Introduction
Baishe zhuan 白蛇傳 (Legend of the White Snake) represents one of China’s most beloved folk narratives. Its literary roots stretch back centuries through oral traditions and classical literature. It centres on the love story between the white snake woman Bai Suzhen 白素貞 and the mortal man Xu Xian 許仙. Driven by a karmic debt to Xu for saving her life in a past life, Bai seeks out his reincarnation in Hangzhou 500 years later. Accompanying her is Xiaoqing 小青, a green snake spirit who is Bai’s younger sister. However, Fahai 法海, a powerful Buddhist monk, fatefully intervenes in Bai and Xu’s love. He tries to enforce the separation between the human and demon worlds. Bai ends up imprisoned by Fahai in the Leifeng ta 雷峰塔 (Thunder Peak Pagoda) for violating the divine law forbidding trans-species union.Footnote 1 As Wilt Idema has established, this plotline features in many traditional versions that constitute an evolving body of variants with no one holding a ‘standard’ status.Footnote 2 This article agrees with Idema, yet for analytical clarity, draws only on two of these variants for their codification of the tale’s characters and cultural connotations: Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 (1574–1646) Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) prose version Bainiangzi yongzhen Leifengta 白娘子永鎮雷峰塔 (Madame White Subdued Forever Under Thunder Peak Pagoda) and Fang Chengpei’s 方成培 (1713–1808) Qing-dynasty (1644–1912) chuanqi opera Leifeng ta chuanqi 雷峰塔傳奇 (Legend of the Thunder Peak Pagoda). According to Liang Luo, studying its global travel and reception, this story thematically explores ‘tolerance for hybrid identities and sexualities, love across traditional boundaries, subversion of authorities, and valuing the strange and the uncanny’.Footnote 3
This heritage was adapted into an animated universe by Zhuiguang Donghua 追光動畫 (Light Chaser Animation) in recent years. Beginning with Baishe: Yuanqi 白蛇:緣起 (White Snake: Origin) (2019), which reimagined Bai and Xu’s initial encounter in the previous life, followed by the perspective-shifting sequel Qingshe: Jieqi 青蛇:劫起 (The Tribulation of the Green Snake) (2021) focusing on Xiaoqing’s trials, the trilogy culminated in the 2024 release of Baishe: Fusheng 白蛇:浮生 (White Snake: Afloat, dirs. Chen Jianxi 陳健喜 and Li Jiakai 李佳鍇), the subject of this article. These animations form a coherent narrative universe. They expand the myth through interconnected narratives and consistent characterizations, attracting a large fanbase. Their popularity is shown in both box office success and cultural resonance. As of August 2024, the trilogy had grossed RMB 1.3 billion collectively. This cements its status as a national IP (intellectual property) phenomenon.Footnote 4 The release of Afloat on 10 August 2024 (the Qixi 七夕 Festival [Chinese Valentine’s Day]), won the love of diverse audiences. According to Tencent news, it was praised as ‘the most suitable movie for family viewing during the summer vacation’. Fan artworks exceed two million shares on the Chinese social media platform Weibo 微博.Footnote 5
Afloat has seen overseas release in various formats. It premiered at Taiwan’s Taichung International Animation Festival (24 October 2024). It received theatre releases in Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines (February 2025),Footnote 6 and it was screened at Germany’s International Film Festival for Children and Young Audience (28 September 2025).Footnote 7 It then had a dubbed theatrical release in Japan (30 January 2026), with promotional teasers and posters.Footnote 8 Its reception in these regions, however, can hardly be assessed for lack of data. There is yet to be an official release for the United States. However, some American viewers claim they have watched the film through unofficial channels like ‘Blue-ray discs’.Footnote 9 They have offered largely positive feedback, awarding it a four-star (out of five) rating. They have also praised its visual spectacle and resonant narrative of cross-species love and look forward to an official North American release.Footnote 10
Scholarly engagement with the trilogy, however, remains uneven. Origin and Green Snake have attracted some critical analysis that explores their ‘eco-aesthetics’ from a feminist perspective,Footnote 11 queer coding in characterization,Footnote 12 modern visual spectacles and aesthetics,Footnote 13 narrative adaptation and innovation,Footnote 14 and a nationalist agenda.Footnote 15 However, Afloat, due to its relatively late release, has not been exhaustively examined.
More significantly, the trilogy’s popularity draws on the broader guoman 國漫 (national animation) resurgence movement that has sparked a research boom in recent years.Footnote 16 But existing studies on Origin and Green Snake fail to demonstrate how the trilogy harnesses the movement’s momentum, reflecting key guoman characteristics. Through addressing this, the article argues that guoman texts like Afloat are shaped by the complex tripartite negotiation between state, market, and animators. Their dynamic interplay not only creates hybrid forms, but also serves as a revealing lens for the contested reality of contemporary Chinese identity politics in the global diaspora landscape.
Literature review
The guoman industry dates back as early as the 1920s, when pioneers like Wanshi Xiongdi 萬氏兄弟 (Wan Brothers) laid the foundation.Footnote 17 It enjoyed a ‘golden era’ in the 1950s,Footnote 18 when a stable environment and policy support fostered the ‘Chinese animation school’. They produced state-funded works like Danao tiangong 大鬧天宮 (The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven) that gained international recognition.Footnote 19 The industry was disrupted during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The three decades after the Reform and Opening Up in 1978 saw an influx of American and Japanese animation. This pushed the industry towards market-oriented reform.Footnote 20 However, fierce competition initially led to stagnation,Footnote 21 but the market shift later paved the way for guoman’s resurgence.
From the 2010s onwards, guoman has been undergoing a resurgence primarily for two sociopolitical reasons. First, this is a transition period from traditional media to digital media. The transition has greatly facilitated the spread of Chinese animation online.Footnote 22 Second, and more importantly, its resurgence has to do with the political culture. Existing studies overwhelmingly analyse guoman in terms of the minzu feng 民族風 (national style). They attribute its revival to state ideological support.Footnote 23 For instance, since the state promotion of Chinese culture’s zouchuqu 走出去 (going out) at the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, state discourse has positioned guoman as a tool to build cultural confidence and national rejuvenation. The government’s fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021–2025), in particular, frames guoman as a vehicle for ‘telling Chinese cultural stories’. It emphasizes two goals: first, amplifying socialist values and spiritual bonds among the youth, and second, building Chinese animation brands to form an ‘all-industry’ and ‘all-age’ market, reducing reliance on foreign IPs.Footnote 24
Such policy support and positioning link guoman to certain deeper-level ideological discourses, particularly the Zhongguo meng 中國夢 (China Dream) rhetoric raised by President Xi in 2012. As Whyke and Brown argue, this rhetoric discursively foregrounds China’s ‘historic civilization’ and ‘technological futurity’. It forges a conceptual linking of the past and future.Footnote 25 Guoman is fuelled and appropriated by the rhetoric, as it fuses the binary of historical heritage and cutting-edge technologiesFootnote 26 into what Liang Luo terms ‘digital classicism’. This is a conceptual framework explaining how classical stories are reimagined through digital means.Footnote 27 This makes guoman a potent site for constructing a state-sanctioned Chinese identity globally. Policy support also includes financial incentives. They include tax rebates, local subsidies, annual grants from the China Film Administration, etc.Footnote 28
Against this sociopolitical backdrop, scholarly discourse predominantly frames guoman as a tool for soft power projection and emphasizes its role in exporting Chinese symbolism.Footnote 29 Works like Zhongguo qitan 中國奇譚 (Yao-Chinese Folktales) (2023) are celebrated for successfully revitalizing ma-pi cun 麻皮皴 (hemp-fibre strokes) in ink-wash aesthetics with modern technologies.Footnote 30 This reinforces China Dream’s logic that guoman’s success stems from adherence to both cultural heritage and technological modernity, as related above. Under this framework, some scholars even suggest that audience demand for traditional themes is itself a product of state-led cultural campaigns. And animators’ adaptations are seen as conforming to ideological demands rather than as the result of independent artistic choice.Footnote 31
This perspective has gained a degree of dominance in understanding the guoman industry since the 2010s. It offers insights into how the state shapes the industry’s landscape but it has two major limitations. First, its heavy emphasis upon state ideology fails to fully break free from the state-led, market-absent analytical paradigmFootnote 32 that defines studies of state-funded artistic features in Mao’s China between the 1950s and late 1970s. The guoman today represents a market-driven industry. Commercial reasons sometimes drive creative decisions independently of state narratives, as shown in Chen and Lau’s research on Ne Zha: Motong Jiangshi 哪吒:魔童降世 (Ne Zha: The Demon Boy Descends to Earth) (2019).Footnote 33 This film broke box office records mainly because it reinterprets traditional myths alongside contemporary themes (e.g. challenging fate, prioritizing individualism). Such themes resonate with young audiences. While Chinese media’s overarching ideological mission for propagandaFootnote 34 persists to this day, China’s media industry has entered a digital-era ‘disjuncture’.Footnote 35 Ideological control sometimes erodes due to decentralized digital production (e.g. grassroots intellectuals create alternative narratives on social media), market pressures (e.g. users prefer sensationalism), and generational value shift (e.g. foxi qingnian 佛系青年 or Buddhist youth indifferent to state ideology).Footnote 36 Therefore, in guoman studies, over-emphasis upon the state’s dominant role risks losing sight of this ‘disjunctive’ media order. Second, even when acknowledging the market’s role,Footnote 37 existing literature simplistically frames it as only profit driven.Footnote 38 This oversimplifies the market’s complex dynamics. I suggest the market in the contemporary guoman industry serves a dual role that is both liberating and compromising. This will be detailed in the case analysis.
Animators’ agency, including their creativity, active identity construction, and particularly their potential to resist state discourse, is also under-researched. Far from passive executors of state policy, creators navigate cultural heritage to construct personal or collective identities. Sometimes they counter top-down narratives. According to Chen and Lau’s analysis of Ne Zha (2019), the animation recasts the protagonist as a rebellious ‘new Chinese individual’ embodying individualism and critical thinking. This subverts state discourse that promotes obedience and social order.Footnote 39 This testifies to animators’ resistant agency. How this interacts with both the state and market deserves more critical engagement.
Based on this literature review, thus, the major problem in existing scholarship on guoman is actually its failure to account for the complex interplay of state, market, and animators in the construction of specific guoman texts. In this view, guoman’s national style should be seen as the result of the three forces’ dynamic and complex negotiation. This article therefore argues that Afloat is structured by their coexistence and contestation. Rather than distinguishing the presence or absence of individual forces, my analysis traces how their negotiation produces distinct textual features, and how these features reflect broader cultural production in contemporary China.
Framework: Hybridity, glocalization, and the identity work of contemporary Chineseness
Plural guoman scholars have observed that, influenced by transnational cultural flows, the complex interplay of the three factors often results in hybrid forms that merge Chinese and foreign elements.Footnote 40 To theorize this process, this article draws on three complementary concepts: Homi Bhabha’s hybridity,Footnote 41 Roland Robertson’s glocalization,Footnote 42 and Weiyu Zhang’s Chineseness as identity work.Footnote 43
Hybridity is not just a mixing of heterogeneous elements. It emerges in the ‘third space’ of enunciation—a contested and productive zone created when distinct cultures interact, particularly under conditions of power imbalance, such as colonialism, migration, and globalization.Footnote 44 In this space, meanings are not generated in pure Chinese or Western forms, but in the interstices between them. Hybrid cultural forms challenge notions of pure identities, exposing the contingent, performative, and transformative nature of cultural in-between-ness.
Roland Robertson’s concept of ‘glocalization’Footnote 45 describes the dynamic interplay where global forms are domesticated to fit local contexts. Meanwhile local forms are projected onto the global stage, modified to satisfy global demands. This two-way dynamic offers a mechanism for understanding how cultural encounter takes place across borders, shaped by media industries, capital flows, and state policies.
The value of combining these two concepts lies in their complementary analytical power. Bhabha’s third space offers a ‘position’ understanding of cultural production. It tells us where hybrid meanings are generated—in the gaps between cultures. Robertson’s glocalization offers a ‘process’ understanding. It tells us how these meanings travel across different contexts. Together, they enable us to see the third space as a fluid field, where hybridity is continually generated through the glocalizing flows of culture, capital, and power.
Closely relevant to this article is Wang and Yeh’s research, which applies ‘hybridity’ and ‘glocalization’ to analysing Ang Lee’s 李安 martial art film Wohu canglong 臥虎藏龍 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) (2000). They find producers adopt Hollywood visual spectacle but introduce local inflections (e.g. Kungfu elements), creating a third space of cultural hybridity. Such hybridity not only fundamentally disrupts essentialist notions of ‘pure’ Chinese films, but also challenges the Western film industry’s narrow view on what is ‘good’ action cinema through expanding action styles. While Wang and Yeh’s study demonstrates the productive combination of ‘hybridity’ and ‘glocalization’ in analysing martial art films, how this combination works out in contemporary guoman remains under-investigated. This article will address this with the case of Afloat.
The tripartite negotiation between state, market, and animators is integral to glocalization and hybridity. They concretize what is local or global. State ideology represents a localizing flow as it promotes cultural purity. Market demands can be further separated. The domestic market, constituted by local audiences, represents another localizing flow. Global market demands pushing for cross-cultural accessibility represent a globalizing flow. The animator’s agency negotiates between these flows, making them converge or compromise, producing specific hybrid forms. However, as critics note, glocalization sometimes perpetuates existing hierarchies,Footnote 46 and we should be aware that animators’ agency may not be neutral but occurs in structures of power. This entails permanent criticism of the hybrid forms their agency creates.
Finally, hybridity and glocalization open onto a broader issue about contemporary Chineseness. Since hybrid cultural forms are produced in the collisions of local and global flows, the identity they claim to represent must be rethought. For this, Weiyu Zhang’s notion of Chineseness as identity work is useful. Zhang proposes that Chineseness be understood as a contested process where multiple versions of Chineseness coexist in the context of global migration, in regions such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Asian America, Australasia, Europe, Southeast Asia, etc. One Chinese diaspora’s self-definition overlaps yet collides with other Chinese diaspora’s self-definitions.Footnote 47 None should hold hierarchical privilege over others, yet power asymmetries persist.
This understanding of Chineseness is a necessary extension of the hybridity-glocalization framework. If the third space is where hybrid meanings are created, and glocalization is how they travel, then, Chineseness is what is at stake in these processes. It becomes a contested object being claimed and redefined. The tripartite negotiation between state, market, and animators in Afloat is, in this sense, also a negotiation over Chineseness itself. The film’s hybrid forms are illustrations of what it means to be ‘Chinese’ in a glocalized mediascape. By incorporating this dimension of Chineseness, we can not only ask: how does the tripartite negotiation produce hybrid aesthetics and narratives in Afloat? How does such hybridization entrench or destabilize existing West–East power asymmetry in popular cultural representation? We could also ask whose Chineseness the hybridity serves, and whose it silences.
Case analysis
This section analyses Afloat’s hybridity across three interconnected aspects: the techno-artistic, the narrative, and the structural. The three aspects show how the animation’s hybridity responds to the ongoing negotiation between state, market, and animators. It should be noted that this article’s understanding of the ‘market’ is primarily inferred from audiences’ cultural preferences and values as they manifest in the film’s textual features. Dimensions such as capital, distribution channels, and industrial policies are not included due to research method limitations.
Techno-artistic hybridity: Convergent negotiation
The techno-artistic aspect of Afloat represents a third space of hybridity where the three forces intersect. This section examines how animators negotiate with state expectations and market demands as two implicit forces, and what kind of hybridity that produces in the techno-artistic register.
Traditional aesthetics
Afloat employs numerous Chinese visual signifiers. For example, it expresses West Lake’s ethereal beauty in traditional ink-wash aesthetics. Scenes of West Lake are rendered with visual effects of soft ink gradient, a technique widely practised in classical Chinese landscape paintings. According to studies on Chinese painting in the Ming-Qing period, this technique lends itself to diffused effects for mist and drizzle.Footnote 48 The animation presents Xu and Bai’s first meeting on a drizzly day, using digital effects of soft ink gradient to represent distant hills dissolving into mist in order to create depth and tranquillity (05: 01).
The Broken Bridge, as Bai and Xu’s meeting point, is also central to the story. It is thus named because on snowy days, its profile, seen from a distance, often becomes partly invisible due to snow coverage, creating the illusion of being ‘broken’. The animation presents a full-scale reproduction of its real-life form, a long stone bridge with weathered balustrades, as shown in Figure 1. Meanwhile, due to the drizzly weather, it is surrounded with fog, symbolizing a both physical and spiritual meeting point. This mixes mundane travel with mythical crossings between human and spiritual worlds.
West Lake and the Broken Bridge in the rain.
The animation adopts bird’s-eye views to represent West Lake under clear skies, when its lotus fields transform into luminous pictures of light and shadow. Unlike the misty scene that softens forms, sunny days amplify the shifting tone of lotus leaves. Traditional colour-ink paintings prefer harmonious and natural colour combinations.Footnote 49 This is perfectly reflected in Figure 2 (24: 03), which is representative of an episode (24: 00–24: 08) describing West Lake on sunny days. The green tones of the lotus leaves and the blue-to-green gradient of the water are pure and harmonious. The green recalls the use of mineral pigments like malachite green in traditional colour-ink paintings, which are bright but not gaudy. Malachite green in traditional paintings symbolizes renewal and growth, and is often applied to mountains, forests, and foliage to express the eternal cycle of life.Footnote 50 In effect, it creates a fresh and tranquil ambience, aligning with ink-wash paintings’ aesthetic pursuit of a peaceful and harmonious mood.
West Lake’s lotus field on a sunny day.
Figure 2 Long description
This map of Tibet, based on Sir Charles Bell’s book, illustrates regional divisions and geographic features. It includes Tibetan-script labels identifying key regions and landmarks. The map outlines Tibet with internal divisions marked by lines. Geographic features such as mountains and rivers are sketched. The map lacks a legend, but boundaries and features are distinguished by line styles and shading. Major labeled regions include Ü-Tsang and Kham. The map is oriented with north at the top, focusing on traditional regional boundaries and significant geographic features.
In Figure 2, the arrangement of the boat and lotus leaves also reflects traditional ink-wash techniques. The former is on one side. The latter occupies the other, creating balance. The water area around the boat constitutes a strategic application of liubai 留白 (minimalism), which, in ink-wash paintings, implies distance or unspoken meaning.Footnote 51 In this picture, the minimalism mainly implies the peaceful atmosphere as analysed above. Read together, both pictures above vividly visualize Song-dynasty (960–1279) poet Su Shi’s (蘇軾, 1037–1101) famous poem celebrating the different yet equally stunning beauty of West Lake in different weather conditions: ‘Water’s light, glistening and rippling, only when sunny is truly lovely. Mountains’ colours, hazy and misty, even when rainy are also marvellous 水光瀲灩晴方好,山色空蒙雨亦奇’.Footnote 52 West Lake is famous for such a poetic atmosphere created by Hangzhou’s changeable weather.
Figures 1 and 2 are extracted from an initial sequence (00: 05: 02–00: 23: 46) depicting how Bai and Xu meet, get to know each other, and fall in love. During this sequence, a music piece entitled Duanqiao chushi 斷橋初識 (First Meeting at the Broken Bridge) is in play. The melody is soft and romantic, reflecting the blossoming connection between the two characters. It features Chinese traditional instruments, especially dizi 笛子 (Chinese flute) and guzheng 古箏 (Chinese zither), mimicking the soft patter of rain, the ripple of waves, and the trembling leaves in the breeze. There is a subtle sense of melancholy woven into the melody, suggesting the tragedy unfolding. For viewers, this sequence creates visual serenity and an immersive auditory experience that are mutually complementary. The two modalities jointly evoke centuries of Chinese people’s collective memory towards Jiangnan 江南mountain-and-water aesthetics.
The animation’s portrayal of Hangzhou’s streets during the Southern Song period (1127–1279) draws heavily upon Zhang Zeduan’s 張擇端 (1085–1145) Northern Song (960–1127) masterpiece Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖 (Along the River During the Qingming Festival). The painting captures Bianliang 汴梁 (modern Kaifeng 開封in Henan 河南 province), the bustling capital of the Northern Song dynasty, during the Qingming Festival, a day for tomb-sweeping and spring celebrations.
In the panoramic scene depicted in Figure 3, the street is filled with vendors, performers, and labourers engaging in all kinds of everyday activities. Shops with retractable cloth awnings, open-fronted workshops (e.g. iron-smiths, herbalists), and multi-storey taverns appear in the scroll’s crowded yet colourful streetscape.
Streetscape of Hangzhou.
Characters’ costumes align with the Song textile sociology. Bai and Xiaoqing wear ruqun 襦裙 (a cross-collar blouse plus high-waisted skirt in silk) (05: 56). Bai’s outfits are always in moon white, symbolizing purity and her white snake identity; Xiaoqing’s are turquoise, implying her green snake identity. Although Xu is casually dressed when working in his pharmacy, when not working, he is well-dressed as a scholar in zhishen 直身 (a straight-collar robe) made of muted grey and white silk (04: 27). This dress code speaks for Song literati’s relatively high social status thanks to the national policy of zhongwen qingwu 重文輕武 (valuing literary culture over military affairs).Footnote 53 However, says Liang Luo in analysing Xu’s traditional characterizations, this departs from traditional white snake narratives where Xu, as a herbalist or craftsman from a lower class, does not have any ‘scholarly attributes’.Footnote 54 The animation’s representation of these silk costumes captures the Song dynasty’s status as the golden age of kesi 緙絲 (carved silk), when this sophisticated tapestry technique reached unprecedentedly high levels of popularity.Footnote 55 In contrast, street vendors wear duanda 短打 (short jackets and trousers) in rough fabric that looks like flax (11: 55), which implies their lower social status.
In representing Hangzhou, therefore, the appropriation of the masterpiece painting’s dynamics and the compliance with Song textile development create a sense of systematic material authenticity. This realism is not a standard feature in traditional white snake narratives or modern adaptations. It is Light Chaser’s unique creative choice aimed at historical immersion. It places the myth in a historically tangible backdrop, evoking a ‘real’ Southern Song vibe for contemporary viewers familiar with Hangzhou and Chinese history.
In sum, through evoking classical poetry and paintings, Light Chaser projects a culturally authentic and globally recognizable Chinese identity in Afloat. This version of Chineseness, on the one hand, represents a state-endorsed version. It is made possible by a broader cultural environment where the state promotes traditional heritage as a source of national confidence. After all, part of the studio’s mission is ‘to inherit and demonstrate the confidence and power of Chinese culture in the modern era’, said Yu Zhou, co-founder of Light Chaser, in an interview.Footnote 56 On the other, Afloat’s global recognizability also hints at a version of Chineseness shaped by global expectations of what ‘Chinese’ aesthetics should look like. Jiakai Chen, co-director of Afloat, explained the team’s intentional adaptation to global audiences’ expectations at a roadshow in Shenyang, China. They spend over a year researching ink-wash painting to create a spectacle for international audiences who grew up with global 3D animation.Footnote 57 Afloat’s artistic achievement, therefore, should be read as a result of animators, under supportive policies, actively using their agency to translate traditional culture into a visual language that speaks simultaneously to state ideology and global market expectation.
Glocalizing spectacle
Evidence of Afloat’s hybridity is that its traditional heritage representations are realized through global 3D technologies, involving cloud computing, photorealistic CGI, and AI-assisted tools, as outlined in Afloat’s concept art book.Footnote 58 With the concerted use of three technologies, Light Chaser translates traditional ink-wash aesthetics into immersive 3D spectacle, making those hyper-realistic West Lake scenes, among others, possible.
All three technologies are globally developed. Fundamental innovations originate from Western academic and corporate systems: CGI from pioneers like Pixar, cloud from Amazon and Microsoft, AI from American research hubs.Footnote 59 Thus, despite its ‘Chinese’ appearance, Afloat is inherently hybrid, blending global tools with Chinese cultural and ideological agendas. In this sense, as Michael Keane put it when commenting on China’s creative industries, Chinese studios’ true expertise lies in the strategic application of global technologies to promote China’s civilizational narrative.Footnote 60
Such strategic application sometimes even includes technological refinement, showing Chinese animators’ creative agency. Although Western labs pioneer most technologies, Chinese animators sometimes push boundaries. For example, in Origin, Lighter Chaser adopts Disney’s Hyperion Renderer, a multi-scattering hair rendering framework. As a kind of minor ‘breakthrough’, Light Chaser developed the ‘Fuxi Rendering System 伏羲渲染系統’ based on Hyperion, increasing hair strand count from 2.5 to four million, while reducing per-frame rendering time from 48 hours to 15 minutes through GPU optimization.Footnote 61 One of the animators at Light Chaser reveals that with Fuxi’s support, they are able to race against time for summer release, turning ultra-detailed rendering capabilities into lifelike hair, scales, and silk textures that impress audiences.Footnote 62
This is not to laud the rise of Chinese high-tech animation. The point is that in contemporary animation production, the line between technological innovation and application becomes blurred in the reciprocal process of glocalization. Glocalization prioritizes technological refinement over origin, as Maureen Furniss put it when writing about Disney animation.Footnote 63 At least within the confines of intellectual property law, technological refinement allows a degree of autonomy in global cultural production. It empowers marginalized countries to serve local needs, challenging technological hegemony not necessarily imposed from the West. This technological refinement, arguably, embodies an animators’ version of Chineseness, defined by the creative agency to improve upon global tools. However, it must be acknowledged that for now such refinements are relatively few. Most Chinese animators remain ‘only users, not developers’ of core technologies, as critiqued by some guoman researchers.Footnote 64
Origin is the first phase of a hybridity continuum that develops across the trilogy. Its technological refinement represents a kind of hybridity at the technological level. This hybridity enables Light Chaser to align with the state’s agenda of projecting Chinese culture through cutting-edge tools, while responding to global market expectations for high-fidelity visuals that contemporary audiences are used to.
In the second phase of the continuum, Green Snake extends hybridity to the generic level. By relocating Xiaoqing into the modern Shura City, a post-punk dystopian world, the film offers a remarkable synthesis between Chinese mythology and Western science fiction.
Afloat, the last phase of the hybrid continuum, inherits previous achievement and applies it to broader domains of visual effects. Characters’ visual design in Afloat embraces realistic body proportions established in Disney animations. Some Chinese fans claim that Bai’s image imitates Elsa from Disney’s 2013 animation Frozen.Footnote 65 As Figure 4 demonstrates, both characters’ proportions lean towards a stylized realism, which David Surman claims is commonly used in CGI animation to emphasize female curves.Footnote 66 Both have delicate jawlines leading to small pointed chins. Both have large and almond-shaped eyes for nuanced emotional conveyance. Such design creates an idealized female body for visual appeal.
Screenshots from a fanvid relating how Bai’s image models on Disney’s Elsa, created by Yinhewan on Rednote 小紅書, a popular Chinese social media platform.
Strictly speaking, these ‘similarities’ are not solid evidence for the intertextual relationship between Bai and Elsa. But they do show that Afloat’s character design might have, consciously or not, employed a ‘universal’ gender aesthetic that homogenizes female beauty standards in mainstream CGI animation today. This trend is largely shaped by Western cinema traditions. It contrasts sharply with the abstract, reserved Chinese gender aesthetic, defined by those meishu dianying 美術電影 (fine art films) produced in the ‘golden era’ of the 1950s.Footnote 67 Bai’s Westernized body proportions point towards yet another version of Chineseness, which is increasingly mediated by prevailing beauty standards in global popular culture. It is widely liked by both international and domestic young audiences nowadays.
The film also incorporates Hollywood sci-fi conventions, which best exemplify the impact of Green Snake’s genre hybridity. For example, in the eventual fighting scene, the audiovisual effects of Fahai’s divine power include golden energy blasts, with impactful visible shockwaves (01: 56: 40–01: 56: 51). This visual effect is accompanied with low-frequency impact waves (01: 57: 01–01: 57: 09). The audiovisual combination recalls Star Wars’ energy weapons. The deep rumble expresses the density of the golden energy visually depicted. The sound makes the light feel destructive, aligning with what Whissel terms the ‘tangible energy’ convention in American sci-fi films.Footnote 68 Together, they effectively visualize the popular imagination of Fahai’s overwhelming power in the traditional white snake legend. These audiovisual similarities do not suggest that Afloat is directly influenced by Star Wars. Rather, it means that Afloat may have adopted those Hollywood sci-fi conventions that derive their origin from Star Wars.
Like the adoption of glocalized technologies, the visual design of female characters and the employment of global audiovisual norms serve implicit market goals as well. They serve to make the film instantly comprehensible to audiences accustomed to international animation. From this perspective, the techno-artistic hybridity of Afloat sheds crucial light on the tripartite negotiation. This hybridity is created by animators who translate state expectations into historically founded aesthetics, then adapt those aesthetics to conventions of global popular culture. Thus, the tripartite negotiation in the techno-artistic register operates such that the state and the market set implicit parameters; animators mediate between them, producing a hybridity that looks traditional yet global, culturally specific yet universally accessible. It is through animators’ agency that market forces converge with state discourse to shape how the story is told, that is, what technologies, gender aesthetics, and audiovisual elements should be used to repackage traditional narratives for global consumption.
Narrative hybridity: Conflicting negotiation
The operation of tripartite negotiation, however, shifts when we move from the techno-artistic to the narrative aspect, another hybrid third space. Here, the influence of market forces goes deeper to shape which characters and themes are deemed appealing to audiences, both global and domestic. This often comes at the cost of traditional cultural roots, revealing deep conflict not only between market demands and state discourse, but also between different market demands themselves. This is a more complex tripartite negotiation. It creates a narrative hybridity that is at once liberating and compromising, as shown below.
Traditional roots
Traditional white snake narratives mix various religious roots. The narrative is based on the Daoist trope of spirit cultivation. Animal spirits like Bai and Xiaoqing develop for centuries, absorbing yuanqi 元氣 (spiritual energy) to obtain human form, magic power, and immortality. Their desire for human interaction, driven by the belief that human life energy can accelerate cultivation,Footnote 69 sets the stage for subsequent narrative conflicts.
However, this desire violates Daoist cosmic order, which requires a strict hierarchical separation between human and spirit realms. As Dao de jing 道德經 (Book of the Way), the fundamental Daoist text, says, ‘humans model earth, earth models heaven, heaven models the Dao, the Dao models nature 人法地,地法天,天法道,道法自然’.Footnote 70 The Way, thus, operates through hierarchical categories within cosmos. Any categorical transgression, such as human-spirit union, will disrupt the hierarchical order, inviting chaos. It is this Daoist prohibition that transforms Bai’s desire for human interaction into ‘forbidden love’, which Luo reads as an ‘enduring theme’ in traditional white snake stories.Footnote 71 Buddhist concepts of karma and reincarnation are also incorporated to explain the origin of the transgressive bond. For instance, in Fang’s most influential chuanqi opera, the narrative says that Xu and Bai’s union is based on their ‘jiuyou suyuan 舊有宿緣’ (pre-existing karmic bond).Footnote 72
Confucian didactics, then, takes advantage of this ‘forbidden love’ motif to deliver moral messages. Traditional white snake narratives belong to the genre of quanjie wenxue 勸誡文學 (didactic literature), which uses cautionary tales to advocate for Confucian patriarchal values.Footnote 73 The white snake narrative featuring a demonic seductress is a perfect resource for this tradition to appropriate. In Ming novelist Feng’s retelling, for example, after Bai’s snake identity is debunked, Xu is initially terrified but soon coaxed by her sweet talk, spellbound by her beauty, and stays the night in her chamber.Footnote 74 What kind of man would have sex with a woman whom he knows is a snake? This carries a Confucian moral warning: female sexuality, when not disciplined by patriarchal authority (e.g. male exorcists like Fahai), threatens to subvert male reason, argues Luo when analysing the novel.Footnote 75 This cautionary genre, thus, discursively justifies patriarchal gender hierarchy by framing it as a protection against male destruction and subsequent social chaos.
In traditional narratives, the aim of characterization is primarily to convey religious or moral messages rather than explore character depth. Good characters are always good. Bad characters are always evil, leaving little room for growth. As literary critic C. T. Hsia sharply observes, early Chinese fiction prioritizes moral didacticism over psychological depth, shaping characters as static moral symbols rather than complex individuals.Footnote 76 Afloat inherits these traditional characters, yet, as the next section will show, significantly reworks them through glocalized narrative techniques.
Glocalizing characters and themes
All major characters undergo glocalized recharacterization in Afloat. In modern ACGN (anime, comics, games, and novels) fields, whether a character is fully developed is a question of more concern than intriguing plotlines.Footnote 77 Afloat’s recharacterization aligns with this trend through integrating traditional characters with Western tropes to increase their roundness. For example, in traditional tales, Xiaoqing’s sole narrative function is to facilitate Bai’s romance, fight enemies, and deliver messages. As per Luo’s critique when commenting on Feng’s novel mentioned earlier, her desires and fears remain largely unexplored, and her traditional persona does not go beyond the flattened role of protector-server.Footnote 78
Afloat hybridizes her traditional role with the Western sidekick trope. In the animation, Xiaoqing becomes Bai’s sarcastic sidekick, displaying modern cynicism and self-interest. She provides snarky commentary on those ‘coincidences’ Bai deliberately creates to meet Xu. She emphasizes the role of material resources and practical benefits in life. When Xu and Bai are starting their pharmacy business, she says ‘money makes the mare go. With money, the pharmacy will be up and running in no time 有錢能使鬼推磨。有了錢,這藥店不就一陣風似得開起來了’ (32: 01–32: 04). Her facial expressions shift rapidly. Audiences can read her anger, suspicion, curiosity, or glee directly on her face. Such features are rarely seen in traditional narratives. Although her traditional protector role remains—for example, when Bai is endangered, Xiaoqing runs to her aid (01: 47: 02–01: 47: 25)—this is overshadowed by her sidekick traits designed for universal amusing effects. Thus, Xiaoqing’s sidekick recharacterization, while adding to the roundness to her character, transforms her into a market-friendly supporting character.
Fahai’s recharacterization undergoes similar hybridization but is more complicated. The animation includes a scene where Xu begs Fahai to spare the two snakes as they have never harmed people. Fahai responds, ‘demons are demons. How can they exist without evil 妖總是妖,妖不害人,何以妖為?’ (01: 38: 12–01: 38: 24). This indifferent assertion reduces his ‘justice’ to fanatical dogma. The sense of righteousness fundamental to his traditional exorcist role is dropped. Moreover, Fahai’s role is now mixed with the Western villain trope. To realize his goal, he would easily give up honesty. Taking advantage of Xu’s trust, Fahai tricks him into bringing him home, setting a trap for the unprepared Bai’s arrival (01: 23: 22–01: 24: 00).
Also noteworthy is that the film introduces a crucial moment of internal conflict when Bai, almost destroyed by Fahai in the climax, is protected by the celestial fetus within her—she is pregnant with Xu’s son, who, in the previous life, was the Wenquxing 文曲星 (Star of Literature). Fahai’s profound confusion is highlighted in a close-up. He murmurs to himself, questioning how a snake could bear a former god, deeming it ‘against the order of the universe 有違天道’ (01: 59: 58). This reveals a profound crack in his ideological universe. It forces him to confront empirical evidence contradicting his dogmatic belief in inherent demonic evil: ‘demons are demons’. This moment of ideological crack, thus, adds tragic complexity. Fahai is recharacterized as someone informed by fanaticism while struggling with the disturbing probability that his fanatical belief might be fundamentally flawed. This internal struggle is reflected in a sense of depression in his look after Bai and Xiaoqing’s escape (02: 01: 48).
However, this tragic complexity is not entirely new. It is probably inspired by Hong Kong director Hark Tsui’s 徐克 1993 film Green Snake 青蛇, a subversive adaptation of Hong Kong novelist Lilian Lee’s 李碧華 1986 novel of the same title. The novel aligns with the villain trope, portraying Fahai as not only relentless but sly. He waits until Bai’s weakest moment—childbirth—to capture her.Footnote 79 Tsui’s film, for the first time, subverts this villainous character through exactly the same ideological crack. Thus, Fahai’s recharacterization in Afloat might have drawn on broad sources involving both Western villain tropes and Chinese popular intertexts. This reflects its textual hybridity. Given Tsui’s Green Snake is a globalized product itself, its intertextuality with Afloat also implies the latter’s assimilation into global genre codes for marketability.
The recharacterization of Xiaoqing and Fahai, read together, shows how global market demand pressures creators to fit traditional characters into familiar cinema tropes, at the expense of traditional roots. Xiaoqing’s devotion as a loyal protector-server is diluted by her sidekick traits; Fahai’s exorcist righteousness is reduced to fanaticism. Such sacrifice reflects the conflicting negotiation between market demands for popular accessibility and state narratives on cultural authenticity in narrative hybridization. Animators’ agency, here, lies in deciding which specific tradition to sacrifice in order to make the narrative travel. Xiaoqing and Fahai’s recharacterizations, thus, constitute a version of Chineseness that speaks to international distributors and audiences alike.
More importantly, as Bai’s recharacterization shows (see below), market forces are not monolithic. Alongside global market pressures, the demands of the domestic market sometimes make animators produce counter-narratives against state narratives to attract certain groups of domestic viewers. This reveals another form of conflicting negotiation between the state and market.
The animation downplays forbidden love and Confucian didactics for they are irrelevant to today’s socio-cultural milieu. Instead, it introduces a new theme based on Western philosophy and contemporary Chinese sociality through Bai’s recharacterization. In the animation, a most crucial question for Bai is whether it is worth giving up immortality to taste mortal love. Her character development seeks to answer this question.
The fundamental question is elicited in an opening sequence, setting the tone for the film. Bai tells Xiaoqing she is going to find Xu’s reincarnation to repay his debt. Yet this is strongly opposed by Xiaoqing, who questions if immortal power is worth trading for mortal love (02: 53). Bai remains silent but stays firm on the decision. I read her silent persistence here as suggesting that the question of ‘worth’ cannot be answered before real experience: you never know whether it is worth it if you have never been through it. In other words, the judgement of ‘worth’ should be retrospective, not prospective. So Bai determines to marry Xu to obtain first-hand knowledge.
Fahai’s intervention, nonetheless, implies that Bai’s approach to experiencing mortal love is completely wrong. Her union with Xu is based on a lie: she does not show her true self—the snake identity—to Xu, for fear of rejection. This fear implies a negation of her snake identity, which, in her subconsciousness, is unworthy of human love. According to Xi Liu’s just critique of Origin, this negation aligns with Bai’s desire for human interaction, both mirroring the anthropocentric worldview Light Chaser inherits from traditional narratives, where non-human beings occupy a lower rank in a human-centred hierarchy.Footnote 80 This fear is an obstacle to evaluation of ‘worth’, because she cannot weigh the ‘gain’ of love if she is constantly rejecting what she has sacrificed for it, that is, the immortal power associated with her snake identity. In this view, until Bai reveals her true self to Xu, any love she experiences is conditional.
Bai’s self-revelation thus becomes a prerequisite for valuing the ‘worth’ of love. Following this logic, the film introduces an unprecedented scene, where Fahai maintains that Xu will stop loving Bai once he sees what she truly is. Then he forces Bai to reveal herself before Xu. Under Fahai’s pressure, Bai shifts back to the giant serpent, stunning Xu. Disappointed, she turns to leave. At this critical moment, Xu recalls something and chases after her, crying out the following words:
May the red thread of fate bind us early. Together we grow old, white-haired and dearly. Though fleeting life may pass like dreams at play, and a hundred years dissolve like dew at day, this love shall endure till seas run dry and stones decay. Unending, everlasting, come what may.Footnote 81
赤繩早系,白首永偕。縱然浮生如夢,百年如露,此情也當海枯石爛,無窮無已。(01: 52: 15–01:52: 32)
This passage is a promise Xu made to Bai in their past life in Origin (2019). Hexuwen 何須問 (Why Trouble Yourself to Ask), the theme song of Origin, runs through this sequence, adding emotional depth. Both the promise and the music, functionally, link Afloat and Origin into a coherent narrative universe. Bai is moved and turns back. As Figure 5 shows, Xu touches on the serpent’s massive head, symbolizing he accepts Bai’s snake identity (01: 53: 39).
The moment Xu touches on the serpent’s head.
After Bai’s self-revelation, the fundamental question shifts from ‘Is love worth immortality?’ to ‘Can I, as my true self, find a love meaningful enough to make the sacrifice worthwhile?’ Bai cannot know the answer until she reveals herself and finds acceptance. Her self-revelation pushed by Fahai, thus, functions as a brutal exposure therapy, forcing her to confront her innate fear that her suppressed snake nature is unlovable. Xu’s acceptance is also crucial as it confirms Bai’s self-acceptance through dispelling her preconceived bias. With this self-acceptance, she is finally able to weigh love against sacrifice in a state of integrated wholeness as both human and snake.
Interestingly, Bai’s answer is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, which reflects her glocalized recharacterization. At the film’s end, echoing the opening scene, Xiaoqing poses the fundamental question again after they have been through everything. Here, Bai answers softly yet firmly, ‘Don’t worry about what’s worth it, just remember it 管什麼值不值得,記得就可以’ (02: 04: 02). I suggest this answer, in light of her self-acceptance, deeply resonates with Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of ‘eternal recurrence’.
In Burnham and Jesinghausen’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s concept, if time is infinite but the world in which we live contains a finite amount of matter and energy, then all combinations of events like joy, pain, sorrow, etc. will eventually recur.Footnote 82 In other words, our life will replay identically, down to every detail, in the endless time. This philosophy fundamentally rejects utilitarian thoughts like ‘Is it worth it?’ asked by Xiaoqing, because in Nietzsche’s discourse, the answer must be ‘yes’; if the answer is ‘no’, people succumb to nihilism: anyway, it is human nature that most people are dissatisfied with their status quo. If they know their ‘unworthy’ (e.g. painful, disappointing, or miserable) experiences would repeat infinitely, they must be driven to despair. Thus, eternal recurrence demands absolute affirmation of one’s fate, embracing even suffering as necessary and beautiful, worthy of repetition.Footnote 83
Bai’s answer transcends her initial existential dilemma (e.g. incapability of self-acceptance) by embodying eternal recurrence. Her dismissal of utilitarian judgement (e.g. ‘Don’t worry about what’s worth it’) eradicates the necessity to measure sacrifice against gain. This rejection is only possible after she has confronted her dual nature as immortal serpent and mortal lover. The trauma of self-exposure ceases to be a source of shame. Instead, through self-acceptance, it becomes raw material for affirmation. When Bai asks Xiaoqing to ‘remember’, she is actually practising eternal recurrence’s ‘amor fati’,Footnote 84 that is, to value every shard of existence, involving the ecstasy of love, the terror of rejection, the grief of loss, as crucial to her wholeness of being. With this, she answers eternal recurrence’s ultimate challenge—‘Do you crave the same life over again’Footnote 85—with a circumlocutory ‘yes’, hidden in the subtext of ‘remember’. From the moment she utters this word, Bai’s journey transforms from the demonic pursuit of linear immortality to a human existential recurrence that celebrates the depth, rather than the length, of living. The animation’s subheading fusheng 浮生 (floating life) originally suggests life’s transience, and thus unworthiness, in Daoist contexts.Footnote 86 In the animation it is used in the opposite way to hint at Bai’s Nietzschean transformation that acknowledges life’s transience. The pain of sacrificing immortality is no longer a loss weighed against love. Along with joy, hope, love, sorrow, happiness, fear, etc., it constitutes a quintessential part of the ‘floating life’ she desires to repeat.
The Nietzschean theme embodied in Bai’s recharacterization, I suggest, mirrors Generation Z China’s existential anxiety. Burdened by work pressure and future uncertainty, urban and digitally saturated youth resist grand linear narratives like career success and social progress. These grand narratives demand participation in the pervasive neijuan 內卷 (involution) culture, an exhausting cycle of fierce competition characterized by sacrificing work-life balance through practising the high-pressure ‘996’ work mode (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week).Footnote 87 This path is implicitly framed as an essential contribution to national technological advancement and economic growth in state media like the People’s Daily.Footnote 88
Rather, Generation Zers prefer micro affirmations of presence, reflected in trendy internet catchphrases like tangping 躺平 (lie flat) and huozai dangxia 活在當下 (live in the moment), in opposition to ‘involution’. Bai’s ‘remember’ validates their lived reality. Her abandonment of centuries-long cultivation of immortality symbolizes Gen Zers’ rejection of ‘involutional’ self-sacrifice for long-term social prosperity. Bai’s embrace of transient joy, despite tragedy, provides solace to a generation facing broken dreams, to whom affirming the present heals. This Nietzschean theme is therefore shaped by domestic market forces, especially Gen Zers’ will to live lives for personal fulfilment rather than social expectations. Bai’s recharacterization, in this sense, represents a version of Chineseness shaped by domestic youth’s anti-involution sentiments and their search for alternative ways of living. This Nietzschean reading, in some sense, concurs with what director Jiakai Li explains regarding the revival of this classic narrative. They hope to remind audiences that sincere emotional attachment is a precious gift amid life’s chaos, which transcends time and speaks to the universal desire for belonging in contemporary society.Footnote 89
Bai’s recharacterization, ultimately, shows a different picture of tripartite negotiation than that seen in Xiaoqing and Fahai. In the latter, pressed by global market expectations, animators’ agency lies mainly in deciding what to sacrifice. Although Bai’s case also comes with cultural sacrifice—the Nietzschean recharacterization inevitably overshadows ‘forbidden love’—domestic market expectation enables a more positive agency. By constructing a counter-narrative responsive to contemporary Chinese youth’s struggles, this agency subtly challenges state collectivist discourse that prioritizes long-term social progress over individuals’ well-being. This shows market forces are innately fractured. At least within Afloat, global market forces foster cultural sacrifice, while domestic market forces sometimes can foster resistance. Afloat’s narrative thus illustrates how different market logics not only conflict with state narratives, but also with each other. Driven by different market demands, animators produce a narrative hybridity that is both liberating (e.g. Bai’s Nietzschean recharacterization) and compromising (e.g. cultural sacrifice in Fahai and Xiaoqing’s recharacterizations).
Critique of hybridity: Structural consequences of market-dominant negotiation
This section looks into the structural aspect of Afloat. This aspect is not an independent third space of hybridity, but a structural projection of the two preceding third spaces. The cultural sacrifice in narrative hybridization, as exposed above, implies that market forces, whether global or domestic, prevail in their conflicting negotiation with state discourse that emphasizes cultural faithfulness. Such market dominance, when unchecked, can reproduce hegemonic discourse on structural levels. This section exposes two such structural consequences: systematic gender oppression and self-Orientalism.
Systematic gender oppression
In line with ACGN customs, Xu, the male protagonist, is also recharacterized to add roundness, which, nevertheless, accidentally perpetuates patriarchal gender hierarchy. In Fang’s opera, which codifies most characters, Xu is portrayed as gentle, but fatally passive. He oscillates between love for Bai and suspicion of her identity.Footnote 90 His flawed character mainly serves to contrast with Bai’s female independence.
To reflect Xu’s innate complexity and growth, the animation recharacterizes him by adding to his traditional personality positive traits like courage, determination, and self-sacrifice. In the climactic battle, Fahai gains the upper hand, threatening to destroy Bai for good. Standing helpless nearby, Xu remembers a dangerous flute he obtained earlier. Playing the flute can release magic power to stop Fahai, but it consumes the player’s own life, symbolizing self-sacrifice. After intense psychological struggle, Xu overcomes his passivity. His decision to play the flute shows determination and courage, implying his growth. This heroic act transforms Xu into an icon of abovementioned virtues, exhibiting transformative growth at critical points to protect love.
While Xu’s development from passive/fearful to active/sacrificial adds roundness, such recharacterization paradoxically repeats the problematic male saviour trope in Western cinema traditions. This trope describes a narrative pattern where a male character assumes the central role of rescuing female characters, thereby reinforcing patriarchal power even within progressive stories.Footnote 91 In the animation, the climax of the plotline shifts entirely to Xu’s growth, culminating in his heroic redemption of Bai. Bai becomes merely a recipient of male salvation. Therefore, Xu’s roundness comes at the cost of Bai’s female agency. Such recharacterization risks exchanging one form of female marginalization (e.g. passive victim) for another (e.g. object of male salvation).
Xu’s ‘male saviour’ recharacterization should be read along with some other observations, which, together, show that animation’s production is systematically under what Laura Mulvey conceptualizes as the ‘male gaze’ that embodies male audiences’ sexual fantasy.Footnote 92 First, Bai’s perfect body proportion is characterized by an ideal waist-to-hip ratio, which is associated with fertility in evolutionary psychology, argues Devendra Singh in decoding female media representations.Footnote 93 This visual design emphasizes her reproductive potential, perpetuating the patriarchal practice of female objectification.
Second, in Afloat, the decisive fight between Bai and Fahai reflects dualistic patriarchal gender oppression. During the battle, Bai first transforms into a huge serpent who possesses immense power to antagonize Fahai. However, upon defeat, she collapses into a human woman, badly wounded. This is a great departure from both Fang and Feng’s traditional versions, where Bai always fights as a woman, and after being vanquished, is reduced to a snake.Footnote 94 I suggest this departure exposes two intersecting hierarchies, both victimizing the female gender. First, the overt patriarchal gender hierarchy in which Bai’s human woman identity is portrayed as weak, vulnerable, and, as analysed earlier, sexually objectified. Lying broken on the ground after being dominated by Fahai who embodies patriarchal authority, she is waiting for delivery by Xu, the male saviour. This aligns with Liu’s analysis of Origin that Bai’s power remains ‘contingent on her monstrous form’,Footnote 95 so when the monstrous form is shattered, she becomes powerless. Second, there is a covert hierarchy of magic power, where Fahai, who represents male authority, and Xu in possession of the flute, who represents male power, are at the top. Bai’s monstrous form, temporarily powerful yet constantly ‘otherized’ due to the anthropocentric setting of the universe, is in the middle. Her human womanhood is at the bottom. When Fahai’s magic reduces her to a vulnerable woman, these two hierarchies converge. The human female identity becomes the site where both hierarchies enforce subjugation, creating dualistic oppression upon Bai, who is now a female both disempowered by male authority and waiting for male power’s redemption. Thus, while reworking traditional narratives for contemporary audiences, this scene betrays Light Chaser’s failure to transcend the patriarchal human world embodied in them.
The adoption of the male saviour trope, the sexualized male gaze, and the dualistic hierarchies in the battle create systematic patriarchal oppression upon women in Afloat. Obviously, the saviour trope and the male gaze gratify global market demands. They serve as purposeful concessions to the perceived expectations of the global male audience. The dual hierarchies, in my view, also silently serve market demands. They adopt global animation tropes demanding spectacular creatures (e.g. a huge serpent) alongside romantic melodrama demanding an imperilled woman as heroine. As Gina Marchetti rightly notes, transnational co-productions often reshape folklore into familiar genre hybrids to maximize cross-cultural appeal, amplifying gendered tropes embedded within those target genres.Footnote 96 From this perspective, the systematic gender oppression in Afloat appears less as a deliberate ideological stance than an incidental byproduct of commercial strategies. It can be read as a version of Chineseness characterized by patriarchal values, which spreads globally through familiar cinema tropes, appealing to international audiences accustomed to such narratives.
Self-Orientalism
The animation is symptomatic of an anachronistic pastiche of Chinese historical elements. The most salient example of historical anachronism is the inclusion of Xi xiang ji 西廂記 (Romance of the Western Chamber). This was a Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) play completed in the fourteenth century, post-dating the film’s Southern Song backdrop by over a century. The animation presents a scene depicting Xu, Bai, and Xiaoqing watching this play. This makes the play a superficial Chinese cultural signifier divorced from historical context. It recalls Disney’s Orientalism exposed by Chenglong Zhou when analysing Mulan (2020). The film contains linguistic mixture (e.g. parallel use of standard pinyin and Cantonese spellings in subtitles), geographical contradictions (e.g. illustrating Northern China histories with Southern China geographies), and temporal flattening (e.g. juxtaposing anachronistic elements). These features collectively construct a monolithic, timeless ‘China’ for Western consumption.Footnote 97 Here, the play-watching scene, in like fashion, creates ‘temporal flattening’, which entrenches Western civilizational privilege by simplifying Chinese history, rendering it devoid of internal chronology, diversity, or dynamics.
Such practice is framed by scholars as ‘self-Orientalism’, which suggests some Asian writers, filmmakers, or intellectuals unconsciously serve the colonial intentions of the West, ‘imparting its geopolitical awareness of the Orient as a static and consumable Other’.Footnote 98 Therefore, by reproducing Western Orientalist discourse critiqued by post-colonial writers, Light Chaser, a Chinese filmmaker, inadvertently perpetuates the imbalance in West–East power dynamics. The self-Orientalism represents a version of Chineseness that serves Western fantasies of an exotic, ahistorical East.
Both systematic gender oppression and self-Orientalism, I suggest, are the effect of a specific configuration of tripartite negotiation, where market logic prevails over state discourse and animators’ critical agency, leading to structural imbalance in the negotiation. This imbalance reveals how a market-dominant dynamic within the tripartite negotiation naturalizes structural inequalities in terms of gender, race, and civilization that progressive films seek to transcend. Its implications will be discussed below.
Discussions
Tripartite negotiation
The case study shows that the tripartite negotiation is neither monolithic nor stable. The same forces interact differently across three aspects.
In the techno-artistic aspect, negotiation takes a largely convergent form. Yet this convergence is not a given. It is animators’ mediation that translates state expectations into historically grounded aesthetics and adapts them to global popular culture norms. Convergent negotiation comes with little cultural sacrifice. Ink-wash aesthetics rendered through global technologies successfully keep cultural specificity. Hollywood audiovisual conventions, when applied to Fahai’s power, successfully visualize his traditional character. Animators’ agency, therefore, brings state and market into an orchestrated convergence, producing a hybridity that is both traditional and global.
The narrative aspect, by contrast, reveals a conflicting negotiation, which manifests in two nuanced ways. First, market demands, whether global or domestic, conflict with state discourse on cultural purity, creating significant cultural sacrifice. The recharacterizations of Xiaoqing and Fahai, under global market pressures, rework traditional roles into Western tropes at the cost of Chinese religious and cultural roots. Bai’s Nietzschean recharacterization, shaped by domestic market expectations, compromises the original ‘forbidden love’ motif. These cases produce a narrative hybridity that serves commercial rather than state demands. Second, different market demands conflict with each other. Global market demands push for universal accessibility; domestic market demands, Generation Z resonance. Animators must decide which audience to privilege in specific parts of textual construction.
What distinguishes narrative hybridity from techno-artistic hybridity, then, is the presence of conflict and the cultural sacrifice it entails. In the techno-artistic register, animators can reconcile state discourse with market demands with little cultural loss. In the narrative register, reconciliation gives way to balancing. Fulfilling market demands requires departing from state expectations of cultural authenticity. Meanwhile, every choice that appeals to one market may sacrifice another. Animators’ agency lies in deciding what, and whom, to sacrifice. We should note that when animators sacrifice state collectivism to gratify domestic youth’s anti-involutional sentiments, as Bai’s recharacterization has shown, their agency can take on a positively critical dimension. This agency is no longer about cultural sacrifice, but about what to gain (e.g. media resistance) through the sacrifice. This opens up new room for critique within the market’s own logic, fundamentally challenging the simplistic notion in existing guoman studies that market forces are merely profit-driven.Footnote 99 Animators’ agency in the narrative aspect, thus, is not unified. Sometimes it is reduced to cultural sacrifice. Sometimes it possesses liberating potential depending on which market it serves, and what politics it undertakes, despite cultural sacrifice.
The structural aspect exposes the consequence of market dominance in tripartite negotiation. The systematic gender oppression and self-Orientalism indicate that market dominance sometimes replicates gender, racial, or civilizational hierarchies. This is the effect of market demands for spectacle and accessibility overriding state civilizational discourse and animators’ critical agency. Here, animators’ agency is the most restricted. It reinforces patriarchal power and Western cultural dominance through an androcentric and self-Orientalizing visual language, when it uncritically follows commercial market demand. Therefore, future studies should interrogate agency not just by strategic hybridization, but by its resistance to hegemony or oppression. The crucial question is how animators’ creative use of hybridity produces a third space that reinforces or challenges existing power asymmetries within the tripartite tension.
The case of Afloat illustrates that no single force in the triad holds absolute power. The state enables and oppresses. The market liberates and constrains. Animators navigate state–market tension with innovation, compliance, or complicity. This tripartite negotiation moves beyond any simplistic binaries, showing the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, nature of contemporary guoman production.
Practical and theoretical implications
The structural consequences in Afloat, especially self-Orientalism, have practical implications for global film production. As shown above, Afloat’s self-Orientalism is symptomatic of how market-driven negotiation and production internalize Hollywood’s Orientalist discourse. A warning trend suggested in this self-Orientalist practice is that Orientalism nowadays is not only Western but is increasingly transforming into non-Western market expectations. Since Chinese animators have demonstrated self-Orientalism, we have reason to believe that some Chinese viewers, or more broadly, viewers from the Global South, might also have internalized some Orientalist representations in global popular culture as part of their movie-going expectations today.
The lesson from Afloat, thus, is twofold. First, for global producers, avoiding Orientalist traps demands rigorous research to put narratives within reliable cultural contexts, rather than cull exotic symbols for global appeal. This advice is initially only for Western producers. Yet today, it is increasingly worthy of vigilance among non-Western producers. Second, for viewers, both Western and non-Western, it may be too much to ask them to develop a critical sense of cultural consumption. But it is suggested that they, drawing on the accessibility of social media, support works prioritizing cultural diversity and authenticity. This might pressure global producers to increase their critical agency to counter-balance market dominance in tripartite negotiation.
Animators’ constrained agency in the structural register also invites a rethinking of how ‘hybridity’ and ‘third space’ are theorized in post-colonial and globalization studies. Bhabha’s ‘third space’ is often celebrated by scholars as a liberatory site where hierarchies are subverted.Footnote 100 Yet the hybridity produced in the structural aspect of Afloat complicates this by showing that hybridity can also reinforce hegemony. ‘Hybridity’ and ‘third space’, thus, are not necessarily democratic. Their effects depend on who is hybridizing and towards what ends.
This, first, calls for a decolonized categorization of the producer of hybridity. It demands that in future research we foreground feminist, minority, and grassroots animators to avoid reducing hybridity to patriarchal, white, and elite narratives. Second, self-Orientalism also requires us to stay alert to the hegemonic or oppressive potential in the subaltern-produced hybridity that is supposed to resist dominance or celebrate freedom. Future research on guoman should attend to these theoretical complexities. Scholars must interrogate what configurations of tripartite negotiation produce what kinds of hybridity. Whose interests do different hybridities serve? And under what conditions can guoman producers upend the hierarchies within the hybridity they generate? These questions point to a more nuanced understanding of guoman production in an age of glocalized media.
Contemporary Chineseness
The tripartite tension in Afloat, I suggest, illuminates the contested nature of contemporary Chineseness within the context of global migration. A single film, however richly layered, cannot capture the full complexity of global Chinese identity formation. So, what this part is attempting is only to use Afloat as a prism to refract how contemporary Chineseness operates as what Weiyu Zhang terms ‘identity work’,Footnote 101 a dynamic process where multiple versions of Chineseness coexist and collide.
Can a hybrid guoman text like Afloat still be called a Chinese ‘national animation’? This question, which some researchers diligently ask,Footnote 102 rests on an essentialist notion that there exists an authentic version of Chineseness against which all others are measured. In today’s world, where diversity and inclusion prevail, such a framing represents an unhelpful way to look at the hybrid reality of guoman production.
Zhang’s ‘identity work’ offers a useful alternative. To use her framing, the tripartite negotiation in Afloat generates a contested field where plural versions of Chineseness exist in parallel, creating a hybridity of Chineseness that is familiar yet strange. These versions include the state’s version which promotes cultural purity, the animator’s version defined by technological refinement, the global market version shaped by international audience expectations, the domestic market version addressing Gen Zers’ anti-involution anxieties, the patriarchal version circulated through problematic cinema tropes, and the self-Orientalist version flattened into exotic spectacle. These versions overlap yet differentiate. Each asserts its own belief of what it means to be Chinese. Magnified, they become the more familiar versions of Chineseness disseminating in mainstream media: communist China’s soft power projection, traditional China’s time-honoured conventions, contemporary Chinese youth’s ‘lying-flat’ life choice, overseas Chinatown experiences, etc. Guoman, in this sense, becomes a microcosm of negotiating Chineseness, where multiple versions operate through friction, not harmony, exactly like geopolitical forces.
As global geopolitical tensions keep amplifying contests over Chinese identities—from Hong Kong’s protest art to United States–China tech decoupling—Chineseness now exists in multiple forms. Following Chenglong Zhou’s argument regarding the complex entanglement of Chinese diasporas due to global migration, no Chinese diaspora should be judged in terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’, and none should hold hierarchical privilege over others.Footnote 103 Nonetheless, hierarchies of identities are maintained. The Asian American experience, for example, is sometimes criticized as a biased misrepresentation of mainland Chineseness, as suggested in Frank Chin’s critique of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976).Footnote 104 Yet such ‘misrepresentations’ may carry their own truth, according to Sheng-Mei Ma’s reconceptualization of Asian American identity: shaped by a Chinatown upbringing, Chinese Americans cannot easily escape the stereotypical but must internalize it as bicultural legacy.Footnote 105 Even in Afloat itself, which promotes standard linguistic expression while suppressing local Hangzhou dialect, the very hegemony hierarchizing global Chinese diasporas is replicated. This reminds us that identity construction, whether on screen or in real-life identity politics, demands identity work’s relational thinking without orthodox tyranny to recognize the diversity of global Chinese communities.
A final suggestion to refine Zhang’s ‘identity work’: in line with identity work’s promotion of diversity, Zhang suggests we embrace not only Chinese communities’ self-representations but also non-Chinese outsiders’ identification of Chineseness.Footnote 106 This is insightful but requires further distinction. Not all outsider perceptions are worth embracing. We must distinguish between stereotypical outsider perceptions like Orientalism, and context-based ones like Western audiences’ appreciation of ink-wash aesthetics as a unique form of Chineseness. The former are colonial tools perpetuating racial hierarchy. The latter, originating from a position of openness, can enrich the ‘relationality’ of Chinese identity work. Even certain ‘insider’ perceptions, like self-Orientalism, are oppressive and should be excluded too. This distinction contributes to a more nuanced theorization of ‘identity work’.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
