Released one hundred years after the Wan brothers’ early experiments in Shanghai, Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion marks a key turn in establishing Chinese animation as its own scholarly field. As the first broad English-language collection on the subject, it fills a major gap in both animation studies and Chinese media studies.
The editors employ Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of “plasmaticness” – animation’s ability to reject fixed forms – as both a description of their subject and a structuring metaphor. This theoretical flexibility enables them to resist conventional organizational schemas in favour of thematic nodes that capture animation’s “multiple motions.” The late Yingjin Zhang’s keynote essay offers essential background by applying media archaeology, recommending that researchers trace Chinese animation along multiple lines of descent and read its past in parallel and parallax rather than as a single, inevitable story.
Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s strategic essentialism, the editors acknowledge that “Chinese animation” risks smoothing out local differences while persistently unpacking that smoothness throughout. This productive tension – between staking a place for Chinese animation in global study and refusing fixed definitions – becomes one of the volume’s major intellectual contributions.
The opening section, “Junctures,” demonstrates that animation cannot be separated from other media. Panpan Yang’s study of stop-motion in silent Chinese films reveals how animated techniques appear in movies usually labelled live action, particularly in An Empty Dream (1922) and The Pearl Necklace (1926). Her claim that scholars should read these sequences through photographic theory rather than as its foil unsettles Western accounts that cast animation as photography’s overlooked twin. Jinying Li connects animation and martial-arts films through shared visual and auditory tricks – mickey-mousing, liquid physics and dizzying upward motions – that transcend Bergson’s notion of false movement. Linda Zhang’s examination of socialist puppet animation shows how toys doubled as entertainment and miniature templates for socialist citizenship, with films like The Dream of Xiaomei (1954) visualizing creative labour and collective obligation. Shasha Liu documents the 1980s shift from fine-arts emphasis toward cinematic techniques, stemming from changing market pressures and foreign models.
The “Gender” section offers revealing examples of how animation has shaped debates about gender and women’s artistic voices. Tim Shao-Hung Teng’s reading of Grandma and Her Ghosts (1998) uses anthropologist Nurit Bird-David’s relational epistemology to show how the film imagines social life extending beyond the nuclear family to include nonhuman kin. By weaving in stories about his shamaness grandmother, Teng pairs animation with an animist outlook that functions as both local practice and living media theory. Daisy Yan Du’s chapter “Suspended authorship” performs important historical recovery by spotlighting women animators whose contributions have been bundled or erased. Her concept gives scholars a way to see how socialist production systems opened some doors while locking others. The fact that Chen Bo’er, socialist China’s first animation director, introduced female voice-over and anticipated the National Style contests usual narratives about Chinese animation’s key authors. Paola Voci’s study of contemporary women animators introduces the label “Chinese-accented” for artists who refuse rigid Sinocentric structures yet move freely between them, using handmade digital animation to claim creative control and corporeal presence.
The “Identities” section investigates how animation shapes ideas about belonging and cross-cultural exchange. Shannon Brownlee’s “What’s in a line?” shows that ink-painting animation (shuimo donghua) both upholds and slips past traditional East–West divides. Her reading of diffusion effects on celluloid as distinct from brush-and-ink work adds technological wonder that unsettles claims of cultural authenticity. Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen explores how The Little Sun (2010) turns abstract stories of Chinese immigrants in Taiwan into site-specific recollections, using Tuan Yi-Fu’s geographical concepts to show how period detail links immigrant identity to Taiwanese locations rather than distant mainland memories. Jessica K. Chan analyses Hong Kong’s first animated feature trilogy (1981–1983) as response to political anxieties during Sino-British negotiations, demonstrating how animation’s plasmaticness offered imaginative freedom amid uncertainty about Hong Kong’s future.
The “Digitality” section surveys how new tools have reshaped animation’s look and labour. Wendy Larson’s reading of animated passages in Jia Zhangke’s The World contends these sequences reveal workers’ agency and inner lives rather than simply overlaying capitalist critique. Yiman Wang’s analysis of Cats and Peachtopia (2018) triangulates spectatorial “real feel,” radical sociopolitical potential, and materialist critiques of digital technology, revealing how algorithmic rendering paradoxically creates vulnerability in non-referential digital bodies while exposing technology’s “cute face” with an “ugly history.”
The final section on “Practices” examines contemporary production environments. Jake Junjie Zhang offers an insider’s view of VR animation in China since 2016, showing how material conditions directly inform storytelling choices. Isabel Galwey traces Hong Kong’s digital turn, while Hannes Rall and Emma Harper’s VR retelling of Singapore’s founding myth illustrates how immersive media can blend cultural traditions to allow complex identities to emerge.
The collection’s principal virtue is its blend of varied methods and advanced theoretical framing, moving between media archaeology, feminist reading and practice-oriented inquiry. By arranging chapters thematically rather than chronologically or geographically, the editors open surprising links across eras and locales.
Some constraints deserve mention. The book dwells heavily on Shanghai Animation Film Studio films – understandable given their significance – but this emphasis limits the promised pluralism. Broader treatment of Taiwan and Hong Kong’s animation scenes would better round out the transnational picture. The editors note territories still to be mapped: animated documentaries, experimental work, sound studies, and animation from ethnic minorities.
Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion succeeds admirably in its ambitious goals. By refusing to treat Chinese animation as merely a subcategory of either Chinese cinema or global animation studies, the editors have created essential reading for scholars across multiple fields. The volume’s theoretical innovations – particularly its use of plasmaticness as an analytical framework and commitment to intermedial analysis – offer models for animation studies beyond the Chinese context. Grounded in the early digital era, the book blends a century-long retrospective with a clear map for future scholarship, embracing the contradictions that keep Chinese animation fresh and scholarly inquiry exciting.
