding such animated films together produced a narrative space for imagining China’s future of scientific modernization.

Linda C. Zhang is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at University of California-Berkeley. Her research pursues questions of medium, space, technology, and realism related to experimental cinema, documentary, and animated film. Her current project, focusing on the early Cold War period, examines how media such as animated films, scientific education films, and documentaries work in a myriad of ways to mediate anxieties about modernity while also projecting an optimism about a technologically-powered future.

This paper explores the employment of “national style” in the soundscapes of Chinese animation films made in the socialist period through the lens of Uproar in Heaven (1961-64), a fantasy animation about the Monkey King, based on an episode from the classic Ming dynasty novel The Journey to the West. The costumes, color patterns, gestures and diction of the animated figures in this film take much inspiration from Beijing opera repertoire, as do the highly operatic and kinetic martial arts and acrobatic combat scenes. The visual realm strongly evokes a kind of “national style”—a broad concept and practice encompassing and combining various Chinese folk cultural conventions and art forms: Buddhist statues, architecture, sculpture, painting, woodblock, pictures of door-gods, among others. Moreover, the soundtrack, which includes dubbed dialogues, sound effects and orchestrated music, corresponds to the visual realm and further cultivates “national style” by incorporating Beijing opera luogujing (percussion by drums and gongs), folk melodies, and kunqu tunes composed by Wu Yingju (1926-2008), one of the most accomplished composers at Shanghai Animation Film Studio who created scores for more than eighty Chinese animation films. Within the diegesis, soundscape also reinforces a sense of “national style” in an illuminating sequence of “musical battle” in which pipa-playing is used to dizzy and defeat the adversary. By closely examining the soundscape in Uproar in Heaven and other Chinese animation films, this paper investigates how this sonic practice of “national style” differs from that in other animations (such as “Mickey Mousing” in Disney animations) and identifies the particular kinds of sonic conventions Wu Yingju and his music helped to establish for Chinese animation films.

Ling Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase, currently an ACLS post-doc fellow (2019-2020). She received her MA in film studies at Beijing Film Academy and her PhD from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She specializes in film sound theory, Chinese-language cinema and opera, cinema and travel/mobility, ruins in cinema, documentary, gender and cinema, as well as film and urbanism. Zhang has extensive experience as a documentary filmmaker and is also an established Chinese film critic with a published collection of reviews and essays in Chinese (2011). Zhang has published academic articles on film sound, 1930s Chinese cinema and film theory, contemporary Chinese independent documentary, Taiwan New Cinema, socialist road movies, and Chinese opera films in Film Quarterly, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, The New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Asian Cinema, Film Art (mainland China) and Film Appreciation (Taiwan), among others. She also contributes to anthologies such as Cinema of Exploration (James Cahill and Luca Camitani eds, AFI, forthcoming), Routledge Companion to Global Film Music (Jeremy Barham, ed, forthcoming), The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys (Timothy Corrigan and José Duarte, eds, Intellect, 2018), and Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic Histories (Emilie Yeh, ed., University of Michigan Press, 2018). She is currently working on her book manuscript, tentatively entitled Sounding Screen Ambiance: Acoustic Culture and Transmediality in 1920s-1940s Chinese Cinema.

During the golden age of Chinese animation, the Vietnamese Chinese Wu Yingju (1926-2008) was the composer of meishu films including The Herd Boy’s Flute (1963), Uproar in Heaven (1965), and Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland (1965). Before entering the Department of Music at Yenching University, Wu had composed and performed patriotic songs in Hai Phong, Vietnam and colonial Macau. Well versed in western and Chinese musical instruments, Wu joined Shanghai Meishu Film Studio in 1955 as the leading composer. This paper examines the musical style of meishu films produced during 1957 and 1965 by focusing on Wu Yingju’s musical numbers, film score, and research papers. I first investigate Wu’s appropriation of Chinese operatic and folk music tradition in Uproar in Heaven and The Herd Boy’s Flute where music guided the flow of the storyline in the visual. I then look into his approach to collecting ethnic music in inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Yunnan, etc. in response to the call for “national style.” Finally, I discuss how Wu’s film music distinguishes from orchestra music (performed independently) and film score for live action films to create an animated soundscape. Wu defines a distinct animated world based on the sub-genres of meishu film, such as paper-cutting, paper-folding, puppet, stop motion, as well as animation clips within live action films. I argue that the film music in meishu films demonstrate the flexibility of national style incorporating a wide array of musical instruments and musical corpus from western music and Chinese folk music traditions.

Yunwen Gao is assistant professor of the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture at the University of Southern California. She is interested in modern Chinese literature and culture, Sinophone studies, Chinese cinema and performative arts, and post-colonial studies. She has published article on literature and opera in refereed journals such as Concentric, and Ming Qing Studies. She is currently working on her book manuscript titled Language, Soundscape, and Identity Formation in Shanghai Fangyan Literature and Culture.

Much current literature about animation produced during the 1950 and 60s describes a “Golden Age” of animation. Films such as The Magic Brush (1955) and The Arrogant General (1956) are considered classics of national style. Released in two parts, Uproar in Heaven (1961; 1964) is admired as an adaptation of one of the most famous episodes of Journey to the West while also referencing theater reform of the period. Where is Mama? (1960) and The Herd Boy’s Flute (1963) are revered as examples of a type of animation distinctly new to China at the time, ink-wash animation. The current evaluation of these iconographic films has been formed by years of screenings and discussion. But how were these classic animated films received in their time? Lacunae remain about how responses to the Shanghai Animation Film Studio catalogue emerged at the time the films were screened. In this paper, I would like to suggest some possible ways of understanding the reception of animated films in the 1950s and 60s. Producers at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio have noted how much freedom animators had to produce their films, often made specifically for children. But children were not the only spectators. No less than live-action film, animation was discussed and debated in the press. How were these films for children interpreted? Did politics affect the reception of these films? Did the reception of the films play a role in their production? This paper attempts to open up questions about the role of audiences in classic animation produced at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.

Sean Macdonald received a PhD degree in comparative literature from University of Montreal. He currently teaches Chinese Language and Culture at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His book, Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media attempts to trace several historical strands that make up the development of the animation in the People’s Republic of China. He attempts to link the early industry of animation to concepts of institutional postmodernism. He has published on the important director of puppet animation, Jin Xi (1919-1997) and is currently working on a translation of an important example of animation theory by that director. His current research explores concepts of fantasy in literature and film, both live action and animated. Fantasy holds a unique place in premodern and modern Chinese literature. While fantastic writing was once contrasted to historic writings, by the twentieth century, concepts of the fantastic emerge within a context of superstition and irrationality. The fantastic played a key role in animated film. In live-action fictional film, fantasy played an important role from the earliest years of martial arts cinema until recent blockbusters. Sean has published translations of two short stories by the Shanghai modernist Mu Shiying (1912-1940).  

Echoing PRC government rhetoric during the post-Mao cultural thaw of China’s new springtime for science, scientific and technological imagery such as robots and satellites were ubiquitous in Chinese animation during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This essay focuses on major motifs of science and technology in Chinese animation during this key transitional era in PRC cultural history. I will examine how animated films portrayed the visual aspects of everyday life at home, at school and at the workplace. The motifs in these settings of everyday modern-style life feature advances in science and technology, new developments in aerospace and national defense, and critiques of religion and superstition. These animated films look more to the future than to the past, celebrate a wider latitude for scientific inquiry, and champion technological innovation; such films argue that science and technology greatly improve economic productivity and are crucial to a near-term achievement of the “Four Modernizations” of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. In addition, I also relate some scientific themes in animation to those in PRC science fiction, such as genetic modification, space exploration, artificial intelligence, and industrial automation. I argue that these scientific themes in animation resonate with those in science fiction, and contribute to a significant rise in interest in science fiction among Chinese readers during the 1980s. 

Hua Li is Associate Professor of Chinese and Chinese Program Coordinator in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montana State University. Her primary research field is modern and contemporary Chinese literature. Her monograph, Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times, was published by Brill in 2011. She has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters on various topics in contemporary Chinese fiction and cinema—this includes more than ten journal articles and book chapters on Chinese science fiction in peer-reviewed journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, Communication and the Public, and edited book volumes such as the Cambridge History of Science Fiction. She recently completed her second book manuscript on Chinese science fiction during the Post-Mao cultural thaw.

Dunhuang caves (Dunhuang, China), the ancient Buddhist site in Northwestern China, has inspired many Chinese animations. Previous scholarship has revolved around the issue of national style by identifying visual and narrative references of Dunhuang murals in related animations. While recent studies on Chinese animation begin to look beyond features of sinicization and to pay more attention to the transnational encounters or influences, the changing ideas of animation as a medium are rarely examined. This paper points to the changing perception of animation in China in the 1980s by comparing the distinctive approaches of The Deer of Nine Colours (Jiu se lu, 1981) and Jiazi Saves the Deer (Jiazijiulu, 1985), both of which adapt Dunhuang murals. While the former approaches animation as a branch of fine arts (meishu), the latter practices cinematic methods (dianyinghua). Their difference resonates with the changing perception of animation. In addition, the production of these two animations was intertwined with picture books (lianhuanhua), which further testify Chinese animators’ struggles with linear story and their efforts in differentiating mural paintings and animated images. Unpacking the intermediality of these cultural productions, this paper aims to highlight the complicated conceptual change of animation as a medium in China.

Shasha Liu is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada). She received her BA (2008) from the department of Art History and Theory at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (Tianjin, China) and MA (2011) from the department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the issue of mediating Dunhuang in the 20th century through the perspectives of four visual media: photography, painting, animation, and film, and argues that the visual mediations of Dunhuang produce knowledge, shape politics, and rewrite relations among the self, the tradition, and the world. She is currently writing her dissertation, titled “Mediating Dunhuang with Images in 1940s-1980s,” with the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship.

This paper investigates the encounters between calligraphy and animation. My focus is Xu Bing’s 2012 animation video, The Character of Characters, which mediates the history of Chinese calligraphy and its intimate relationships with nature and painting within a highly conceptual framework. Pairing Xu Bing’s animation with A Da’s 36 Characters (1984), an educational animated short, I will underscore how the transformative and performative qualities of archaic Chinese hieroglyphics come into play in the medium of animation. I will also explore how audiences react to calligraphy—or dancing lines—with immediate, visceral excitement. By offering a close analysis of the scene of The Character of Characters in which trees and stones fly into a book—a calligraphic manual—and become the “heartfelt” Chinese characters so dependent on nature, I will argue that, to think about pictographic scripts on screen is meant to see the screen as a space crosshatched with multiple temporal rhythms, one in which the ancient story of “images-becoming-words” coexists with the present tendency of “words-becoming-images.” I will also put my reading of this scene into dialogue with Xu Bing’s other artworks, especially the Landscript series (1999-present). Ultimately, I will evoke a double vision that sees words on screen as linguistic texts and pictorial shapes at the same time, a vision through which and because of which looking and reading are no longer separate activities. If, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s account, the historical process of disenchantment inevitably entails a dissociation of verbal and pictorial functions, a double vision that enables a re-association of verbal and pictorial functions perhaps indicates the unwitting and spectral return of dream, imagination and poetic possibilities in the mundane world.

Panpan Yang received her PhD in 2020 in the joint program in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where she is currently a postdoctoral teaching fellow. Her first book project, partly based on her dissertation, rethinks the questions of cinematic space and time through a reappraisal of the history of Chinese animation. Concurrently, she is pursuing a second book project on the calligraphic imagination of contemporary films and emerging media.

San Mao (or Three Hairs), the famous street urchin created by cartoonist Zhang Leping in 1930s-40s, is a household name in the Chinese-speaking region across generational and geo-political boundaries. The comic books have inspired many screen adaptations ranging from live action, puppetry and cel animation films, and TV serial animation. After a brief consideration of the trans-medial metamorphosis of this legendary cartoon figure’s “evolution” from still images to moving images on the big screen, my article focuses on the two live action-animation hybrid films, An Orphan on the Street (1949) and San Mao Joins the Army(1992), and their articulations of what I call a persistent “orphan imagination” in Chinese film history. The former was made on the brink of the Communist “liberation,” whereas the latter was made by a Shanghai-based Fifth-generation director when China and Chinese cinema remerged onto the international stage under the forces of post-socialist globalization. Thus I am also interested in investigating the relationships between these two popular films’ unique or ambiguous forms and Shanghai film industry’s two epochal transitions book-ended by the emergence and decline of a state-sponsored cinema system.

Zhen Zhang is Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Asian Film & Media Initiative (AFMI) at the Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her publications include An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937; The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century; DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, as well as numerous articles and essays on Chinese-language film history, women directors, and independent cinema and media activism in anthologies, journals, catalogues etc. She is currently working on a new book tentatively called The Orphan Imagination and Transnational Chinese Film History. She founded the Reel China at NYU Documentary Biennial (2001-ongoing) and organized films series for, among other venues, the Film Society at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Taiwan’s Women Make Waves International Film Festival.

Princess Iron Fan is the first animated feature film in China, produced by the Wan Brothers during the Orphan Island period of Shanghai. The film’s disclaimer asserted its origin as fairytales rather than god-spirit novels, with the aim of cultivating children’s spiritual world. Current studies often regard Princess Iron Fan as a representative of national style animation with hidden resistance messages. Focusing on the genre of “fairytales,” this paper will situate this film in the discourse of children and film education in Republican China, global cultural flows of animation, and contemporary mediascape. Based on historical analysis and close reading of the film, this paper argues that the so-called fairytale animated film, rather than a pure cultural construct targeting the child audience, was a promiscuous category to negotiate diverse cultural flows, film genres, audience types and competing political discourses in wartime China, which in turn empowered the film to move beyond diverse geographical bounds and adjust to different ideological frameworks. With Princess Iron Fan as a case study, this paper further sheds light on the ambiguous yet flexible identity of early Chinese animation, which always requires border-crossings in methodological sense.

Ying Chen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Chinese and History at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include the history of children/childhood, media culture, and political culture in Republican China. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation on film education for children and the visual images of children in Republican China. Her article on film education for children in the 1930s has been published by Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai  dianying).

This paper has been co-written and researched during lockdown in a global pandemic. Both authors, in Liverpool and Beijing respectively, have spent many weeks working from home. Despite the impact this period has wreaked on lives and futures, it has also enabled reflection. Here we have worked on a conversation between animators, children, and between ourselves as different generation academics, with the aim of comparing a view of animation conceived in a research period in Beijing in 2002-2004  (Donald, 2005) with the views and insights of child consumers in 2020 and significant older animators who can look back on their work and think about its value.

The paper therefore focusses first on the reflections of animators for the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, asking them to self -identify the particular influences, techniques, values and achievements that characterised their work. This provides a basis from which we re-visit contemporary values as evinced by younger users of animated content. We commence by reminding ourselves of Donald’s research with young people in Beijing and Shandong in the early 2000s, where she asked them to talk about (and to draw their own) animation as one part of their media consumption. In those years she discovered a fiercely loyal and passionate audience group, loyal that is both to the animations (or cartoons), and protagonists, and to the Chinese origins of those animations (whether or not they were actually created in China or whether they were actually localised Japanese content). We then compare these discussions with interviews and creative interventions carried out this year with young people in Beijing. Have their attitudes to animated content changed? Is the prevalence of Chinese stories for Chinese viewers more or less important to them, and why might that be the case? What platforms do they prefer to accessing animation, and are there larger social reasons for their choice? Finally, we ask the older animators to consider these reflections from children of today and to think about the historical shifts across the past 50 years of animated content in the PRC.

Stephi Hemelryk Donald is currently Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia, and SE Asian lead of the Justice Arts and Migration Network. Stephi Hemelryk Donald FASSA, FRSA is Research Director for the Centre of Culture and Creativity and Distinguished Professor (Film and Media) in the College of Arts. Immediately prior to her appointment at Lincoln she was Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at UNSW (Sydney). Since 2003, she has been Chief Investigator for 3 ARC Discovery, 3 ARC Linkage and 2 Linkage International awards, and named investigator on 2 ARC National network grants. She has also won a Leverhulme International Fellowship and a Leverhulme Network as international lead. She has served as Chair of the ARC Humanities and Creative Arts College, Deputy Chair of the Hong Kong RAE Humanities panel, and served on the national ERA panel for HCA. Her recent book, There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema, won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award in 2018. Previous roles include Foundation Dean of Media and Communication (RMIT) and Director of International Studies (UTS).

Internationalism was widely propagandized through children’s cultures during the Maoist era, but the issue is how it was produced, circulated, and changed during that era. Through examining the trope of “international correspondence” between children in 1950s films, mainly focusing on the film The Magic Kite (1958) and the animation The Sun’s Little Guests (1961), this paper shows that the newly established Communist government not only tried to construct children as future national citizens, but also as young pioneers with an internationalist consciousness. Both films focus on the cross-border travelling adventures of children. I would argue that the anthropomorphism and medium plasticity of the devices of animation and fairytale are transferred to the children in order to become a transcendental body with great mobility to overcome the limits of language, national borders as well as ideological differences, which could therefore embody the sublime border-free internationalist spirits. They serve the function of teaching young children about foreign cultures, following the period’s official doctrine of internationalism, and offering routes with a series of adventures that direct children to the dreamland full of fantasies. The following questions will be asked: In what ways do the two films represent Chinese children together with the children of other countries? How are issues of race, class and language dealt with in these two films? Do the fantasies created through such adventures necessarily lead to the socialist utopia or something else? This paper aims to recast the complex relationship between the medium of animation, the cultural and ideological engineering of children in the first decade of the PRC regime, and the radical political developments in the 1960s.

Lanjun Xu is an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore.  She received her BA and MA from Peking University, and PhD from Princeton University. Her research interests include modern Chinese literature and culture, cultural history of children and youth in modern China, cold war politics and Chinese cinemas. She is the author of Chinese Children and War: Education, Nation and Popular Culture (in Chinese) (Peking University Press, 2015) and two edited volumes: Discovery of Children: The Problem of Children in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (co-edit with Andrew Jones, 2011) Remapping the Nanyang Childhood: A Study of the Chinese Children Publications in Post-War Malaya (co-edit with Lidan Li, 2016). She has recently completed an English book manuscript tentatively titled The Child and Chinese Modernity: Culture, Nation and Technologies of Childhood in Modern China. Currently she is working on two new projects: Transnational Cultural Networks and Asian Internationalism: China and Cultural Mobility in Cold War Southeast Asia (1940s-1960s) and Sinophone Childhoods and the Chinese Cold War in Asia.

This proposal focuses on the Chinese animated feature The Guardian (Dahufa 2017), which gains significance in Chinese animation market by exploring the possibilities of the adult-oriented production. Historically speaking, Chinese cinema animation has always found opportunities for catering to the children’s pleasure while ignoring the entertainment appeal from adults. A dark fantasy set in a fictional “peanut town,” The Guardian was a major change of subject matter and creative principle compared to its domestically-made predecessors. In short, it tells a story about how the enslaved and oppressed peanut people (the residents of peanut town) rebel against a cruel, greedy ruler and his hired thugs with the help of the protagonist Dahufa.

By adopting textual analysis and social-political studies approaches, this proposal shall analyse the adult-oriented The Guardian as an important milestone in the history of Chinese animation. The findings of this study can be divided into three parts. First, China still does not have an official film classification system. The Guardian, a dark, bloody and violent adventure story, was the first ever Chinese cinema animation that has self-imposed a “PG-13” rating, which has broken the adult viewers’ stereotypes on domestically-made animation (childish, simplistic, etc) to a certain extent. Second, as an oblique political metaphor, the film explicitly aims at attracting adult audiences. The latter could clearly perceive the ideological dimension of the film like dystopia, fascism and totalitarianism. Third, the ignorant peanut people, who live in a dystopian totalitarian land, can be considered as the unconscious masses that falls into bewilderment with their obscure ontological status.

Dr Shaopeng Chen is a lecturer of animation at School of Arts, Southeast University (China). He received his PhD degree in Film Studies from University of Southampton (UK). Previously, He taught animation production courses at Nanjing Normal University of Special Education in China. In 2010, his paint-on-glass-animated short film The Pipe was being included in Animated Short Film Creative Practice (2010), which is the selected teaching material in Jiangsu Province (China). This film also won Excellence Award in The Third Animation and Comics Design Match for College Students in Nanjing City. In 2012 and 2017, he travelled to Japan and Croatia respectively to investigate the local animation and comics industry. He has written a number of articles on Chinese animated film, Chinese film industry and Chinese film marketing in both Chinese and English languages. His research interests include style of animation character, animation aesthetics, film industry in China, government policy of Chinese creative industries and new generation cinema animation in China.

Technology plays a major role in the resurgence of animation studies. The exponential advancement in digital imagery has opened up new possibilities in the art of animation. The seamless integration of CGI animation into live action movies has radically changed the idea of realism and our perception of reality. Once considered a “minor genre,” animation is forcefully asserting the primacy of its aesthetic principles, which even leads to a complete rethinking of what cinema is. Yet despite the growing importance of animation studies as a major scholarly field stimulating new theoretical exploration, its critical impact within and beyond academia has not been as great as it could have been. This is partly because of its structural inconsistency or dividedness. Theoretical discussions too often focus on “Western” examples; that is, they are conducted as if other types of animation, most notably Japanese anime, did not exist as an essential part of global popular culture and media landscape. A large body of works on Japanese anime and books and articles on Chinese and Korean animation do already exist in English. However, they constitute a separate universe existing outside the purview of animation theory. It may seem the problematic dichotomy of the West and the rest is anachronistically reproduced. My argument is that despite the uncanny appearance of déjà vu, this is not the case; that is, it is not a simple repetition of what was—or should have been—overcome a long time ago. Even though a great gulf separates the theoretical reflection on “Western” animation from the historical or ethnographic discussion on “other” animation, it is not particularly productive to criticize this division as a manifestation of orientalism or West-centered ideology. In my presentation, I will analyze the historical conditions that have produced the current state of animation studies, and speculate on how the study of Asian animation can intervene in animation studies to produce a new type of critical discourse that is not trapped by the existing division.

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto is Professor of Media and Visual Culture and Dean of the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies at Waseda University. He is the author of Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2000), Empire of Images and the End of Cinema (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2007), and Spectacle of Conspiracy (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2012). He co-authored with Masao Miyoshi Site of Resistance (Kyoto: Rakuhoku Shuppan, 2007), and co-edited Television, Japan, and Globalization (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010) with Eva Tsai and Jung-bong Choi and also Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society after Fukushima (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) with Christophe Thouny. His new article “Nuclear Disasters and Invisible Spectacles” is forthcoming in Asian Cinema, vol. 30, no. 2 (2019).

Chinese animation recently has drawn increasing attention due to the significant domestic output, the vast investment in the industry and the high box office figures. In spite of this, the theoretical research on animation in China has not been given much attention and far from robust. The aims of this paper are therefore to trace the emergence and development of animation theories in China and to investigate how they have been influenced and reshaped by the different historical, cultural and political contexts.

Animation arrived in China in the 1930s, with the global popularity of American commercial animations. Firstly, this paper will look at how the debates about the relationship between animation ontology and methodologies among the local artists formed the early Chinese animation theories. The period from the 1950s to the 1960s is usually considered as the first “golden era” of Chinese animation, during which Shanghai Animation Film Studio produced a considerable number of animated films. The paper will then explore how Chinese animation theories were influenced by the Soviet animated film theories and tried to address three major issues at the time—nationality, imaginativeness and socialist realism. During the 1980s, influenced by the western modernism, there was a transformation of Chinese animation from a classical style to a more modern style, which also had an impact on the field of animation theories in China. The voice of modernizing Chinese animation will be examined in the following section. Since the 2000s, animation filmmaking in China has greatly changed within the context of globalization, and various approaches and methodologies for theorizing animation from the West has significantly enriched Chinese animation theories. The mish-mash of approaches constitutes and reshapes today’s animation research in China, which will be considered in the final part of the paper.

Yuanyuan Chen is Lecturer in History & Theory of Animation at Ulster University. Her research focuses on contemporary Chinese animation, with particular interest in the influence of modernism and postmodernism on Chinese animation after the 1980s. Her broader research interests include animation theory, animation narratives, experimental animation, modernism and postmodernism in cinema, non-fiction animation, verisimilitude and authenticity in animation. Her work has been published in journals, such as Modernism/modernity and Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.

In the history of moving images there are three great periods: first, the era of the shadow play; second, the era of cinema mechanics and television electronics; third, the era of digital images and virtualization.

The art of the shadow play originates from Asia. It came to Europe by way of the Silk Road and, finally, in Germany, transformed into cinematic images thanks to the aptitude of Lotte Reiniger, who, between 1923 and 1926, created the feature-length Adventures of Prince Achmed by animating silhouettes.

The Chinese have a proper term for the movies that refers to both, to their own century-old culture as well as to the future symbolized by electricity. They call them dianying, electric shadows. This way the art of animated images became popular with Chinese audiences.

Today China is the largest provider of artificially created moving images but these images are no more film, no more television. You cannot touch the “material” they are made of because there is none. Digitals images exist just as a collection of numbers. They are spaceless. They are timeless. They are phantoms like shadows themselves.

Today they are part of the global system and infiltrate all spheres of life. In Cyber Age everything and everybody is subject to a global matrix. In the beginning it was just a typewriter in front of a TV set.  Today it is a life design which fulfills the visions of religion. Anything can be copied, and this is a big challenge to a nation like China because China’s cultural tradition is based on the art of copying. 

The research question is: Will China imitate the West and standardize global monitoring, or will China face the digital challenges creatively with a nod to Chinese culture? Will the future be YouTube and Google, Youku and Baidu, Silicon Valley and Alibaba Group, or based on century-old culture?

Will global dominance of digitization diminish cultural identity, or will it be the springboard of intercultural exchange?

Dr. Rolf Giesen was born in 1953 and studied at Free University in Berlin. He is a historian, author and screenwriter. At Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin he founded a collection of visual effects memorabilia and for 20 years curated the stop-motion artifacts of Ray Harryhausen. For another ten years he worked as a visiting professor, animation expert and museum curator in Beijing and Changchun. His books include Animation Under the Swastika: A History of Trickfilm in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945; Chinese Animation: A History and Filmography, 1922-2012; Acting & Character Animation and The Nosferatu Story.

This article ponders the import of what I call the chimera in contemporary mainland Chinese CGI animations as illustrated by the first three Light Chaser productions, The Little Door God (2016), Tea Pets (2017) and Cats and Peachtopia (2018)—all scripted and directed by the company founder and former Tudou CEO, Gary Wang. By chimera, I mean the conjugation of disparate elements in both technical rendition and the conception of the narrative. Such a chimeric effect stems from the attempt to accomplish the Janus-faced legibility of the non-human characters (animals, gods and clay figures) as visually non-human and yet aurally and conceptually intelligible to the human audience. This chimeric effect is further amplified by Wang’s ambition to emulate Pixar technology while Sinifying the content by drawing upon Chinese folk legends, local tea culture and location-specific cityscape. My goal is to probe the long-standing issue of the inherently composite Chineseness of China-made animation as it ventures into new territories in the era of Pixar-branded CGI.

Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.  She is the author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013) and editor of the Asian Media special issue of Feminist Media Histories (2019). She is currently completing a book on Anna May Wong, the best known early 20^th-c. Chinese-American screen-stage performer.

She has published numerous articles on border-crossing stardom, transnational Chinese cinema, early Chinese cinema, Chinese independent documentaries, socialist comedy and stop-motion animation in refereed journals and edited volumes. She is a recent recipient of two NEH grants for the Anna May Wong project, and was able to accept one grant.

Subsuming Chinese socialist realism of the Mao era under the broader category of “prescriptive realism” allows us to analyze certain continuities between that narrative mode and different strands of contemporary Chinese cinema—including martial arts films, patriotic action films, and films depicting both the promises and the evils of capitalism in China. Digital animation and CGI compositing have offered new resources for achieving unprecedentedly vivid idealized visions of a prescribed, abstracted world that attempts to articulate the problems and possibilities of China today. Exploring the overlap between what Chen Xihe calls “virtual realism” and what I propose to call “prescriptive realism” provides insight into how the new tools of computer animation are employed for effects that are ideological as well as aesthetic, creating a virtual arena where twenty-first century China can negotiate its own values and priorities while also increasingly asserting itself within the global cinematic discourse and market.

Jason McGrath is Associate Professor of modern Chinese literature and film in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, where he serves on the graduate faculties of Moving Image Studies, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media. He is the author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age, and his current projects include a co-edited anthology of Chinese film theory and a book manuscript entitled “Inscribing the Real: Realism and Convention in Chinese Cinema from the Silent Era to the Digital Age.”

Chinese animators from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio created ink-painting animation in the early 1960s in response to the rise of cultural nationalism at that time, but the production was costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming, posing difficulties for animators to launch large-scale massive production. With the advent of the digital age in the 21^st Century, Chinese animators felt obliged to take advantage of the new technologies to meet the demands of the market. They began with experimental shorts by using CGI ink-painting technologies, negotiating the collision between traditional aesthetics and digital production. At the same time, they were testing the water of making CGI ink-painting animated feature films by optimizing digital technologies. What we need to do now is to overcome the drawbacks of labor-intensive production technology, give full play to the characteristics of contemporary ink-painting technology, develop a new CGI ink-painting animation technology to meet the audience’s aesthetic needs, and further promote the sustainable development of CGI ink-painting animation in China.

Hailu Chen is Associate Professor of Animation in the School of Design at the East China Normal University, Shanghai. She had worked as a key animator and executive director at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. Her representative work includes Lotus Lantern (1999), Warrior (2006), and The Magic Aster (2008), which won numerous awards such as Golden Rooster Award, Hundred Flowers Awards, and Huabiao Awards. She also made independent animated films, which won numerous awards at international film festivals.  

Although Virtual Reality (VR) has been discussed and experimented in academic and scientific fields as early as 30 years ago, it was not until 2016 that VR became a well-known term to the public. Due to extensive VR investment and the entrepreneurial craze of that year, 2016 was called the First Year of VR in China. This paper regards VR as a post-image and a new kind of “myth” in post-digital time and hopes to compare VR as an emerging media myth with ancient mythology. In an attempt to re-examine the phenomenon of VR’s cultural popularity and explosive growth, as well as to classify it as a “present absence,” which means to seek within the absence beneath the surface of rapidly growing VR in China, including aspects from VR technology research and development, production, application, audience and examples of VR content. The cornerstone of VR’s illusion in China, like many Chinese-style myths, comes first from its vast numbers of consumers and users. However, among the huge quantities of VR hard devices, there are few real creative VR creations to match. Finally, this paper will offer a potential method to face the VR myth through two examples of award-winning Chinese VR animation works Shennong: Taste of Illusion(2018) and The Dream Collector(2017) from Pinta Studios. VR artists in China as pioneers begin to rethink how Chinese legends and traditional memories could be reconstructed through VR, showing great significance for the use of digital mythology methodology in Chinese daily life.

Maggie Chunning Guo is Associate Professor of New Media Art and Animation at Renmin University of China. Her animated artwork has been exhibited and collected internationally by galleries and festivals including the White Rabbit Art Gallery in Australia and the L’abbaye de Fontevraud in France. She was the recipient of NETPAC Award in 2015 Busan International Short Film Festival of South Korea. Her academic writings have been published in local and international journals, including Contemporary Cinema, Contemporary Animation, Aesthetics, Art Education, Studies in National Art, Croatian Cinema Chronicle Film Journal, Cartoon and Animation Studies, Epistémè, and the Global Animation Theory published by Bloomsbury Academic.

The essay explores practices associated with nonlinear space in recent animation produced in the PRC, traces it to earlier forms of Chinese animation, and argues that the challenge to linear pictorial space forms a discourse of distinctive stylistic and ideological implications. Animation in China has turned, time and again, to famous paintings — the Dunhuang murals, Qi Baishi’s expressionistic brush, Along the River at Qingming Festival, Emperor Huizong’s academic painting, and more. The tribute to Chinese painting styles and themes is often made through the use of spatial constructions that ignore linear perspective. Although animation worldwide regularly ignores the Albertian window and employs nonlinear space, the cultural context of such constructs sets Chinese animation apart. Elsewhere, drawing attention to the painterly qualities of the moving image is a stylistic choice; breaking through the fourth wall is a gag aiming simply at a comic effect. Chinese animators, on the other hand, frequently appropriate nonlinear perspective and shatter the perception of contiguous space to make an ideological statement. To understand the ideological implications of nonlinear space in Chinese animation, I trace the discourse on pictorial space back to the early twentieth century. In line with Panofsky’s contention that perspective is a symbolic form, Zong Baihua and others put cultural value to the purported lack of linear perspective in Chinese painting. The technique of xieyi was hailed as an aesthetic principle that distinguished Chinese painting and gave it higher merit than Western art. The nationalistic Hegelianism at the foundation of this particularism carried over to later debates.

Yomi Braester is Byron and Alice Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media at the University of Washington in Seattle, as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Beijing Film Academy. He is also the co-editor of Journal of Chinese Cinemas. Among his books are Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (2003)and Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (2010), which won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize. Among his current book projects is Cinephilia Besieged: Viewing Communities and the Ethics of the Image in the People’s Republic of China, which is supported by a Guggenheim fellowship.

The 2019 animation White Snake opens in the ink brush painting style. White Snake and Green Snake are portrayed together intimately, queering the iconic romantic narrative between a snake woman and a human male. The story opens as Green Snake helps White Snake revisits her memories sealed in a jade hair pin. The jade hair pin eventually leads the viewers to the Fox Spirit character, the ultimate authority in enabling many of the key transgressions between the human and the nonhuman in the 2019 animation. In addition to highlighting the power of the Fox Spirit with the head of a beauty in front, and the head of a white fox in the back, the new animation also ingeniously creates the character of Du Dou the talking dog, echoing the anthropomorphic animal “sidekicks” in the 1958 Japanese animation The Tale of the White Serpent, where a Kungfu Panda-like giant panda and a Donald Duck-like duck have enriched the representation of the humanity of the nonhuman in significant ways. However, the most revolutionary change in the 2019 animation comes when the human male lover Ah Xuan (Xu Xuan, Xu Xian) declares that he will become a demon in order to be together with Xiao Bai (White Snake), making him not only a worthy object of White Snake’s love, but also the most daring and the most heroic lover to date, surpassing the Disney prince-like characterization of the male lover in the 1958 Japanese animation.  

Liang Luo is an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, 2014), and recently published in English in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, and in Chinese in Literature and Culture and Film Studies. She is working on two book-length projects, The Humanity of the Non-human: Gender, Media and Politics in The White Snake, and Joris Ivens, the International Avant-Garde and Modern China. She has served as a book review editor for The Journal of Asian Studies and is on the board of the European Foundation Joris Ivens and Trans-Humanities (Ewha Institute for the Humanities, South Korea). At the University of Kentucky, she directs the International Village Living and Learning Program and serves on the Executive Committee of the KFLC, one of the longest-running foreign language and culture conferences in the United States. 

Since the birth of Chinese animation, Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM) has been an untouched topic until recently, when three animated series were produced almost around the same time: HerbSpirits (Bencaoyaoling, 2016), Little Calabash Talks of Chinese Medicine (Hulu xiangdingdang, 2017), and Herb Family (Caobenjiazu,2018). Each adopting varied animating styles and following different narrative strategies, these approaches to introducing TCM with animation test different models of production and representation. Following the trend of health-keeping (yangsheng) and a rising public interest in TCM in recent years, these series have to face the special challenges of representing a sophisticated body of knowledge for children and young audiences.

This project compares the strategies that these animated series adopt to promote traditional philosophical and medicinal knowledge to young audiences: how do they structure lessons, reformulate concepts, and portray characters and ideas using animated language? What are their influences and how do they influence others? What are their contributions to the introduction of TCM as a knowledge/tradition, and what do they mean to Chinese animation, which has been constantly seeking a style that is marked as Chinese and a path to success in the fierce competitions of world animations? While examining the three sets of texts, I am particularly interested in the image of TCM doctors that these series create, which can serve as a window for the examination of these questions.

Hongmei Sun is assistant professor of Chinese at the department of Modern and Classical Languages, George Mason University. Her research interest is around Chinese traditions in a cross-cultural context. Her first book, entitled Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic (Washington, 2018), explores how the Chinese classic Journey to the West has been adapted in recent history from China to the United States, and how such adaptations have used the image of its protagonist Sun Wukong, aka. the Monkey King, in cross-temporal and cross-cultural representation, and in turn changed this iconic image. She is currently working on a manuscript on the modern transformations of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and an edited collection on games and play in China.

The Wan Brothers have long been considered as the founding fathers of Chinese animation. Among them, the most acclaimed is Wan Laiming. Many researchers even omit the other brothers and call Wan Laiming “the father of Chinese animation.” However, “the Wan Brothers” was, in fact, a constantly changing concept. In the early stages of their career, it was referring to four brothers, but later it was at times three of the brothers and at times two. In cases where two of the brothers were involved, it wasn’t always the twins – Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan. As a result, the real authors behind many works by “the Wan Brothers” were misconstrued. The achievements and artistic features of each individual brother were obscured under the encompassing term “the Wan Brothers.” Even the memoirs of each of the brothers sometimes differ from or contradict each other. This article will attempt to deconstruct the concept of “the Wan Brothers” through historical documents, memoirs of the brothers, and oral history from their contemporaries as well as family members, in order to re-evaluate each of the brothers individually. With special focus on the early period of the Wan Brother’s animation career (before 1930s), this article aims to examine the conditions of their work in that time through primary resources including a great number of news accounts, and argue that Wan Guchan is in fact “the Father of Chinese animation” who had made the greatest contributions to the early development of Chinese animation.

Yan Chen is a lecturer in Character Design Course in the Faculty of Manga at Kyoto Seika University. She received her PhD degree in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Her PhD dissertation is titled “Man, Dong, Dongman―History of Chinese Animation from a Sinosphere Viewpoint.” She also holds a MA degree in the same discipline from the University of Tokyo, and a BA degree from the School of Journalism and Communications at Peking University, PRC. Her research focuses on Chinese animation history. She is a member of the Japan Society for Animation Studies and research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2014-2016). In addition to research, Chen Yan works on creative writing and arts. She was a columnist for “Nijigen,” Fresh Japan by the Asahi Shimbun. She also published several graphic novels, including Yanner’s Days in PKU (2008) and Hilarious Times in PKU (2010). Since 2018, Chen Yan has been working as an advisor for multiple corporations in the comic and animation industry in China, including Tencent and Dream Castle. She is a fan, creator, researcher, and practitioner in the field of comics and anime.

Between 1993 and 2003, the domestic animation industry in China had a very low production output: 46,000 minutes in total, or 4,600 episodes (10minutes / episode) in total, or 460 episodes per year on average. At that time, many Chinese animation studios were all working on outsourced projects from the US, Europe, and Japan, and there was only one creative TV series made in Hunan: 3000 Whys of Blue Cat (3057 episodes). In 2003, I led a team of media and ads practitioners and started to use Flash to make a TV animation series titled Happy Family (40 episodes, 2004). After it was broadcast on TV, we began to make Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf. With some animated samples, I signed a contract with 7 TV stations: Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf would be broadcast under the creative animation program Animation Train for half an hour per day from Monday to Sunday. We will provide 260 episodes of creative animation per year, in exchange of one minute’s ads time from the TV stations. By 2008, the number of channels increased from 7 to 10, including CCTV children channel and other provincial children or animation channels. Also in 2008, we spent 3 million yuan in producing the first Flash animated feature film about Pleasant Goat, and 1 million yuan in making the first theatrical puppet musical about Pleasant Goat. In 2009, we started to make shadow plays featuring Pleasant Goat. From then on, we made quite a few Flash TV animation series: Cookie Master (2008), Legendary Soccer Kid (2010), Planet of 7 Colors (2009), and others. In 2009, I went to the US and tried to persuade Dr. Nelson Chu, the inventor of CGI ink-painting animation software, to come back to China to develop Chinese CGI ink-painting animation, but not successful. In 2016, Dr. Nelson Chu finally agreed to collaborate, so we started making the CGI ink-painting animated feature film titled Red Squirrel Mai. In this talk, I will share the many hidden histories from Pleasant Goat to Red Squirrel Mai from an insider’s perspective, with the aim of casting new light on the creative animation industry in contemporary China.

Born in Hong Kong in 1958, Lo Wing Keung is a renowned animation and media practitioner, producer, scriptwriter, and composer. He entered the domestic animation industry in mainland China in 2004 and began to work on Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf in 2005, a TV animation series that became an immediate hit in China, with a view rate that reached as high as 17.3%. He has been dubbed by some media as the “father of Pleasant Goat.” He also produced other animations, such as Happy Family (TV series, 2004), Cookie Master (TV series, 2008), Tale of the Rally (feature, 2014), and many others. Renowned for his expertise in IP industrialization, he has successfully charted a commercial model for domestic creative animation. In 2011, he received his EMBA degree from the Business School of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In 2018, he started to work on Red Squirrel Mai, the first CGI ink-painting animated feature film in China.

Ink painting has a long history in Asia. Progressive artists have always been looking for new tools or styles of expression. In this talk, Dr. Nelson Chu will share his inspiration and process in marrying Eastern ink painting and calligraphy with technology. New directions for further development for such culture will be discussed. Ink wash animation is a proud product of China from the 1960s to 80s. Dr. Chu will show how his software tool Expresii can be applied to provide a modernized ink wash animation style not achieved before. After the talk, you will have a chance to try Expresii yourself.

Dr. Nelson Chu has spent most of his career developing technology for artistic creations. His groundbreaking work on Chinese ink simulation was used to produce visual effect for the Opening Ceremony of Beijing 2008 Olympics and earned him a PhD in Computer Science from the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. His work wowed the Computer Graphics (CG) industry and even Adobe, world’s largest CG software maker, reached out to hire Nelson for technology transfer. Tech giant Microsoft later also sought to hire Nelson in 2008 to develop digital painting technology, which became the popular app Microsoft Fresh Paint. Today, Nelson is an independent software partner of Microsoft and Wacom. He is also working with an animation studio producing a feature film that incorporates Chinese ink painting aesthetics.

Worldwide, animation has been closely linked to print cartoons for most of the form’s existence. This is true for China. A majority of the pioneer Chinese animators and those who worked in the glory years of animation (1957 to 1966, and 1978 to 1988) started their careers drawing humor and political cartoons. At the same time, various political cartoons and comic strips made their way onto the screen as animation. 

Wan Laiming, one of four brothers responsible for introducing animation to China,  started as a print cartoonist, as did Te Wei, founder of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, who had been a newspaper political cartoonist in the 1930s. Many other cartoonists dipped into animation occasionally, serving in different capacities on specific films or permitting their cartoons or strips to be animated. 

Political satirist and 1930s cartoon magazine editor Zhang Guangyu served as character designer of the classic Havoc in Heaven (1961-1964), a task that famous painter and wartime cartoonist Zhang Ding completed on the animated Nezha Makes Havoc in the Sea (1979). Political cartoonist Hua Junwu was the screen writer of at least one animated short, portraying financial magnates as ugly and greedy. The so-called “three musketeers” of animation (A Da, Zhan Tong, and Wang Shuchen) all were print cartoonists before (and even during ) their animation careers. Zhan and Wang strongly expressed their indebtedness to cartoons. Among other important animators who started as print artists was Cao Xiouhui (later, head of Beijing Science and Education Film Studio), who in early years drew lianhuanhua (small picture books).

The most popular cartoon character adapted to animation is “San Mao,” initially the adventures of a vagrant boy, who, over the decades, changes into an unbelievably brave boy soldier fighting the Japanese, and, later, a promoter of education. Some animated shorts were based on individual cartoons, such as Hua Junwu’s political cartoon, Eisenhower Shows His True Colors, depicting the US as an aggressive Cold War invader. More recently, Yao Feila’s comics series The Dreaming Girl became a CCTV animation series. 

This paper will elaborate on these strong connections between Chinese animation and printed cartoons and comics, heavily relying on the interviews I conducted with at least 125 animators and cartoonists in China.

John A. Lent taught at the college/university level for 51 years, beginning in 1960, including stints as the organizer of the first journalism courses at De La Salle College in Manila; founder and coordinator of Universiti Sains Malaysia communications program; Rogers Distinguished Chair at University of Western Ontario; visiting professor at Shanghai University, Communication University of China, Jilin College of the Arts Animation School, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and Beijing Film Academy–Qingdao. Prof. Lent pioneered in the study of mass communication and popular culture in Asia (since 1964) and Caribbean (since 1968), comic art and animation, and development communication.  He has authored or edited 85 books and monographs and hundreds or articles and chapters in books.  Additionally, he publishes and edits International Journal of Comic Art (which he founded) and Asian Cinema (1994-2012), chairs Asian Popular Culture (PCA), Asian Cinema Studies Society (1994-2012), Comic Art Working Group (IAMCR 1984-2016), Asian-Pacific Animation and Comics Association, and Asian Research Center for Animation and Comics Art (all of which he founded).  He also founded the Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group of Association for Asian Studies in 1976 and its quarterly periodical, Berita, which he edited for 26 years.  He has served on cartoon juries such as the Pulitzer Prize (twice), and others in many countries.  He is a member of both American and Canadian editorial cartoonists association. Prof. Lent has lectured or presented papers in 68 countries.

In socialist China (1949-1976), National Style was a predominant principal in animated filmmaking. To represent a distinct national identity on screen, socialist animators incorporated traditional Chinese art forms including ink painting, paper cutting, paper folding and folklore stories in their animated filmmaking. Current scholarship has discussed Chinese animation from the perspective of the National Style. However, the National Style is not the only art form of Chinese animation. A new approach to understanding Chinese animation should go beyond the framework of the National Style. This paper aims to deconstruct the prevailing National-Style narratives by presenting the cartoonish style in socialist animations. I will study the case of a renowned cartoonist Hua Junwu (1915-2010), whose cartoons were more westernized and were adapted into animations in socialist China. I will contextualize Hua Junwu’s cartoons and differentiate them from the Sinicized cartoons that had a kinship with traditional Chinese painting. By elaborating on the uniqueness of Hua Junwu’s cartoons, this paper employs methodologies of close reading and transmedia studies to analyze the animated films adapted from Hua’s works. I argue that it was the medium specificity of cartoon that sowed the seeds of difference, deconstructed National-Style animation, and reshaped socialist self-consciousness.

Muyang Zhuang is a second -year PhD student in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include Chinese cartoon, animation, and visual culture in East Asia.

During the Cultural Revolution, talking animals largely disappeared from Chinese animated films, illustrated books, and comics. Daisy Du has traced this shift to a 1960 campaign by Jiang Qing and her supporters against the author Chen Bochui, suggesting that more than simply reading this as a geopolitically-motivated critique of the cultural hegemony of Disney in the Third World, in the Chinese case it might be more useful to consider the influence of educator and wife of Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who likewise attacked the escapism of socialist fairy tales in the 1920s Soviet Union. In my paper I consider a late attempt to square the circle of realism, revolution, and talking animals in the form of the “scientific fairytale” (kexuetonghua), focusing on Ye Yonglie’s “Patient of an Unknown Origin” published by Shanghai People’s Press in June 1976, with illustrations by Chen Liping. As I argue, the fact that this story would go on to become one of the Shanghai Animation Studio’s first post-Cultural Revolution cel animations when it was adapted for the screen in 1978 by Wang Shuchen reflects the power of the underlying contradiction between collective needs and individual desires that would continue to go unresolved even after the death of Chairman Mao and the surprise arrest of the “Gang of Four” in September, 1976. 

Nick Stember is a translator and historian of Chinese comics and science fiction, currently writing his PhD dissertation on Reform-era comic books in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.

The street performance medium kamishibai developed in Japan alongside cinema from the 1910s to the 1930s, in a mutually-influencing relationship with live-action film, animation, and also manga. In the 1930s and ’40s kamishibai was exported to Japan’s colonial empire, including Taiwan, Manchurian, and parts of China, where it was used to try to propagandize the local populace into supporting Japan’s military and colonial activities. This presentation will explore kamishibai in China and Manchuria during Japan’s colonial period, highlighting the elements where animation and kamishibai influenced each other most profoundly: editing, narrative pacing, and sound technology. It will also explore the visual and rhetorical strategies used in kamishibai plays to try to persuade Chinese and Manchurian audiences to support Japan.

Sharalyn Orbaugh is professor of modern Japanese literature and popular culture at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches courses on manga and anime. Recent publications include: Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen Year War (Leiden: Brill, 2015); “Play, Education, or Indoctrination? Kamishibai in 1930s Japan” (forthcoming in Mechademia); and “Kamishibai: The Fantasy Space of the Urban Street Corner” (Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Alisa Freedman and Toby Slade; Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018).

Chen Xiaozuostarted his career in cartooning, woodcuts and photography prior to the war (when he was still a student in Shanghai), publishing some of his work in anti-Japanese and commercially oriented periodicals in 1936-7. However, he was most prolific during the period of the Japanese occupation, producing hundreds of images for newspapers and journals first under the collaborationist government of Liang Hongzhi in Nanjing, and later for the Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei. Working under the name of Ma Wu, Chen emerged as the single most prolific of Chinese cartoonists under Japanese occupation in the Lower Yangtze region, producing everything from bawdy depictions of “modern girls” to anti-Western war propaganda. Indeed, Chen remained active in occupation graphic art from 1938 right through until the Japanese surrender in 1945, serving in the press corps of Wang Jingwei’s army.

However, despite the vast body of work he created during the war, Chen has been almost completely expunged from the history of Chinese cartooning. Like so much else in terms of cultural production during the occupation, his close association with the Wang jingwei regime in particular has ensured that his legacy has been written out of history. Nonetheless, by exploring Chen’s cartoons, I would like to suggest that we can begin to question the argument that cartooning remained the monopoly of “resistance” cultural expression during the war. We can also start to consider what was distinct about “occupation cartooning” by considering Chen’s work alongside that of other prominent cartoonists who continued to operate under occupation, such as Cao Hanmei.

Jeremy E. Taylor is Associate Professor in Asian History at the University of Nottingham. Heis the author of Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinemas (Routledge 2011), and the founder of the “Enemy of the People” digital archive (https://www.dhi.ac.uk/chiangkaishek/). His research has been accepted in over 25 international journals, including China Quarterly, Modern China, Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Historyand,most recently,The Journal of Asian Studies. The work he is presenting here is part of a 2-million euro European Research Council called“Cultures of Occupation in 20th Century Asia” (www.cotca.org). 

In the early 1950s, institutionalising lianhuanhua (serial picture stories) offered a unique opportunity to infiltrate the, as yet largely unknown, urban cultural sphere for PRC Party-State agencies. However, as a predominantly Shanghai-based phenomenon, with its own publishing characteristics and little link to the Chinese Communist Party, growing the lianhuanhua industry from 1949 to 1956 came with its own distinctive set of logistical and theoretical challenges. While initially experiencing a “golden era” in publishing, “revolutionary” lianhuanhua faced stiff market competition from more popular genres, comics published prior to 1949 persisted in circulating and speedy publishing posed challenges for regulating content ultimately resulting in the “horse racing book” crisis. At the same time, lianhuanhua lay outside the parameters of the establishment Art Academies and artists were in short supply, continuing to train in apprenticeships rather than through authorised channels. As well as offering an understanding of a popular medium central to urban PRC cultural discourses in the 1950s, this paper will pose insights into the day to day interactions between Party-State agencies, publishers and artists and how those involved adapted, and adapted to the existing local urban cultural milieu.

Rebecca Scott’s research interests lie in the fields of modern Chinese political, social and cultural history, with a particular focus on the development of the political and popular cultural sphere in the 1950s and 1960s. Through the lens of an analysis of the production and distribution of lianhunahua (serial picture stories), a ubiquitous form of visual culture, her current research and book project explores how Party-State agencies, artists and distributors interacted and the ways popular culture mediums were published and censored at a grassroots level. Rebecca’s article on the development of “guerrilla vending” and comic distribution was published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture in 2017.  Since completing her ESRC funded PhD in modern Chinese history at the University of Nottingham in 2016, Rebecca has lectured at the Universities of York and Nottingham. In September 2018, she joined the History Department at King’s College London as a Teaching Fellow and currently teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate modules of a research-led, comparative and methodological nature as well as more specialised modules on modern Chinese political, social and cultural history.

Animation (donghuapian) and martial arts films (wuxia pian) have demonstrated close affinity with each other in the history of Chinese cinema. They overlap historically and conceptually. The martial arts films frequently rely on various animation techniques to create special effects in spectacular fighting scenes. Chinese animations often take their narrative and visual references from the genre conventions of martial arts. More importantly, both Chinese animation and martial arts cinema have constantly been endorsed with the nationalist discourse of cultural heritage, associated with such notions as “national styles” and “folk traditions,” suggesting their shared historical legacy in addressing certain crisis of national identity. This paper aims to provide an analytical mapping of the historical and aesthetical connections between animation and martial arts cinema. I will particularly focus on the notion of movement, and demonstrate that both animation and martial arts emerged and developed in Chinese history as powerful vehicles to negotiate with competing conceptualizations of bodily motion and their implication in shaping a vernacular perception of space, time, energy, vitality, and physicality, all of which have been animating cultural discourses and activities as well as the formation of a national identity in China from early modernity to the digital age. These two forms of moving images, through closely related techniques and technologies, also tackle the question of movement as an intrinsic problem of cinema. With shared techniques such as sound effects and plasmatic physics, both animation and martial arts cinema struggle to overcome what Henri Bergson describes as the fundamental falsehood of cinematic movements.

Jinying Li is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She focuses her teaching and research on media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. Her essays on Asian cinema, animation, and digital media have been published in Film International, Mechademia, the International Journal of Communication, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Asiascape, Asian Cinema, and Camera Obscura. She co-edited two special issues on Chinese animation for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and a special issue on regional platforms for Asiascape: Digital Asia. She recently completed her first book, Geek Pleasures: Anime, Otaku, and Cybernetic Affect (to be published with Indiana University Press), and began her second book project, Walled Media and Mediating Walls. Jinying is also a filmmaker and has worked on animations, feature films, and documentaries. Two documentary TV series that she produced were broadcasted nationwide in China through Shanghai Media Group (SMG). She is one of the co-writers of animated feature film Big Fish and Begonia (Dayuhaitang, 2016). She also produced an experimental VR documentary 47km (2017) in collaboration with Chinese director Zhang Mengqi at Beijing Film Academy.

Jia Zhangke’s film The World features migrant workers who come to Beijing to work and end up in a theme garden called The World, where the women work as stage performers and the men as security guards and construction workers. The story revolves around the dream of self-improvement through physical mobility, with travel by train, bus, and car anchoring the characters’ sense of independence and autonomy. Travel by plane, which is completely out of the realm of possibility for most of the workers, is imbued with the fantasy of radical possibility and change. With Paris at the top of cities reachable by flight, and Ulan Bator at the bottom, access to the global metropolis is severely constrained for the migrant workers. Beijing, their first destination, emerges almost entirely as a backdrop to the World Park, where for the women, the culture-as-prostitution metaphor that implicitly supports their performances also regulates movement, while the ubiquitous cell phone supports two related imaginaries: mobility and flying. Although the cell phone seems to open the door to instantaneous communication and thus increased mobility, it turns out to be more useful for surveillance, especially spying by men who hope to track their girlfriends’ locations and activities. Scenes of flying that originate in the cell phone as pictures turn into flash animation and spin out across the screen, with beautiful colors and stunning bursts of flight. Like other aspects of this surreal atmosphere, however, the promise seemingly born through this communicative technology is false. The hyper-realistic use of flash animation enhances the illusion of mobility while also drawing viewers’ attention to the characters’ alienation and desolation. The two main characters, Zhao Xiaotao and Cheng Taisheng, anchor contrasting networks of experience.  Whereas Cheng Taisheng has seen through everything and realizes that honest living will not help him improve his life, Zhao Xiaotao lives in denial, clinging to her belief that by doing things right, she will construct a positive, authentic, and satisfying life that will include happiness in the present and hope for the future. The hyper-realistic association of Xiaotao with the visual apparatus of revolutionary optimism secures her position within the film as someone who displaces her real lifeworld with the dream of flying, or a deep belief that new opportunities and freedom will be hers. In his paper, I focus on the role played by Xiaotao, and the temporal and spatial imaginaries and deceits that appear through flash animation.

Wendy Larson is Professor Emerita of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Oregon. She received her PhD in Oriental Languages from the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist on modern Chinese literature and film, Prof Larson’s research monographs include Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture (2017); From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China (2009); Women and Writing in Modern China (1998); and Literary Authority and the Chinese Writer: Ambivalence and Autobiography (1991). Larson translated Wang Meng’s modernist novel Bolshevik Salute (1991), and co-edited two volumes, Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (2005), and Inside Out: Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literary Culture (1993). Broadly speaking, her research investigates the negotiations of Chinese filmmakers and writers with the conditions of modernity and post-modernity. She presently is working on a monograph comparing optimism under capitalism and socialism.

With the national and local government policies of developing “creative industry,” animation and visual effects flourished in recent decades in China. As animated and special effects ascend to an increasingly important status in filmmaking, the interfacing between human actors and digital fabricated characters and virtual environment not only brings forth new cinematic aesthetics, but also invites reconsideration on the affective effect of such interfacing. This paper focuses on popular Chinese-language films produced in recent years to conduct a preliminary examination on this development.

Xiao Liu (PhD University of California, Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and a faculty member of the World Cinemas Program. Her research focuses on cybernetics, information technologies and digital media, Chinese cinemas, science fiction and fantasy, and (post-) socialist culture and critique. Her essays have appeared in venues such as Grey Room, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Frontier of Literary Studies in China, the anthology China’s iGeneration and others. She is the author of Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (2019).

The flourishing of animated documentaries in the global scene particularly since the 1990s has evoked rich theoretical queries on the uneasy bond between the seemingly incongruent genres of animation and documentary. Annabelle Honess Roe argues that this unique union of the two genres evoked new dialogues and reflections on the “ontological differences between animation and live action, in terms of their relationship with reality.” To begin with, animation reconfigures and displaces indexical or photographic realism and beckons toward alternative ways of understanding documentary truth. However, animation’s creative reconfiguration of truth and actuality challenges dichotomous understandings of “fiction/documentary,” “reality/representation” (Randolf Jordon) and in diverse cultural and historical contexts, evoked controversies among critics about the very raison d’être of animation documentaries. This essay studies China’s animated documentaries in such a transnational theoretical context, covering key animation documentary shorts including “Sunrise over Tiananmen Square” (Dir. Shui-Bo Wang 1998), “Migrant Workers” (Dir. Feihong Cong, Xuecheng He 2008), and the recent feature film “Silent within Noise: An Account of the Chinese Animation”(Dir. Yanping Xue 2016). My inquiry of these indigenous Chinese animation documentaries not only considers animation as a means of representational strategy, but also explores how animation documentaries reconfigure the ideological discourses of actualities in documentary film, and project the ontological implications of this hybrid genre beyond the indexical. Taking the above specific examples, this essay assesses digital animation’s representation of the real beyond the dichotomous division of immediacy and hypermediacy. Rather, recalling Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s discussion of the remediation theory as an approach to new digital media, this essay explores how animated documentaries achieve an “enhanced perception of the real” through remediation, and question how these works strive to achieve new forms of realism through technological enhancement while at the time same open new spaces for hypermedia’s ongoing self-replacement and reconstruction of diverse modes of representation.

Li Guo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies at Utah State University. She teaches Chinese language, literature, film, culture, and Asian cinemas and literatures at USU. Her research interests include late imperial and modern women’s literature, gender studies, translation, and popular narratives. She is the author of Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China (Purdue UP, 2015). Her peer-reviewed articles appeared in Modern China Studies (2018), Frontiers of Literary Studies in China (2011, 2014, 2017), Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (2014), CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (2013, 2015), Film International (2012, 2016), and Consciousness: Literature and the Arts (2011).

Anime has led a complex existence throughout East Asia for decades. Often understood as produced “in Japan” and circulating outside of it, anime’s production history as much as the reception practices attached to it in fact considerably complicate such an easy national attribution. This paper will map some aspects of the history of anime in China, with a special emphasis on the problem of memory. Tracking the ways in which series and characters such as Astro Boy and Doraemon found audiences in China will help the paper address larger issues. With generations across East Asia sharing a common memory of anime as part of personal and larger media histories, the question of how to understand the effects of such shared memories provides an outlook on larger issues of shared media circulation today. Using Andrew Hoskins’ concept of “connective memory”, this paper will attempt to trace anime’s implications for an understanding of collective memory beyond purely national boundaries. What consequences for the concept of shared memory does it have to think about it as connective rather than collective? What specific relation to this question does a media form such as anime have, which is so adept at crossing boundaries of media specificity and nation? Engaging with these questions will open up new considerations regarding the changing media situation and its effects on our understanding of the world.

Alexander Zahlten is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research interests center on film and audiovisual culture in East Asia, with a focus on Japan. His work explores fundamental shifts in how we engage with media through the connections between larger economic, social, and institutional structures and media aesthetics. Zahlten is especially interested in the experience of media ecologies, and his recent work touches on topics such as film’s connections to other media, “amateur” production, or the history of the connection of electricity and the film industry in Japan. Zahlten’s publications have examined the role of postcolonial fantasy in Korean “remakes” of Japanese films, the role of a character such as Doraemon as shared media memory in East Asia, the metaphors of world in the media mix environment of Japan, the history of German sexploitation cinema, or poststructuralist media theory in 1980s Japan. Recently, Zahlten has co-edited the volume Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017). His monograph The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies (Duke University Press, 2017) maps developments in film and media culture in Japan from the 1960s – 2000s as a whole through the genres of pink film, Kadokawa film, and V-Cinema. He has curated film programs for the German Film Museum, the Athénée Français Cultural Center, Tokyo, Parasophia Festival of Contemporary Culture (Kyoto), or the AAS in Asia Conference in Kyoto and was Program Director for the Nippon Connection Film Festival, the largest festival for film from Japan, from 2002 to 2010.

Recent scholarly efforts by Ono Kōsei, Daisy Yan Du, Mochinaga Noriko, and the National Film Archive of Japan have begun to introduce students and fans of East Asian animation to the innovative techniques and variegated materials employed by Mochinaga Tadahito (1919-1999) for the creation of his diverse array of animated films. Mochinaga’s enduring passion for tinkering – first with animation stands and cels, and then with puppets – fueled his pivotal contributions to animated works for audiences in wartime and postwar Japan, early socialist China, and 1960s America, making him a crucial subject for studies on mid-century transnational movements between those three centers of animation production. However, the intercontinental nature of Mochinaga’s career engendered a wide variety of films, television programs, newsreel segments, and commercials that cannot be easily situated into histories of animation constructed in terms of “national” cinemas and/or culturally-informed aesthetics. This talk will focus on my recent explorations of the Mochinaga family archive, with a focus on its unruly materiality and multilingual textual forms. I will offer preliminary observations about the ways in which the materials and films therein might help us to trace – and ultimately to expand – the limits of nation-specific studies, such as those on “Chinese,” “Japanese,” or “American” animation.

Jason Cody Douglass is a PhD student in Yale University’s combined program in Film and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures, as well as the graduate program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research interests include animation, film and media theory, and East Asian cinema. In 2018, his article “In Search of a ‘New Wind’: Experimental, Labor Intensive, and Intermedial Animation in 1950s and 1960s Japan” received the Maureen Furniss Award for Best Student Paper on Animated Media. Most recently, he contributed a chapter on early Japanese television commercials to Animation and Advertising (eds. Kirsten Moana Thompson and Malcolm Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

In 2012, Japanese cultural theorist/social critic Ôtsuka Eiji embarked on a world tour of lecture series to introduce manga drawing techniques to art students and artists in China, Korea, Singapore, France, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, the U.S. etc. Joining Ôtsuka was his then-assistant Asano Tatsuya, a Japanese manga artist who later decided to drop out of the tour and relocate to China, first as a lecturer at numerous universities in Beijing and subsequently working at a Chinese comic studio to focus on publishing his own manga. One major output from his exposure to Chinese culture is Faceless, an online horror manga series based on urban myths in contemporary Beijing, serialized on Comic Walker (a Japanese manga/magazine website run by Kadokawa, one of the largest publishers in Japan).

This paper aims to locate the cultural production of transnational/cultural creativity embodied by Asano’s Faceless, both as a cultural product engendered across geopolitical boundary between Japan and China, and a cultural crystallization between Japanese form (manga techniques and linguistic performance) and Chinese content (overarching narrative and cultural symbols). Rather than problematizing the very definition of manga/manhua, I would argue that transnational work such as Faceless opens a discursive space for us to explore the transnational/cultural field of cultural production—as creators dis-/re-locate themselves from one place to another—and how Chinese cultural phenomenon (wanghong, or internet celebrity and their market as influencers, among others) is re-presented in this “seemingly” Japanese text. In doing so, this paper intends to shed lights on how transnational/cultural creative activities help shape the formation and our conceptualization of future manhua/manga. 

Cyrus Huiyong Qiu received his BA in Japanese from Shenzhen University (Shenzhen, China) and MA in Modern Japanese Literature and Popular Culture from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). His Master’s thesis, entitled “Keroro Gunsô: Carnivalization in Japanese Anime,” explored issues of political humour, war history/memory and gender as embedded in anime comedies. Qiu is currently pursuing a PhD at UBC, and his research focuses on Japanese popular culture and its circulation among Japan, Korea and China.

Since the late of 2000s, the online ACGN (Anime, Comic, Game, and Novel) sharing websites with the bullet-screen (namely, Danmu in Mardain) service has circulated broadly among Chinese young people and launched a rising local subculture-orientated and a market-driven phenomena in the following years. The dominant bullet-screen online video sharing websites, particularly the AcFun (launched in 2007, bullet-screen featured in 2008) and Bilibili (launched 2010), have gained great but peculiar success for animation online consumption by this yet un-identified participatory-screen culture highlighted in the fandom-ish engagement and the daily-based subcultural statement.  

Studies have paid attention to the originality of bullet-screen from its birthplace the online otaku community. The usage of the “otaku” was then re-conceptualized in China as the “two-dimension” by highlighting its cultural preference to the ACGN-orientated visualized, fictional reality instead of the “three-dimensional” social reality. The online otaku community, situated as the subaltern cyberculture in the old days, suddenly unveiled its underground identity and subcultural existence by the debut of the ACGN-based online video sharing websites. Immediately, the combination of ACGN-related contents and the acceleration of bullet-screen users boosted a whole new online tribe which was marked as the “two-dimension” generation by the engagement with daily practice of bullet-screen-granted participatory watching, commenting, chatting, and communicating.

This paper was a happy product of a long-standing research program, a pair of new questions to Chinese digital natives, especially the animation fans, and a wonderful dialogue with the participatory online practices and the so-called two-dimension generation. Early new media scholarship in China criticized the postmodern nonsense and subcultural resistance brought by both the uploading and watching experience of the uncontrollable bullet-screen. More recent scholarship pinpointed the compromise between the subcultural representation and the mainstream-lized adoption, followed by the popular “imitation” of the non-bullet-screen online video websites, television shows and experimental films. In lights of these changes, it is the opportune to address how China’s youth animation conceive of and modify the bullet-screen expression, participatory communication, and the visualized style as the everyday practice on the Internet. This paper engages this tension by drawing on findings from an ethnographic approach that exams the past, present and the possible future of the ACGN culture, both online and offline. Specifically, this paper also aims to explore the struggle between the singularity of the traditional line narrative of the audio-visual culture and the youth generated, interactive dynamics of the animation production and redistribution, and how the struggle demonstrates a subcultural style of everyday practice and a discursive cultural ethos revived by Chinese young people.

Weihua Wu is currently professor of media studies in the Faculty of Journalism and Communication at the Communication University of China in Beijing. He received his PhD from the City University of Hong Kong, and then joined the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2006. He was also a Fulbright research fellow at the department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 2014-2015. As an academic, his research focuses on, but is not limited to, visual communication, Internet and youth culture, and animation studies. Weihua’s books include Critical Introduction to New Media (in Chinese, Fudan University Press, 2016), and Chinese Animation, Creative Industry, and Digital Culture (in English, Routledge, 2018).

This paper explores issues of translation, transliteration, and transculturation in voice acting for Chinese animation by looking at a corpus of irreverent comedy produced by cucn201, a fandubbing group originally consisting of students from the Communications University of China in Nanjing. Both their wide-reaching unofficial dub of the animated adaptation of Japanese manga series It’s a Good Day for Gag (Gyagumanga biyori) circa 2010 and their subsequent localized “spin-off” of the series titled 100,000 Jokes that Fall Flat (Shiwangelengxiaohua) draw on the comedic effects of dialect, mistranslation, and “bad” subtitling to connect the visceral disillusionment with life in Japan’s late capitalist society to China’s own brand of reflection on post-revolutionary and post-apocalyptic despair.

Aside from thematic content, the career trajectory of many cucn201 members who started in a niche of subcultural fan production but went on to become professional voice actors in the Chinese animation/comics/games (ACG) industry highlights the importance of both amateur translation practice and sound culture in the formation of contemporary Chinese cultural industries. The latter part of this paper discusses the work of cucn201 in the context of how both the simultaneity of content translation and distribution in ACG fandoms and the supposed immediacy of voiced lines and sound tracks has impacted the language of popular storytelling in Chinese ACG media as well as more mainstream media properties, such as TV dramas.

Casey Lee is a scholar of animation/comics/games (ACG) media fandoms and popular storytelling practice in China and Japan. Her dissertation-in-progress at Harvard University looks at the history of Chinese animation/comics/games (ACG) culture from printed info-magazines of the 90s to BL (boys love) fanzines that remix characters from classical Chinese novels via multimedia (i.e. video games, pop music, comics, films) storytelling sensibilities. An essay she wrote on nationalist sentiment in Chinese fan production appears in A New Literary History of Modern China (Harvard, 2017). She is currently working as the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies librarian at the University of Florida.

There are a surprising number of comics books produced in Taiwan which not only represent the daily life of white-collar workers, but in which characters appear who clearly represent the artist creating the comic. These characters, some of the best known of which are the ones created by designers Wan Wan and Mark, often begin as a self-representation on designers’ personal blogs or as free-to-download stickers for messaging services before they become the protagonists in narrative comics, as well as logo characters reproduced on a wide assortment of products. The comics are critical of corporate logic (like Scott Adams’ Dilbert) while simultaneously promoting the values of hard work, entrepreneurship, and the continual reanimation of one’s “inner child,” sometimes through the citation of self-help discourse, but more through techniques of composition and visual style. The comics encourage multiple identifications with both characters and artists, and the transmedia platforms allow fans not only to keep the cartoon characters co-present in their daily lives, but also to use them as vehicles for self-expression. I argue that these licensed characters, with their combination of autobiographical aura and Everyman genericness, absorb “creativity” into a new model of the ideal neoliberal subject, and encourage fans to inhabit that subject by reframing all labor as animation.

Teri Silvio is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei. She has done ethnographic research on Taiwanese Opera and puppetry, toy design and collection, and comics. Her book, Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (Hawai’i, 2019), develops an anthropological concept of animation as a complement to the concept of performance: if performance is the creation of social selves through embodiment and psychic introjection, animation is the creation of social others through the projection of agency into the material world. The book then looks at specific practices of animation across different fields within Taiwanese society: entertainment, folk religion, economic enterprise, and the construction of national identity. She has also published articles in Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, positions, and Mechademia.

This study examines how Pili puppetry, a popular TV series, interacts with animation within transmedia productions that produce a virtual world where performance of Taiwanese puppetry is in transmutation. Pili creates martial-art fantasies through cross-cultural transference, transmedia interaction, and the mixing of techniques and technologies. Cultural commodification and advancing technologies have motivated the convergence and displacement of traditional boundaries, genres, and media, changing the very fabric of textuality itself. I first examine how the visual design and transmedia operation of Pili animate the materiality of the puppet. The puppet’s growing autonomy parallels with the development of animation. I explore how transmedia production uses the traditional performing art of puppetry, with its ability to culturally and materially animate the puppets, and adds novel elements to create something artistically new and culturally significant. Second, I analyse how Pili’s transmedia production changes the puppet master’s performance techniques. The camera movements, along with scenes and transmedia editing, expand the possibilities for manipulating the puppet. This shift changes the puppeteers’ role within the performance, as puppeteering moves from being a craft into a transmedia process, which manipulates an immobile puppet and coordinates the post-production of a virtual character. By exploring how interaction with the new media effects puppetry, this article sheds light on Pili puppetry through animation and transmedia theory in order to contextualize how animation’s life-giving potential transgresses screens and genre categories.

Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen is an Assistant Professor of Chinese at Utah State University. She specializes in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone theatre, media, visual culture, and literature. Her research examines how cross-cultural performance reshapes the performer and the audience’s perception of artistry, nation, and gender in Martial-Law Taiwan and how theatrical works interact with multiple forms of new media. Her articles appear in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Intercultural Acting and Performer Training, and Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia. Currently, she serves as a guest editor of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies.

How does animation represent and reconstruct collective memories? How would we understand the medium of animation in the visual, cinematic narrative of historical trauma? This paper focuses on two Taiwanese films, Hand in Hand (2011) and On Happiness Road (2017), to examine the ways in which the animation recapitulates, intervenes, and problematizes ordinary everyday scenes to evoke collective, traumatic memories from Taiwan’s White Terror during the martial law period (1949–1987). Hand in Hand is a documentary with animation scenes and On Happiness Road is an animation feature film. The former utilizes animation as a replacement of missing evidence in political violence, while the latter employs the animation genre to turn muted trauma into fairy-tale-like scenes. In both films, the animation serves to complete cinematic narratives while at the same time challenges the epistemological boundaries of truth, representation, and reconstruction in collective memories. Exploring the medium of animation at the convergence of trauma and historical narratives, I argue that the animation in Hand in Hand and On Happiness Road both play a significant role in the ritual of commemoration to identify trauma and reproduce a collective past, and thus a collective identity is summoned through the spectator’s film experience.

Laura Jo-Han Wen is an Assistant Professor and Acting Chair in the Department of Asian Studies at Randolph-Macon College. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature with a minor in Visual Culture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. Her research primarily focuses on the film culture in colonial and postcolonial Sinosphere. Her most recent publication is seen in the book anthology, Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic Histories, edited by Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and published in 2018. She is at work on her manuscript The Intermedial Screen: Cinema and Media Culture in Colonial Taiwan, 1895–1945.

This paper pays attention to online animated discursive practices about history in relation to Chinese nationalism and Sinocentrism. Two comparative animation cases will be analyzed: Taiwan Bar, a YouTube animated series introduces Taiwan’s history from non-Chinese nationalist and non-Sinocentric perspectives, and Year Hare Affair, a four-season animation adaptation of a webcomic series that uses cute animal characters as an allegory for nations to represent modern political and military history and conflicts. First, this paper investigates how animation with its media specificity engages the viewers in a vivid and entertaining inquiry into the constructed and fabricated nature of history. Second, both cases employ the transnational kawaii aesthetics and animation signifiers that provide a buffer to prevent viewers from making immediate judgements of historical occurrences based on their own political ideologies. Finally, using online platforms as a publishing outlets permits immediacy, interactivity, and a certain level of openness for the creative process of animation. History is a constructed reality, embedded in a particular perspective and problem. Scholars have investigated the discursive practices of “history” and pinpointed the problems of ideological construction in school curricula and government propaganda. Contrary to the curricula and propaganda that have the limited capacity to present the complexity of history, this paper argues that online animated discursive practices allow viewers to engage in the transgressive pleasure of viewing, exploring multiple perspectives and further inquiring into the complexity of historical reality.

Lien Fan Shen is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah, USA. Shen earned her PhD in Art Education at the Ohio State University and MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her creative work includes manga, animation, and digital arts. Shen published five manga and was awarded The Best Romantic Comic in Taiwan. Her animation won several international awards, and her digital media arts have been screened and exhibited in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Netherlands, and the United States. Her recent animated documentary Seeing Through the Eyes of Crocodiles was screened in Beijing Queer Film Festival, Shanghai Pride Film Festival, TWIST Seattle Queer Film Festival, and Boston LGBT film festival. This short won the Best Editing Award in Shanghai Pride and the Audience Award of International Shorts in Boston LGBT Film Festival. Her recent book chapters are: “Traversing Otaku Fantasy: Representation of the Otaku Subject, Gaze, and Fantasy in Otaku no Video,” in Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan and “The Dark, Twisted Magical Girls: Shōjo Heroines in Puella Magi Madoka Magica” in Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture. She is the recipient of College of Fine Arts Faculty Excellence Award in Research and an honoree of Celebrate U, extraordinary faculty achievements at the University of Utah in 2017.

Taking into account today’s singular yet peripheral position of abstract animation within the current cultural and socio-political global sphere, this paper discusses the works of a range of Hong Kong-based artists to explore animated abstraction as a discursive space through which meaning can be created. Artists including Choi Sai-Ho, Tobias Gremmler and Carla Chan serve as case studies of new and promising alternative and experimental ways of narrative processing that are emerging in response to more traditional modes of moving image storytelling. A dedicated taxonomy of meaning in abstract animation is proposed as a framework from which to develop a narrative-abstraction vocabulary for artists and scholars to work with. What role do the works of Hong Kong artists in particular play in shaping this, and what are the unique perspectives that these works can offer for such an endeavour? A range of preoccupations with references ranging from music concrete to Chinese opera and Hong Kong architecture bring to light those other visions and possible modes of animated abstraction engaged with producing meaning. Relevant conceptual links include David Rodowick’s (2001) elaboration on reading the figural in light of a philosophy after new media, and Michel Foucault’s (1986) modelling of heterotopias as counter-sites through which to represent, contest and invert hegemonic culture. This presentation is part of the author’s research project Towards a Taxonomy of Meaning and Narrative in Abstract Animation: A Study of Contemporary Hong Kong and International Artists.

Max Hattler is a German video artist, experimental filmmaker, animation researcher and educator based in Hong Kong. After studying in London at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, he completed a Doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London. Hattler’s artworks have been presented around the world, including at Ars Electronica Festival, European Media Art Festival, Seoul Museum of Art, MoCA Taipei and Sónar Hong Kong. Awards include London International Animation Festival, Cannes Lions, Bradford Animation Festival, and several Visual Music Awards. He has presented papers at the Society for Animation Studies Conference, CONFIA in Portugal, and the inaugural Annual China Animation Studies Conference in Chengdu. Max Hattler serves on the board of directors of the iotaCenter and the editorial board of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He is an Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong.

Retrospectively, this work-in-progress research is a follow-up of my original critical work on Hong Kong animation which was published almost two decades ago. The first part briefly surveys the landscape of Hong Kong animation from the beginning of the 21^st century and takes up a curatorial position as well in introducing and summarizing the selected array of Hong Kong animations that have been produced and reported on the mass media.

The latter introduction sets the background analysis of No. 7 Cherry Lane, a Hong Kong animated film directed by live action director, Yonfan. The film made its debut at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival in 2019 and won the Best Screenplay Award. The animation not only brings a breath of fresh air to the island territory’s animation scene but also brightens up the Hong Kong film industry on the whole.

Focusing on the themes of narrative and storytelling, and the creative strategies of recall and nostalgia, the research will explore the directorial ways in which Yonfan employed in making an unusual Hong Kong Hollywood style film. Presented in the animated format influenced by Japanese animation and anime, yet the distinctive live-action touch covertly holds the storyline firmly and cinematically. Narrative techniques of nostalgia, recall and allusion continue to propel many contemporary Hong Kong-made films. No. 7 Cherry Lane shows no exception. However, the animated work brings a level of sensitive imagination, fantasy and reality not seen in recent Hong Kong cinema for quite a long while. The animated film features as well a part of Hong Kong’s cultural, social and political past that relates relevantly to the territory’s current events.

The paper will also address the present stagnant state of Hong Kong live-action cinema in the light of the ever-growing popularity of K-pop media, competition from mainland Chinese multiple TV channels and proximate established appeal of Japanese popular culture.

Tze-yue G. Hu is an independent educator based in Northern California,  (https://www.animafilmperformance.com/). She has published academic essays and books on Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese and Korean animations. Her essay, “The ‘Art’ between frames in Hong Kong Animation” is a forerunner research on Hong Kong animation and other background aspects of Chinese animation (Animation in Asia and the Pacific, 2001). Her latest book publication is Animating the Spirited: Journeys and Transformations (2020) by the University Press of Mississippi. It is a co-edited volume of contributions from various artists, scholars and animators working in different parts of the world, showing their analyses and discussions on the subject of the “spirited” and sub-themes of journeys and transformations.

Hong Kong animation’s multifaceted developments are supported by several generations of motivated creators with the spirit of dedication. Hong Kong animations remain in close connection with the local culture telling unique stories of the city and deserve in-depth historical and cultural studies.

Tracing the history of Hong Kong animation, you can find diverse development trends, including the development of animation for TV commercials, independent hand-drawn works, as well as special effects and creative trailers for broadcast programmes and feature films, which had already started since the late 1960s.

Starting from the early 1980s, the industry began to produce feature-length animated films, including a series of three Older Master Q feature films based on Alphonso Wong’s (Wong Chak’s) well-known Old Master Q comics. With the development of computer animation software such as Softimage in the 1990s, Hong Kong films and commercials were increasingly digitalized. Media Graphics Limited began the production of the animated feature film Cyber Weapon Z in 1995 (completed in 1997), while advertising or special effects companies such as Centro Digital Pictures Limited and Menfond Electronic Arts & Computer Design Company established their own film special effects and animation production departments in mid-1990s, contributing to the production of special effects-laden films such as The Storm Riders (1998) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004).

Since the last decade, Hong Kong animation has been developing at a stunning speed, with many works receiving the annual DigiCon6 Asia Awards, and animators successfully created side-products and brand licensing.

My presentation shall be based on two major oral history exercises done in 2005-2006 and 2017-2018 respectively, covering three key generations of Hong Kong’s animation history. Contents shall cover the historical timeline based on production modes; their trends in creative concepts, styles and characteristics of works in various periods.

Winnie Fu specializes in Hong Kong Film History and media culture, with over 20 years’ experience in curatorial, exhibition management, and editorial projects. During the past 20 years, she has spearheaded the execution of over 100 archival exhibitions of various scales as Editor, Exhibition Coordinator and Programmer for the Hong Kong Film Archive. She has published an edited book, titled Frame After Frame – A Retrospective on Hong Kong Animation, which is a collection of oral histories by interviewing Hong Kong animators active from the 1960s until 2006. Her latest curatorial projects include Moving Tales of Hong Kong Animation – Oral History Project for the Hong Kong Arts Center, which is a volume of oral histories on Hong Kong animations by interviewing animators active from 2006 to the present.

Ink-painting animation originated from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in the 1950s and earned reputation for its artistic excellence worldwide since the 1960s. This paper discusses how this art form traveled to Hong Kong in the 1980s, and how such unique production techniques are transferred to local Hong Kong animators, sustained with a manuscript The Secret Book of Animations, written by those animation masters who emigrated from Mainland China to Hong Kong between the 1970s and 80s. As a result, there are ink-painting animated films created and produced in Hong Kong. The arrival of the universal digitalization has great impacts on Hong Kong’s ink-painting animation creation. In other words, ink-painting animation in Hong Kong has evolved along with the modernized computer-generated imagery (CGI) production workflow, which focuses on the computer-generated inking and ink-wash effects. This paper will disclose the novel Hong Kong developed ink wash simulation engine and software tools which indeed have contributed to the legacy of an exclusive Hong Kong ink-painting animation techniques where animators and software developers work together to strive for an original Hong Kong-style ink-painting animation.

Ann Y. Y. Leung is a PhD candidate in Education at the University of Hong Kong. She is a 3D computer animator, as well as design and animation lecturer in Hong Kong. She is the founder of Open Source Multi Media.HK. She is currently operating OSMM.HK to promote the use of free and open-source software (FOSS) and open learning for everyone who wishes to practice creative arts, including animation.

Since the beginning of the millennium animation became an art form that was strongly supported by the Singaporean government through funding institutions and the emergence of animation programs at universities and art schools. The author was a witness and a contributor to the evolution of the medium in Singapore: He is teaching animation at Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU) since 2005. Since then independent animation has taken a phenomenal path of growth through the works of graduates from NTU and other schools. Today, Singapore’s animation artists have found their place among the world’s very best with acceptances and awards at major festivals like Berlinale, Annecy and Animafest Zagreb among many others. What is more, some key independent artists have found ways to combine commissioned work and independent art to sustain a living without compromising on artistic quality. This talk will introduce this new generation of Singaporean animators to the audience through their amazing works.

Hannes Rall is a tenured Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is also an independent animation director. He has shown his work in over 600 film festivals worldwide and won 65 international awards. His research and artistic work are focused on exploring adaptation of classic literature for animation, animated documentary and expanded animation and Asian animation. He presents regularly in major conferences like FMX, SIGGRAPH and the Society of Animation Studies. His book Animation: From Concept to Production was published by CRC Press in December 2017.