Abstracts

Introduction: Chinese Animation: A Statement of the Field (by Daisy Yan Du, John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang) 

The Introduction defines Chinese animation studies as a new field of research emerging from the margins of modern Chinese literature and film studies on the one hand and from the peripheries of American, European, and Japanese animation studies on the other. It begins with a review of scholarly work on Chinese animation from the early 1970s to the present, and then invites readers to imagine the formation of Chinese animation studies as a “plasmatic” process that, like animation itself, promises release from conventional perceptions of the world. Key among these perceptions is the essentializing notion of Chinese animation. Rather than avoiding the term Chinese, which would be impracticable, the volume opts for Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” that, on the one hand, stakes a claim to a strategic unitary identity on par with American, European, and Japanese animations. At the same time, however, the contributors’ essays deconstruct a stable imagination of Chineseness by describing an ever-shifting, alternate archive of film history whose multiplicity, heterogeneity, and playful encounters with spectators entail not a telos of development, but rather “multiple lines of descent.” The Introduction concludes with an overview of the chapters included in the volume’s five sections: Junctures, Gender, Identity, Digitality, and Practices.

Foreword: Modern Chinese Literature, Film, and Animation (by David Wang)

The foreword outlines the trajectory of Chinese animation studies as a new field of research emerging from modern Chinese literature and film studies. It especially draws attention to the significance of Chinese animation studies during the pandemic, when the Chinese lives were rendered inanimate while this book was being made.       

Keynote Essay: Playful Dispositif and Remediation: Chinese Animation from the Perspective of Film History as Media Archaeology (by Yingjin Zhang) 

This chapter 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).

Part One: Junctures

Chapter 1: The Animation of Inanimate Objects in Chinese Silent Cinema (by Panpan Yang)

The chapter traces the moments of animation of inanimate, everyday objects—such as a pair of boots or a string of pearls—in so-called live-action Chinese films in the silent era. I show that the animation of inanimate objects can be achieved by using the stop-motion technique, wires, or combined tricks. Key exemplary films are An Empty Dream (Qing xu meng, dir. Ren Pengnian, 1922, nonextant), The Pearl Necklace (Yichuan zhenzhu, dir. Li Zeyuan, 1926, extant), and The Knight (Daxia ganfengchi, dir. Yang Xiaozhong, 1928, partially extant). While troubling the conventional historical narrative that treats An Empty Dream—adapted from the story entitled “The Taoist Priest of Laoshan” from Pu Songling’s (1640–1715)  Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio—as the first trick film in Chinese film history, I show that the notion of the trick becomes a site of encounter between the Chinese classical tale and the modern medium of film, as it takes shape in the confrontation between the world that Pu conjures up—one thick with ghosts, fox-spirits, and fairy maidens—and the ghosts in the machine. By examining an account of how to make stop-motion animation published in Photography Pictorial (Sheying huabao) in 1931, I demonstrate that in the Chinese historical context, this species of animation was surprisingly understood as part and parcel of trick photography.

Chapter 2: From Animation to Martial Arts: Toward the Transcendence of False Movements (by Jinying Li) 

Animation and martial arts films have close affinities with each other in the history of Chinese cinema, overlapping conceptually and aesthetically with shared technical concerns and cultural forms. Martial arts films frequently rely on 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, suggesting their shared historical legacy in addressing certain crises and anxieties in national identity. This chapter provides an analytical mapping of the historical and aesthetical connections between animation and martial arts cinema. It focuses on the notion of movement and demonstrates that both animation and martial arts cinema, with their shared roots in shadowplay, the Wan brothers, and Monkey King, emerged and developed in Chinese history as powerful vehicles to negotiate with competing conceptualizations of bodily motion and their implications in shaping a vernacular perception of space, time, energy, vitality, and physicality, all of which have been animating the cultural meanings of a national identity from early modernity to the digital age. These two forms of moving images, through their shared technologies and techniques such as mickey-mousing sound effects, plasmatic physicality, and extreme verticality, also tackle the question of movement as an intrinsic problem of cinema. The aesthetic overlaps demonstrate that both animation and martial arts cinema struggle to overcome what Henri Bergson describes as the fundamental falsehood of cinematic movements. 

Chapter 3: Toy Country: Playful Innovation in Socialist Chinese Puppet Animation (by Linda C. Zhang)  

In 1950s China, puppet animation film, overlapping but distinct from stop-motion animation, emerged as popular media that appealed particularly to young audiences. The chapter analyzes films such as The Dream of Xiaomei (Xiaomei de meng 小梅的梦, 1954) featuring youth characters interacting with toys or who resembled toys themselves. This chapter argues that within these films, the relationship between children and toys is set against a broader narrative arc of socialist world-building and framed by civic participation and education in production, labor, and technology. Considering this relationship between children and toys within these films, the chapter then brings in theoretical and historical writings on puppet animation by filmmakers and puppet animation designers such as Yu Zheguang 虞哲光 (1906–1991). In these writings, the aesthetic and pedagogical functions of puppet animation were closely intertwined, including ideas such as the “puppet aesthetic” that were defined by the toy-like characteristics of the puppet animation characters and the ability to teach audiences. Considering these discussions, “Toy Country” proposes to conceive of 1950s puppet animation film in China as not merely a genre informed by traditional and cultural heritage in puppet theater, but also as a mass medium informed by theories of pedagogy and aspirations of socialist world-building.

Chapter 4: Adapting Dunhuang in a Transitional Period: Negotiated Intermediality in The Deer of Nine Colors and Jiazi Saves the Deer (by Shasha Liu) 

Dunhuang caves (Dunhuang, China), an ancient Buddhist archeological site along the Silk Road, has inspired many Chinese animations. Previous scholarship revolving around the issue of national style identifies visual and narrative references of Dunhuang murals in related animations. Although the latest studies, in general, have strived to look beyond the nationalization features by paying attention to transnational encounters or influences, the ideological undercurrents behind the developing ideas of animation as a medium are rarely examined. Comparing The Deer of Nine Colours (Jiu se lu, 1981) and Jiazi Saves the Deer (Jiazi jiu lu, 1985), both of which adapt Dunhuang murals, this chapter argues the distinctive approaches, emphasizing fine arts (meishu) or cinematic methods (dianying shouduan) respectively, actually resonate with the changing perception of animation in China in the 1980s. While the former adheres to fine arts, the latter emphasizes more cinematic methods. In addition, the production of these two animations was intertwined with picture books (lianhuanhua), which further testifies to Chinese animators’ struggles with linear storytelling and their efforts to differentiate mural paintings from animated images. By unpacking the intermediality of these cultural productions, this chapter aims to highlight the complicated conceptual change of animation as a medium in China.

Part Two: Gender 

Chapter 5: Psychic Grannies: Animation and Animism in Turn-of-the-Century Taiwan (by Tim Shao-Hung Teng)  

This chapter centers around the highly popular animation film Mofa ama (Grandma and Her Ghosts, 1998) to explore the relationship between animation and animism in turn-of-the-millennium Taiwan. I first sketch out various manifestations of ghosts in literary, cultural, and folk religious accounts through the lens of animism. In referencing theories of animism proposed by anthropologists, I engage concepts associated with animist worldviews, such as kinship, relationality, and the environment, to delineate a distinct mode of sociality found in the film. I then shift the focus to the psychic granny, known in Mandarin as shenpo, whose versatile career can be parsed in different registers as an ethnographic figure, an animating medium, a set of cultural techniques, and a media theorist. To these explications I supply anecdotes from the life and work of my own grandmother, whose profession as a shamaness in rural Taiwan sheds light on female mediumship as a site-specific and community-based media practice. Grandma’s mediumistic career, I suggest, invites conversations with and reflections upon key topics raised in media studies today. Across historic, ethnographic, and theoretical accounts, the many psychic grannies that animate life and media in Taiwan constitute a fertile meeting ground where animation and religion, by a mutual investment in animism, stage their felicitous encounter.

Chapter 6: Suspended Authorship: Women Animation Directors in Socialist China, 1940s–1980s (by Daisy Yan Du) 

How has gender affected the trajectory of film history, especially when it comes to authorship? How and to what extent can a gender analysis of film and film history enhance our knowledge of both? These questions have long been heated debates in film studies. However, two major gaps exist in these discussions: they unanimously consider adults as the intended audience of cinematic texts while neglecting children, and they focus on live-action films without addressing other mediums such as animation. If we draw attention to animation that targets children as its intended audience, can we shed new light on the debates about gender and authorship? 

In this chapter, I reexamine the authorship and gender question by focusing on Chinese socialist animation, which I loosely define as the predigital cel or stop-motion animations handmade by veteran animators between the late 1940s and 1980s. It is difficult to detect a distinct female aesthetics or perspective in socialist animated films directed or codirected by women animators, but this does not mean that Chinese women animators lacked a female consciousness à la Western feminist theories, nor is this lack an inadequacy or weakness. These films must be analyzed in context by considering the films’ intended audience (children) and the collective socialist mode of animated filmmaking that suspended authorship itself. Although a distinct female aesthetics or perspective did not appear until the rise of independent animation in the 1990s, socialist women animators’ tireless efforts to make a difference in Chinese animation history must be acknowledged, precisely because their individual labor and creativities were often subsumed under collective authorship. The differences they made within the state-controlled animation industry, though not always gender specific, are adequate to call them socialist cine-feminists, defined as women practitioners making innovations, exploring alternative paths, and even challenging the established mainstream conventions symbolically coded as authoritative, masculine, and patriarchal.

Chapter 7: When Animation Is Accented and Gendered: The Feminist Gestures of Women Animateurs (by Paola Voci) 

What does it mean to be a woman who creates and produces animation in the fluid, liminal, Chinese-accented context in which animateurs produce their works, while also negotiating their individual creativity in the transnational milieu of globalized animation? Can we find evidence of a feminist perspective, both in the texts –i.e., their animation works and their stylistic and narrative choices– and their contexts –i.e., the channels and platforms in which these women share their works and reflect on their own practices? 

The women animateurs foci of my study are active both in Chinese contexts (such as the PRC and Taiwan) and elsewhere, but they rarely, if at all, emphasize either Sinocentric or Sinophone belongings. In the current globalized context, the notion of “Chinese-accented” therefore allows us to recognize a transnational positionality that can also be situated within, rather than simply departing from, the PRC, Mandarin-dominated, center.

I analyze and conceptualize women animateurs’ Chinese-accented, gendered, minor practices as feminist gestures. I argue that these feminist gestures point to the need of reconnecting issues of representation with that of production and distribution and embracing a critical space in which theory and practice, aesthetics and politics, art and craft are mutually determining. In a scholarly context in which a feminist approach to animation is largely undeveloped, not only can an examination of contemporary Chinese-accented women animateurs contribute to de-westernize scholarship in animation studies but can also stimulate further research on the key relationship between feminism and animation. I see their affirmation of corporeal presence and creative agency as part of a feminist critical approach to animation or, possibly more accurately, animation’s critical approach to feminism.

Part Three: Identities

Chapter 8: What’s in a Line? Borders and Diffusion in Ink-Painting Animation (by Shannon Brownlee)  

Ink-painting animation is a quintessentially Chinese style of animation that closely replicates the aesthetics of traditional Chinese ink painting. Nonetheless, its forms and practices are testaments to the entanglements of East and West. This chapter’s discussion of key moments in the history of ink-painting animation aims to unravel essentialist and inequitable conceptions of both “China” and “the West.” Taking its cue from the visual diffusion effects that characterize this form, it argues that ink-painting animation acts as both an instance of and a metaphor for the blurriness of regional borders. First, through the lens of English-language film and animation theory, the chapter analyzes ink painting and analog ink-painting animation created on the animation stand at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS); it also argues that attention to the liveliness of these artistic forms can inform and expand English-language theories. Turning to the digital era, the chapter excavates East-West exchanges that have always been part of research and development in digital paintbrush technologies, and it discusses the diversity of aesthetics and theoretical approaches among early digital ink-painting animated films. The chapter’s multiple stories and approaches reflect the heterogeneity characteristic of this form of animation.

Chapter 9: Homemaking Allegory: Animating Taiwanese Local Memory in The Little Sun (by Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen) 

How do Chinese immigrants in Taiwan—educated to actively support the return to their mainland homeland during the Martial Law period (1949-1987)—unexpectedly turn the island into their home and represent their local memories? Animation, a medium commonly linked with childhood innocence, effectively fosters emotional connections with audiences. This article examines The Little Sun (2010), a 13-episode animation depicting a Chinese immigrant family in 1970s Taiwan, highlighting a storytelling of homemaking that transcends the China-centric imagination of homeland found in previous Taiwanese animated works. Through contextualizing the transition of cultural policy and the animation industry, this article argues that the homemaking narrative is a meaningful process that inspires collective memories and local identity in Taiwan. The discussion starts with a historical overview of the animation industry in Taiwan, from its inception in the 1970s through its transformation in the 1990s to government funding in the new century. Then the analysis moves to animation content throughout the Martial Law period, and what sets the subject matter of The Little Sun apart. Finally, through visual analysis of the street landscape and domestic space, I show how The Little Sun utilizes animation to depict characters’ growth and address issues of identity, family, and finding a sense of home. The depiction of everyday-life details unexpectedly shifts Chinese immigrants’ vision from longing to return to their hometown in China to settling in Taiwan. This diversifies the diasporic image propagated by the government during the Martial Law period and suggests the possibility of raising a family and rooting in Taiwan. The narrative of homemaking in animation evokes shared local memories and transforms the meaning of home and hometown for Chinese immigrants in Taiwan.   

Chapter 10: Animation as Action: The Old Master Q Animation Trilogy in Hong Kong (by Jessica K. Chan)  

The Old Master Q Animation Trilogy (1981–83), which includes three 2D animation feature films – Old Master Cute (Qicai katong laofuzi 七彩卡通老夫子, 1981), Old Master Cute Part II (Laofuzi shuihuzhuan 老夫子水虎傳, 1982), and Old Master Cute Part III (Shan’T laofuzi 山T老夫子, 1983), is the first animation feature film series in Hong Kong cinema. The trilogy is a forgotten moment in the pioneering but marginalized work of animation in Hong Kong cinema and can be understood in terms of its modernity and medium specificity. First, it demonstrates the fluidity, elasticity, and plasmaticness of animation with an imaginative expressiveness and subversiveness that are specific to Hong Kong’s colonial and capitalist modernity in the early 1980s, when the Sino-British negotiations on Hong Kong’s future were unfolding. Second, by remediating various cultural icons (Bruce Lee, Wu Song, and E.T.) and traversing generic boundaries between multiple cinematic traditions (Chinese martial arts and Hollywood science fiction), the trilogy develops a global vocabulary of animation as action, seeking to create an animation paradise that is not only Disney-inspired but also identifiable and accessible across cultures. In its development from kung fu animation to wuxia (martial arts swordplay) animation to sci-fi animation in just three years, the trilogy experiments with the realist, supernatural, and formalist modes of animating action, thus challenging the corporeal authenticity of live action film by introducing a new animation aesthetic.

Part Four: Digitality 

Chapter 11: Animation as Agency in the Glistening City Orb: Jia Zhangke’s The World (by Wendy Larson) 

In The World (2004), director Jia Zhangke inserts animation into what otherwise is a gritty presentation that powerfully–if conventionally–zones in on the disruption of community and the individual’s sense of self, belonging, and value caused by the expansion of capitalism in the postsocialist world. What does the animation cause viewers to see, feel, or sense that we cannot get from the carefully constructed realistic sequences? In a film that combines pan-documentary realism with animation and sets the story in the simulated environment of a theme park, how can we understand the animated sequences of this overwrought context of the fake+real? I argue that in The World, animation offsets the critique implicit in the realistic parts of the film, offering a burst of energy that enhances the richness of the characters’ inner lives and expands their agency. In other words, the animation is not an extension of the film’s realism but rather is an expression of presence and creativity in a confusing and contradictory environment. Additionally, animation breaks apart the conventional interpretive habits of the intellectual art house audience, which may see a critical realism that exposes societies’ ills as the most imperative technique and thus would tend to interpret the animation as an extension of the film’s realism. And finally, the theme park itself becomes a player in the non-linear movement between the murky poles of real/fake, authentic/inauthentic, and agent/victim, which brings in a discourse contesting the meaning of the immersive space. 

Chapter 12: When a Cat Flies: Futures of 3D Animation through Cats and Peachtopia (by Yiman Wang) 

This article ponders the futures of 3D animation through the seemingly impossible example of Mao yu Taohuayuan 猫与桃花源 (Cats and Peachtopia), dir. Wang Wei 王微, 2018)—an ambitious Chinese Pixar animation-wannabe that turned out to be not only a box office failure, but also a disturbing animal-abuse film under its 3D computer-generated furry surface, according to a Western viewer seeking family-friendly entertainment. 

At the heart of my article is a tri-perspective study of this 3D animated film, especially concerning how the film intersects with three understandings of the real in the digital age, namely, the spectators’ experience of the simulated real, the radical sociopolitical transformations that could become real as inspired by “Pixavolt” (Jack Halberstam), and the real underbelly of digital visual and sens­ing technologies as revealed in infrastructure studies and media archeology. Read through this tri-perspective lens, Cats and Peachtopia, a cat-centered Bilduingsroman, offers a surprising opportunity for exploring multifarious, nonteleological futures of 3D animation.

Part Five: Practices 

Chapter 13: The Path to Cinematic Immersion: Creating VR Animation in China (by Jake Junjie Zhang)  

The year 2016 has been referred to as “the first year of the virtual reality (VR) industry” in China by many publications due to the rapid growth of VR products, including games and cinematic VR released during that year. In line with the global trend of investment in VR industries since 2014, particularly following Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus for 2 billion US dollars, several Chinese studios have dedicated themselves to this new medium, contributing to the development of cinematic language in VR animation and its creative process. Despite limited previous examples and resources on “what a VR animation looks like,” various approaches, including applying traditional animation principles and incorporating interactive components, have been experimented with and integrated into practice.

VR animations created by the first generation of Chinese VR creators have garnered international recognition through selection at top international film festivals in 2016 and 2017. However, cinematic VR projects, including VR animation, experienced a rapid decline after 2017 due to an immature end-user market at that time. This paper aims to identify the motivations, developmental features, and challenges of creating VR animation in China, analyzing VR animations created by Pinta Studio, Digital Domain, and other studios. Works by Pinta Studio, Sandman Studios, and Digital Domain are predominantly discussed as representative examples.

Chapter 14: The Digital Turn in Hong Kong Independent Animation (by Isabel Galwey) 

Independent animators have been active in Hong Kong since the late 1940’s, but the digital turn allowed the field to expand and flourish beyond the constraints of analogue animation techniques. In fact, the digital turn is credited with saving Hong Kong independent animation by allowing animators more freedom to experiment with different styles, technologies and platforms. This chapter charts the development of Hong Kong independent animation from its beginnings in the mid-twentieth century, identifying important practitioners and organizations, as well as highlighting the many difficulties which the independent animators faced.

The chapter then goes on to document the efflorescence of digital animation in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, combining close analysis of animations, artists’ statements, and contemporary commentary from experts from Hong Kong’s independent short film and video awards (now IFVA) to build a picture of a changing field. The chapter also highlights Hong Kong independent animation’s positioning in relation to adjacent fields, including music videos, feature animation, and fine art, and touches upon the impact of Hong Kong politics at the turn of the millennium on Hong Kong animators and animation. 

Chapter 15: Expanding Notions of Diasporic Chineseness: Toward a Singaporean Approach to VR (by Hannes Rall and Emma Harper)  

Singapore is a country with a majority ethnically Chinese population – around 75% of residents, as of 2020 – and 30% of the population speak Mandarin at home. Whilst animated features produced in Singapore in the 21st century have predominantly been targeted towards global audiences, non-commercial productions have been more likely to display a distinctly “Singaporean” animation style, featuring local settings and dealing with issues related to contemporary Singaporean identity such as multiculturalism and community (Ang, 2018). Productions have also looked to local artistic traditions – such as Wayang Kulit shadow puppetry and Chinese painting– as sources of creative inspiration for their projects. Through a mix of traditional and digital techniques, animations produced in Singapore combine local and global influences and visual forms to create something new, integrating the artistic influences of their creators’ personal cultural heritage within the framework of animation history.  

It is within this context that we will present our project “Transforming Singaporean Wayang Kulit for Virtual Reality” in which a diverse, interdisciplinary team of animators, academic researchers and performers have collaborated to adapt the traditional art of Wayang Kulit for VR – the project reflects the multicultural nature of Singaporean society. Rather than presenting our work purely as a digital adaptation of a traditional Southeast Asian performance form, we will highlight how the project can be considered a case study for the creative diversity that exists within the broader Chinese-speaking world. It will also demonstrate how design and narrative decisions that drew upon Singapore’s cultural diversity made within the context of VR can be considered as part of an attempt to create a novel virtual experience that can be considered distinctly “Singaporean” in both its visual and storytelling methods – indebted to Chinese, Southeast Asian and global trends yet unique in its approach, much like Singapore itself.  

Afterword: Lessons from Japanese Animation Studies: On the Future Directions of Chinese Animation Studies (by Alexander Zahlten)  

How can “Chinese animation studies” be made into a productive area of inquiry that generates new insights that help to better understand animation, media technologies, visual culture, power dynamics, and so on? Are there lessons to be learnt from an established field such as “Japanese animation studies”? This chapter considers the complications of a field emerging under a name that already suggests deeply problematic categories such as as a bounded idea of nation or of a fixed aesthetic / media-technological form. Through examining some of the critical reflection on the field of “Japanese animation studies” that the field itself generated, the chapter speculates on how “Chinese animation studies” as a field might retain (and value) the plasmatic dynamics that the editors of this volume have set as an ideal. 

Contributors

Shannon Brownlee is an associate professor of cinema and media stud­ies/gender and women’s studies at Dalhousie University in Mi’kma’ki, which is also known as Atlantic Canada. Her research is primarily in film adaptation and in animation; she has published articles in journals such as Film Criticism and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, as well as in anthologies published by Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan. She is also part of the organizing team of the Animation Festival of Halifax.

Jessica K. Chan is an associate professor of Chinese studies at the Univer­sity of Richmond. Her recent publications include Chinese Revolutionary Cinema: Propaganda, Aesthetics, and Internationalism, 1949–1966 (I. B. Tauris, 2019) and articles in the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, The Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and The Opera Quarterly.

Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen is an associate professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Utah State University. She special­izes in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone theater, film, media, visual culture, and literature. She has published peer-reviewed articles in journals including Theatre, Dance and Performance Training; Comparative Media Arts Journal; Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia; Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature; and Journal of Chinese Overseas.

John A. Crespi is a professor of Chinese at Colgate University in Hamil­ton, New York. He is the author of Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010) and Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn (Univer­sity of California Press, 2020). His articles on modern Chinese poetry and China’s manhua (cartoons and comics) have appeared in a range of edited volumes and scholarly journals. His online publications include the path­breaking three-part illustrated essay “China’s Modern Sketch: The Golden Era of Cartoon Art, 1934–1937,” written for MIT’s Visualizing Cultures project. He is the recipient of two Fulbright awards (2005–2006 and 2017).

Daisy Yan Du is an associate professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is the author of Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s–1970s (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019). Her refereed journal arti­cles have appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Discourse, Positions, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cine­mas, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Gender & History, among others. She is the editor of Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspec­tives (Brill, 2021), and is currently working on two monographs and edit­ing several volumes about animation and new media. She is the founder of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (https://acas.world), established in 2015 and dedicated to introducing and promoting Chinese animation to the English-speaking world.

Isabel Galwey is an animator and researcher. She completed a founda­tion diploma in art and design at Leeds Arts University, followed by a BA at University of Oxford, where she studied Chinese, and an MPhil at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she researched the digital turn in Hong Kong animation, transmedia connections between different areas of the Hong Kong creative industries, and the significance of nonnarrative elements as part of animation’s medium specificity. She has been involved in numerous short film and animation projects.

Emma Harper is a researcher with experience of working in universi­ties and museums in the UK, China, and Singapore. Harper holds BA and MSt degrees from the University of Oxford. She was most recently a research associate in the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she supports the delivery of cross-disciplinary projects relating to the use of immersive and interactive media within the fields of literature, culture, and education.

Wendy Larson is a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon. She is the author of several monographs, most recently Zhang Yimou: Global­ization and the Subject of Culture (Cambria Press, 2017) and From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China (Stanford University Press, 2008). Her present project is on comparative cultural optimism in 1950s China and the West.

Jinying Li is an assistant professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, where she teaches media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. Her essays have been published in Film International, Mecha­demia, the International Journal of Communication, Journal of Chinese Cine­mas, Asiascape, differences, and Camera Obscura. Her first book, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai was published by University of Minnesota Press (2024). She is currently working on her second book, Walled Media and Mediating Walls.

Shasha Liu is currently a sessional instructor at the University of Toronto (UT) and York University, after receiving her PhD degree from the Department of East Asian Studies at UT in June 2024. Her PhD dissertation investigates the reproduction and dissemination of Dunhuang in the twentieth century through the perspectives of four visual media: photography, painting, animation, and film. She published the article, “Zooming in on the Animated Background: Mediated Dunhuang Murals with Design in the Conceited General,” in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas in 2021. One of her dissertation chapters won the Best Student Paper Award (First Place) at the Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (Zoom Webinar, March 1–May 12, 2021).

Hannes Rall is President’s Chair Professor in Animation Studies and Associate Chair (Research) in the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is also an award-winning director of independent animated short films, with a particular focus on animated adaptations of classic literature. Conference presentations include FMX, ACM SIGGRAPH, and the annual conferences of the Society for Animation Studies; in 2016 he was the chair of the 28th Annual Confer­ence of the Society for Animation Studies. Hannes has published essays, chapters and books with publishers including Routledge, UVK Verlag Konstanz, and Julius Springer.

Tim Shao-Hung Teng is an assistant professor of Chinese film and media at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His book project, titled Earthbound Mediation: Geological Entanglements in Sinophone Extractive Zones, studies four historical sites of earth material extraction and their entanglement with media technology across China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in positions: asia critique, Screen, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies.

Paola Voci is a professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at the Univer­sity of Otago, New Zealand. She specializes in Chinese cinema and visual cultures, and in particular documentary, animation, and other hybrid digi­tal video practices. She is the author of China on Video: Smaller-Screen Realities (Routledge, 2010), a book that analyses and theorizes “light” movies made for and viewed on computer and mobile screens, and coeditor of Screening China’s Soft Power (Routledge, 2018), an investigation of the role played by film and media in shaping China’s global image. Her essays have been published in Animation, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, Global Storytelling, Bianco e Nero, among others. Her current research focuses on animateur practices and examines their contribution to the theory and archaeology of the moving image.

David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University and holds a joint appointment in compar­ative literature. The director of the CCK Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinological Studies and academician at Academia Sinica, Wang took his BA in foreign languages and literature from National Taiwan University, and his MA (1978) and PhD (1982) in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (Columbia University Press, 2014) and other works.

Yiman Wang is a professor of film and digital media and Kenneth R. Corday Family Presidential Chair in Writing for Television & Film at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World (Univer­sity of California Press, 2024) and Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). She is coeditor of the Global East Asian Screen Cultures book series published by Bloomsbury and Associate Editor of Journal of Chinese Cine­mas, having published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on topics of Chinese cinema, independent documentary, ethnic border-cross­ing stardom, ecocinema, film remakes, and adaptation. She is an National Endowment for the Humanities award recipient (2019–2020).

Panpan Yang is a lecturer (UK equivalent of assistant professor) in the arts and visual cultures of modern China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago. She is currently completing her first book on the emergence of animated space in China, in which she charts the history of Chinese animation from the 1920s to the present, focusing on Chinese animation’s encounters with other art forms, including photography, painting, calligraphy, and porcelain. Her writings on different aspects of Chinese animation have received a Domitor Essay Award in 2019 and an Honorable Mention from the Association for Chinese Animation Studies in 2021.

Alexander Zahlten is a professor of East Asian Languages and Civi­lizations at Harvard University. He received his PhD in film studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, in 2007. He conducted dissertation research at Nihon University (2003–2005) and postdoctoral research at Meiji Gakuin University (2009–2011). Zahlten was assistant professor in the Department of Film & Digital Media of Dongguk Univer­sity in Seoul, South Korea, for one and a half years before joining Harvard in 2012. He is the author of The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies (Duke University Press, 2017) and a coeditor of Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017).

Jake Junjie Zhang is an assistant professor of practice in digital media in computational media and arts thrust area at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). An award-winning independent animation artist, educator, and researcher living in mainland China and Hong Kong, Zhang holds a BA in digital media from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA in animation and digital arts from the University of Southern California. His films have been selected for and won awards at festivals all over the world, such as the Gold Award at the 8th Animation Support Program (2021) and the Jury Award at the 55th Ann Arbor Film Festival (2017), among others.

Linda C. Zhang (PhD, University of California at Berkeley, 2022) is an assistant professor of film in the Art & Media Studies program at Fulbright University Vietnam. She is currently completing a book project titled Technological Futures: Animated Media in Socialist China, which offers new understandings of the media history surrounding modern Chinese animation, visual culture, and popular science texts from the early Maoist era. Her work has appeared in academic and popular publications including Journal of Chinese Cinemas, the Association for Chinese Animation Studies, and Radii China, as well as in the edited volume Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury (Rutgers University Press, 2024).

Yingjin Zhang (1957–2022, PhD, Stanford) was Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Studies, and chair of the Department of Literature at University of California, San Diego. His works include The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford University Press, 1996), Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2002), Chinese National Cinema (Routledge, 2004), and Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), among others.