Daisy Du's Animated Encounters is a timely and important examination of animation from China and Japan. Reading Chinese animation through transnational flows of production and images, especially Japanese, Du has produced an indispensable addition to studies of animation from the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Animated Encounters is divided into two parts. The first part, Chapters 1 and 2, approach early Chinese animation through readings of the Wan Brothers’ Princess Iron Fan (1941), Japanese reception of this film, and the colonial outpost of Manchuria for the Man'ei/Manying/Northeast film studio, locus of the first communist controlled animation studio, which would evolve into the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS). Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the SAFS during the revolutionary period, from the early 1960s until the late 1970s. As Du notes, “Chinese animation has played a vital and indispensable role in the world history of animation, but a role that has been either trivialized or forgotten” (1). Du shines a light on Chinese animation, not only as a singular national style, but as a moment in transnational flows of studios and styles.
Du works through assumptions and expectations around national style that open up the concept to historical and theoretical scrutiny. In Chinese, the term used for animation from the 1940s was meishu pian, literally a “fine arts film”: “The new name implies that Chinese animated film was indigenized as it increasingly became associated with traditional fine arts rather than international cinema” (2). Du emphasizes the collectivity of the early Shanghai animators: “As the only animation studio at the time, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio adhered to the principles of collective enterprise and followed a meticulous division of labor despite a seemingly unified style … Although the individual animator was given credit as director of a particular film, he or she acknowledged the collective effort of the studio's entire staff” (7–8).
Chapter 1 recounts the fate of that treasured first feature-length Chinese animation, Princess Iron Fan. Du reads the Princess as a gendered figure: “an allegory of the indeterminate status of the film” (45). According to Du, “[a] liminal figure associated with the liminal and personal, Princess Iron Fan belongs to the sphere of domesticity” (44). Du charts the reception of the film in Japan, showing the importance of Princess Iron Fan to Japanese animation production during World War II and after. Chapter 2 focuses on the origins of the Man'ei Studio in colonial Manchuria and the animator Mochinaga Tadahito. Through readings of Chinese and Japanese accounts of the early years of this studio, Du brings out continuities in its different iterations. Her discussion of Mochinaga shows the way this important animator contributed to early animation in the PRC. Mochinaga is a key link in the development of early animation in the PRC, and Du shows how his work in Japan's puppet animation industry would become significant for outsourcing in 1960s American stop-motion television production.
With Chapter 3, Du turns to a reading of ink-brush animation from the 1960s and 70s. Du reads Little Tadpoles Look for Mama (aka Where is Mama? 1960) and The Herd Boy's Flute (aka The Oxherd's Flute 1963) through allusions to traditional painting. She notes the well-known story about the mayor of Shanghai Chen Yi's encouragement of ink-brush painting (135). In chapter 4, Du introduces the concept of the “disappearance” of animals in animation and in other media during the Cultural Revolution. A gorgeous still from Heroic Sisters of the Grassland graces Du's book cover and she provides a background to the 1964 film to evidence the links between the representations of animals and minorities in animation at this time: “[a]nimality both joins and separates villains and ethnic minorities, creating a common yet non-unified Other for the communist state to lord over” (170).
Du's work on the Man'ei/Manying transition is a major contribution to animation studies. By returning to this pre-PRC period film studio, Du explicitly links the early history of animation in the PRC to Man'ei. With her work on Man'ei and the animator Mochinaga, Du establishes the links between the Northeastern Film Studio and the animation unit that would become the SAFS.
Du emphasizes the international over the national, an important strategy given the dominance of national style discourse in discussion of Chinese animation. At the same time, Du's language shows the difficulty of escaping national style discourse: “As the only animation studio at the time, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio adhered to the principles of collective enterprise and followed a meticulous division of labor despite a seemingly unified style” (7). Thus Du succinctly articulates national style as a simultaneous claim to collectivity and a unified style. What is animation filmmaking if not a collective endeavor?
Positioning Princess Iron Fan in originary relation to wartime Japanese animation, Du reads a letter written by the Wan brothers to the film critic Shimizu Akira in 1942 showing the way the reception of the Wan Brothers's feature in Japan would spur wartime animation production there, including the well-known Momotaro series. Tze-Yue G. Hu had already made this connection, translating the entire Wan brothers letter.Footnote 1 However, Du adds fresh insights to this significant moment in animation history.
Du's work on Mochinaga, known in Chinese as Fang Ming, establishes the importance of this animator in the transition from the Japanese-run Man'ei to the Chinese Communist controlled Northeastern Film Studio, and to what would later become the SAFS. Du's discussion reveals the way national style discourse is difficult to avoid. If Mochinaga/Fang Ming's work was distinguished by “Chineseness” and “Japanese features” (99–102), is it also possible to refer to the stylistic differences of particular animators by their name or studio (to read stylistic differences as Mochinaga/Fang Ming-like as much as Japanese or Chinese)?
Du's discussion of classic ink-wash animation at the SAFS represents a significant addition to this key historical moment of Chinese animation referred to as the “golden age.” Regarding one of the oft-repeated narratives around the film Why is the Crow Black? (1955), Du is on the mark that this story is “probably fabricated” (121). The official People's Daily report was clear, The Magic Brush (1955) shared first prize for best Children's film (Category B, children 8–12) with the Soviet film Seryy Razboynik/Light of the Arctic.Footnote 2
Du does a commendable job of suggesting sources for the ink-wash films (although I am still skeptical that a line from a poem by Zha Shenxing (1650–1727) is an appropriate source for the tadpoles in Where is Mama? (132). National style implies the legitimization of the filmic medium through reference to cultural production with claims of cultural authenticity, whether visual, literary, or theatrical. Elsewhere I note that The Oxherd's Flute may indeed reference the “Ten Oxherding Pictures.” But now that I think about it, I may have also been taken in by the implicit claims of SAFS meishu to read high art allusions in place of the camera eye. The use of bokeh is one example of a photographic technique that grounds this film as film as much as animation.Footnote 3 In addition, the SAFS film dampens allusions to Buddhism (and Daoism) through recourse to a realist mode that frames the young oxherd's separation and search as a dream that inevitably returns to a waking reality—the ox never really leaves.
Du's research is very thorough in terms of sources. But questions remain that go beyond source material. Chen Yi's 1960 endorsement of ink-brush animation is a case in point (135). Since the early ink-brush animation experiments were already completed, was Chen endorsing a fait accompli? What was the role of a leader like Chen in publicizing work already in production? Wu Weihua notes that these shorts were produced under “specific political motivations” that enabled them to incur higher budgets.Footnote 4 In the context of animated narrative films, ink-brush films might be suited to exhibition spaces (e.g. the China Pavilion; Du 114–15) as much as theatrical ones.
National style emerged in the 1950s as a discourse that anchored live-action filmmaking in Chinese literary, performance, and visual arts. According to Judith Zeitlin, from 1953 until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, 115 opera films were produced in the PRC.Footnote 5 Presumably this doesn't include the rich opera film tradition in Hong Kong. Even SAFS president, Te Wei, whose name is attached to the first ink-brush films, explicitly invoked theater in the suspiciously obvious character designs of two characters in The Conceited General (aka The Arrogant General, 1955).
Watching the plethora of styles produced by the studio over three decades or more, the SAFS shows more diversity than Disney. And this diversity comes with additional caveats. The diversity of SAFS production is consistently linked to privileged styles and forms during different periods of the studio heyday from the late 1950s until the 1980s. However, within the apparent collectivism of the SAFS, individual animator styles are also discernable and are similar to the division of labor used by Mochinaga for his work in American television (108–9).
The role of what Eisenstein called “plasmatics” (a term just as relevant to Princess Iron Fan) is important to Du's discussion of early animation at Man'ei (75–86). Plasmatics is often linked to visual style, but Eisenstein also employed this term to discuss the illogical plots of early Disney shorts. Disney would leave plasmatics for a type of realism.Footnote 6Uproar in Heaven (1961; 1964) retains traces of this early tendency. The adaptation of animation techniques to represent realism probably limited “plasmatic” aspects so beloved by Eisenstein in early American animation.
Plasmatics privileges one type of early visual stylization that stopped being dominant in American animation by the 1940s. I have noted elsewhere the use of squash and stretch in the early SAFS Ink-brush Animated Film (1960).Footnote 7 The figures in Where is Mama? seem a tad formalized compared to those first experiments. The Oxherd's Flute plays with objects that appear and disappear but always imply well-defined concrete shapes. Like their digital descendants, figures are first mapped as well-defined objects and then hidden.Footnote 8
Du reads the Heroic Sisters of the Grassland film in the context of the disappearance of animals during the Cultural Revolution (155–80). Du is referring to talking animals, since animals never truly disappear from animation in the PRC. This hypothesis deserves much more attention. Du focuses on a small number of films in the 1970s, but even The Arrogant General (1955) used animals “realistically,” outside of funny animal tropes. The climax to The Little Trumpeter (1973), an animated children's version of Red Detachment of Women, has a chase on horseback that employs repetitive limited animation. Realism obviously held sway here, but Du shows there is room for allegorizing animals even if they didn't talk.
Du's book is a tour-de-force of animation studies. Her meticulously researched transnational emphasis is welcome for an animation industry that could be, at times, parochial and inward turning. But I wonder what role did the city of Shanghai play in the studio's success? Did this post-colonial space benefit from its previous position as a nexus of cultural production? The jury may be out that “[t]he totalitarian state unexpectedly brought about the golden age of Chinese animation” (7). Perhaps the decline of the SAFS should be mapped on a trajectory of animation production beginning with its inception in 1957 and its apex in the early 1960s.
Daisy Du's book is a richly detailed and theoretically nuanced addition to the growing research on Chinese and transnational animation. Animated Encounters evidences the way Chinese animation was, from its early beginnings, intersecting with world animations.
