By Hang Wu Animation renders visible the nonhuman energy that is otherwise hidden. The visualization of this nonhuman affective energy is exemplified by the animated feature film Ne Zha (2019), which reaches its climax during the fight of fire vs. water between Ne Zha and Ao Bing. As Ne Zha was born with the power … Continue reading Visual Effects and the Enchanted Technique of Elements: A Review of Ne Zha
By Maggie Chunning Guo The animated film Next Gen, released in 2019, presents a series of dualisms, such as stereotypes of humans vs. machines and the dilemma of deleting memories vs. unloading weapons. These confrontations lead to a war between the humans and machines, climaxing in a final fight between the robot “7723” and Justin … Continue reading Next Gen: Out-of-control “Prototype Memory” in a Futuristic Machine City
By Ying Chen Princess Iron Fanis the first Chinese animated feature film produced by the Wan Brothers at Xinhua studio during the Orphan Island period of Shanghai’s film industry. Adapted from a well-known story in Journey to the West, the film was made as a response to Disney’s first animated feature film, Snow White and … Continue reading Transborder Fairy Tales: Princess Iron Fan and the Discourse of Children
By Linda C. Zhang In 1958, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio released a 35-minute, color, stop-motion puppet animation film, Mountain of Flames (Huoyan shan), directed by Jin Xi. The movie retold a familiar episode from the novel Journey to the West, where Sun Wukong – the Monkey King – must try three successive times to … Continue reading “Our Comrade Sun Wukong”: On Fantasy and Exaggeration in Mountain of Flames
By Liang Luo The 2019 animated film White Snake: Origins (Baishe yuanqi), co-produced by Beijing-based Light Chaser Animation and Warner Bros., premiered on January 11 throughout China. It opens with an innovative, hybrid style of ink-painting 3D animation.[1] In the one-minute opening sequence, two snakes who have transformed into beautiful women, White Snake and Green … Continue reading Queering an Icon, Becoming a Demon: A Review of White Snake: Origins
By Yiman Wang Liu Jian, a Nanjing-based animator and director with a background in painting, has single-handedly launched the genre of black humor adult animation in China, and further catapulted it into the international limelight with two feature-length works, Piercing I (2010) and Have a Nice Day (2018). Produced by the Le Joy Animation Studio, … Continue reading The Animation that Deconstructs Itself—Liu Jian’s Piercing I and Have a Nice Day
By Jianhua Chen; translated by Isabel Galwey The first ten years of the twenty-first century have passed in a snap of the fingers. Many trends have come and gone, but nothing has prevented the onward march of the globalized economy. The world, the globe, and our everyday lives are undergoing historic changes — and so … Continue reading The Rise of Wolf Culture: Thoughts on Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf
By Silin Chen China was once proud of its top-notch animation industry. Animation classics produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio impressed generations of Chinese children and inspired internationally renowned directors like Miyazaki Hayao to pursue careers in animation. Having witnessed the decline of the Chinese animation industry, which was overshadowed by the global popularity … Continue reading In the Empty Name of Zhuangzi ——The Arbitrariness of Semiotics in Big Fish & Begonia
By Haiyan Lee The 2015 animated feature film Monster Hunt (Zhuoyao ji) is a popcorn caper served up by a mainland-Hong Kong coproduction team led by director Raman Hui who cleverly meld the nonsensical (moleitau) conventions of Hong Kong cinema with state-of-the-art CGI technologies. It also rehashes the well-worn Hollywood motif of a bumbling everyman … Continue reading Monsters to Die For: On Monster Hunt as an Ecological Fable