Pathbreaking edited volumes quite often get their start at a three- to four-day university-based conference involving fifteen to twenty primary participants. This collection is different. It began with the inaugural conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies. Owing to the pandemic, the conference was held entirely on Zoom and lasted for almost six weeks, from March 1 to May 12, 2021. There were nearly seventy speakers and 553 registered participants from thirty-two countries and regions. Thanks to the remarkable and no-doubt exhausting work of the three co-editors, Daisy Yan Du (Lead Editor), John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang, the final product is a 440-page book with fifteen challenging chapters on a wide range of subjects related to Chinese animation. The lineup of contributors is quite diverse when it comes to gender, places of origin, sites of education, and current work locations. For example, the contributors are currently employed in eight different global regions: the United Kingdom, Vietnam, the People’s Republic of China, Canada, the United States, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore.
Another unusual aspect of this book is the title. As a rule, the first part of a book title is the most important and revealing. In this case, the first part is Chinese Animation, but the editors and authors go to great lengths to show that there really is no such thing as “Chinese” animation. Indeed, in their introduction, the editors insist that “the Chineseness of Chinese animation is a porous and transmutable concept that needs to be stretched, squeezed, bent, bounced, and perhaps someday even tossed aside in favor of new analytical lexicons” (13). The contributors also question the usefulness of the term “animation” because it might wrongly suggest a one-dimensional, clear cut artistic form such as a Disneyesque cartoon. “Animation is nothing,” they assert, “if not heterogeneous” (13).
It is Multiplicities in Motion, the second part of the book title, that captures what this important volume is all about. With reference to “Chineseness,” the contributors resist the notion that it has a single, stereotypic form in spatial and cultural terms. Instead, they stress that there are many spatial forms of “China” and many different types of “Chinese” social, cultural, economic, and political expression. Moreover, these forms and concepts have changed over time in various ways, though not in any unilinear or sequential manner. So, what does Multiplicities in Motion mean? As the editors explain, the contributors to this volume “do not tell one story, but instead adopt diverse methods to reflect on the artists, institutions, traditions, ideologies, technologies, and media that have over time formed, and continue to form, the multiplicities of Chinese animation” (1–2).
Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion is divided into five thematic sections. Section One is called “Junctures” and contains four chapters that provide background on the complex history of animation in the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China from the 1920s to the 1980s. Two examples are Panpan Yang’s chapter on animation in Chinese silent-era cinema, which includes case studies of Li Zeyuan’s The Pearl Necklace (1926) and Yang Xiaozhong’s Kan the Great Knight-Errant (1928), and Linda C. Zhang’s chapter on early socialist-era puppet animation for children, which details Jin Xi’s The Dream of Xiaomei (1954) and its preoccupation with shaping model citizens for the new society.
Section Two, entitled “Gender,” has three chapters that deal with representations of women in Chinese animations as well as the contributions and struggles of female animation artists. One example is Tim Shao-Hung Teng’s fascinating discussion of Wang Shau Di’s Grandma and Her Ghosts (1998), which focuses on an elderly and influential Taiwanese female psychic. Teng’s investigation is wonderfully enhanced by the fact that his own grandmother was a psychic. Another example is Daisy Yan Du’s exploration of the considerable work done by female animation artists in the PRC from the late 1940s to the 1980s, women whose contributions were typically and intentionally downplayed at the time.
Section Three, a splendid collection of three chapters, is called “Identities.” Jasmie Yu-Hsing Chen offers a nicely crafted discussion of Chi Li-Wei’s The Little Sun (2010), a popular animation that spells out how and why migrants from China during the martial law period in Taiwan (1949–1987) eventually embraced Taiwan as their homeland. Another example is Jessica K. Chan’s lively analysis of Wu Sau Yee’s Old Master Q animation trilogy (1981–1983), eye-opening works that capture identities in flux in late colonial-era Hong Kong.
Section Four is called “Digitality” and contains two chapters that deal with the interface of traditional film realism and new age digital animation. One example is Wendy Larson’s excellent discussion of Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004), the first use of animation by a filmmaker known for his realist criticism of the PRC’s post-socialist era. In the “realist” portions of the film, Jia continues to shed light on the disturbing plight of migrant workers, but in his initial use of digital animation he rejects the tone of utter hopelessness and grants everyday people a welcome measure of agency.
One of the many surprises contained in this volume is Section Five, entitled “Practices,” which consists of three chapters crafted by animation artists and technology experts themselves. Two examples are Isabel Galwey’s detailed discussion of the experimental digital turns taken in the Hong Kong media world prior to and just after the end of British colonial rule in 1997, and the chapter written jointly by Hannes Rall and Emma Harper that details diasporic Chineseness in Singaporean animation, an illuminating inquiry that makes many insightful references to Singapore’s cultural connectivity to Malaysia and Indonesia.
In addition to the editors’ introduction and the fifteen multifaceted, cutting-edge chapters, Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion also contains three extremely useful overview essays by noted senior scholars. David Der-wei Wang applauds the contributions of the authors, especially their focus on the multiple directions of media culture. Wang rightfully argues that the purpose of the volume is to get researchers to wonder what the future of “Chinese animation” might involve. The chapters, he affirms, “open Chinese animation to as many disciplines and topics as possible so as to demonstrate its amorphous potential” (xi). This book also includes an essay by my former distinguished colleague, the late Yingjin Zhang, that points to the various ways in which Chinese animation has constantly reinvented itself. He urges scholars to keep “tracking parallel and parallax histories and trajectories, envisioning different futures, and revisiting forgotten pasts so as to better understand the present” (30). Yingjin died in June 2022. His contribution to this volume was the final publication of his magnificent career. Finally, there is a fascinating piece by Alexander Zahlten, a leading specialist on Japanese media, titled “Lessons from Japanese Animation Studies.” Not surprisingly, he leaves those who have read the first 369 pages of this book a clear and predictable message: “Japanese” animation studies “as a field does not really exist, or maybe instead it shouldn’t.” What about “animation”? Animation as a “stable, recognizable media form” is “rapidly collapsing.” These two caveats “apply to Chinese animation studies as well, if in slightly different ways,” he asserts (p. 370).
In keeping with its title, this challenging and insightful book, creatively edited by Du, Crespi and Wang, urges readers to focus on dynamic multiplicities that have been in motion for a long time and to abandon fruitless searches for a dominant form of Chineseness and a single form of animation.
