Daisy Yan Du's Animated Encounters presents a transnational history of animation in China during the late Republican era, the Seventeen Years period, and the Cultural Revolution, as well as a brief overview of the state of the animation industry during post-socialism in the text's epilogue. Drawing on both field studies conducted around the globe and expert archival research—and framed by a theoretical model that takes into account cross-cultural flow in terms of politics, economics, and aesthetics—the text sheds light on filmmaking in China from a fresh perspective.

Animated Encounters is organized into an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction explains how the supposedly closed decades of filmmaking in China were quite open to international exchanges that transformed both the industry within China and other nations’ industries abroad. In contrast to studies that focus on the discourse of a national style, this text attempts to “move beyond the reified national style approach that centers on roots and static images to unveil the multidirectional routes, encounters, and movements disavowed in the master narrative of national-nationalist cinema” (p. 23). Remarkably, in contrast to studies that praise the fifth generation of the 1980s as a high point of Chinese cinema production, Du states that the socialist/totalitarian era “coincided with a golden age of Chinese animation, during which many masterpieces were produced” (p. 4).

The first chapter discusses how the first animated feature made in China, Princess Iron Fan (1941), helped set into motion the production of early animated works in Japan and directly shaped the career of manga and anime figurehead Tezuka Osamu. The cross-border flows of culture in the postwar years impacted both China and Japan in interesting ways—a theme that extends into chapter 2 of the text, which looks at the influence of transnational exchanges on animated filmmaking from 1945 to 1953.

Chapter 3 focuses on the ways the so-called national style of Chinese animation—the primary representative being ink-painting animation in the early 1960s—was altered by the role of international relationships and cultural connections. For example, Du considers the effects of Soviet filmmaking, the nationalist reaction to the breaking of Sino-Soviet political relations in the late 1950s, and responses to animation from the West.

A summary of the fourth chapter does not do it justice, for the fascinating story must be read to be fully appreciated; namely, the chapter describes the significance of the absence of animals, and their replacement by revolutionary heroes, in animated works during the Cultural Revolution. The substantiated conclusions and the powerful implications of the disappearance of animals from the silver screen—which detours into conversations about fantasy, revolutionary realism, ethnicity, and feminism—show that the “monolithic national identity under the solid leadership of Mao” was consistently disrupted in significant ways (p. 180).

As presented, Animated Encounters achieves its goal of situating China's animation industry in its rightful place alongside other animated filmmaking traditions in world cinema history. Each section deftly summarizes both the historical context and the general state of filmmaking in China. And as expected from superior academic work, the narratives here are traced in a methodical, detail-oriented, and even graceful manner. Of course, it is impossible to at once record the importance of a particular story and at the same time consider all the possible permutations and global ramifications of the same event. Thus, Du observes that when Princess Iron Fan was screened in Tokyo during wartime, it “made the Japanese people—and especially animators—awed and envious” (p. 50); if the text truly disavowed singular national responses, we would learn about all of the possible responses to the film, from adoration to condescension, and so on. But at the end of the day, even texts that consider multiple points of view are limited by the written word, which, perhaps unlike the image, tends to be capable of only telling one story at a time.

Clearly, this book is geared toward an academic rather than mainstream audience when cartoons are described as “a plasmatic world full of humor and fantasy” (p. 85) that project “the aesthetics of cuteness” (p. 98). Someday scholarly books may reach a wider audience, but that day has not yet arrived, so it is entirely understandable that straightforward, accessible writing is at times sacrificed to the professional expectations of the academy. With that said, all who research the important animated films covered in this text, such as The Herd Boy's Flute (1963) and Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland (1970), will overlook the jargon in order to appreciate the lucid ideas and insights, as will students and scholars interested in cinema, animation, art, pop culture, and visual culture produced in China during the years covered. This indispensable book, the first in the University of Hawai‘i Press's Asia Pop! series, deserves to be housed worldwide in all academic libraries.