Chinese Animation
Plus: news.
Welcome! Glad you could join us for a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s our agenda today:
1) Animating Chinese arts and crafts.
2) The week’s newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – Another tradition
It happened. In under a month, Nezha 2 has earned more money than any animated film by Disney — in fact, more than any animated film ever. It’s over $1.8 billion now, and it may yet become a top-five movie, up there with Titanic.
Those returns come mainly from China, where Nezha 2 was created. The film has tapped into something there: it’s a fad, a societal event. It’s nonstop headline news and widely discussed online. To many, it’s proof that China-made animation has arrived.
Which is the end of a saga, so to speak. In China, during much of the ‘10s and ‘20s, there’s been buzz in the media and online about “the rise of guoman” — that is, the rise of Chinese animation.1 Some argued that it was ongoing. Others doubted that it was possible. Back in 2022, we wrote about this endlessly-repeated phrase:
It represents the dream of modern Chinese animation — the desire for an art form that competes toe-to-toe with the best of Pixar and Studio Ghibli, both in artistry and popularity. The rise of guoman is the rise of China’s answer to the top animation in the world, made with a Chinese spirit.
For a lot of people, Nezha 2 has realized this dream. It’s bigger than Pixar, and yet it’s built on Chinese stories, characters and aesthetics (including local styles of cartooning). The film borrows plenty from Hollywood and anime — but it looks and feels China-made.
As it happens, that’s an old fixation for China’s animators. It dates at least to the ‘50s, when the medium first bloomed at Shanghai Animation Film Studio. The team was familiar with foreign animators’ films — work drawn from vaudeville, or American print cartoons, or Russian fairy tales. In turn, the Shanghai team adapted local art and folk crafts into animation indigenous to China.
Here’s Duan Xiaoxuan, a founder of Chinese animation in the ‘40s and ‘50s, on the artists’ thinking:
... the films we mostly watched and studied were Japanese animated films, Soviet animated films and American animated films. We watched a lot and became very serious students of foreign animation. For example, we studied the Soviet film Little Gray Neck (1948) for how they did all the movements, going over them one by one. We learned everything we could from them, and they all influenced us to a certain extent. But how were we supposed to make something actually Chinese? After watching so many foreign animations, we wondered how to develop our own style.2
In those days, Chinese animation was often called meishu dianying — literally, “art films.” That mattered for reasons beyond semantics. “As the name implies, an art film is both art and film,” explained a screenwriter at the studio.3 The Shanghai team began to treat its projects as film adaptations of arts and crafts, guided (in the storytelling, staging, movement and more) by the idiosyncrasies of each form.
The team pulled from the performing arts, too. The Conceited General (1956) is usually cited as the start of the “first golden age” of Chinese animation, and it isn’t Disney-like in its look or animation: Peking opera was its point of reference.
“We had a clear idea to draw useful things from the traditional arts — local opera, drama and Peking opera,” said the film’s director, Te Wei, who oversaw the Shanghai studio. “From the models to the movements, we followed these operas. Most importantly, we invited opera teachers to the film studio to show us how to move.”4
It’s a different feel than a Mickey cartoon. The characters are firmer, with very deliberate poses — and they tend to move with stop-start timing. That suited the form.
A few years after The Conceited General, the Shanghai team invented ink-wash animation. By way of a complex, grueling and secret process, it brought the look of traditional ink-wash painting to the screen. And the artists believed that any film with that look should go all the way: it shouldn’t just be a superficial aesthetic. The story had to match, as did the pace, as did the motion.
Here’s director Tang Cheng, who had a big hand in the ink-wash films, on what that meant:
If the Disney style of highly exaggerated and elastic movements is used to draw ink-wash animation, it will surely feel incongruous, because it is a completely different form of expression from the lyrical style of ink-wash painting. Therefore, ink-wash animation is not simply a matter of adopting new technologies, but also requires new methods in all aspects of artistic treatment in order to achieve a poetic, picturesque, harmonious and unified effect.5
For the Shanghai team, even specific genres of ink-wash painting called for specific solutions. Tang Cheng described their first effort, Little Tadpoles Search for Mama (1960), as an instance of “bird-and-flower” art in the vein of painter Qi Baishi. But she wrote that the 1963 Buffalo Boy and His Flute was “landscape painting plus figure painting.” Recreating that on film was a far more complicated task.
The Shanghai Animation people were thorough about these things. Many of their films (Buffalo Boy among them) involved field research — traveling to other, sometimes remote cities and towns to study landscapes, or cultures, or crafts.
Reportedly, the team came up with “paper-folding animation” partly for that reason. Director Yu Zheguang was in the city of Xi’an, watching puppet performances and shadow plays — an ancient type of theater in China, which is magical to see. The experience, it seems, helped to spark the idea of a film based on Chinese paper-folding, a folk craft comparable to origami.6
The artists began to put out films in that style during the ‘60s, and they’re fascinating. It’s stop motion made out of paper, in three dimensions.
Take Yu Zheguang’s Three Wolves or Little Duckling Yaya (both 1980). The two are gorgeous, and yet wholly different from ink-wash films. They’re light and playful and pushed. The three paper wolves, for example, sometimes unfold and flatten out to the ground, only to pop back into shape.
Again, the artists were converting craft into film. That even gave them a target demographic: young children, viewed as the main audience for traditional paper-folding. In the words of director Fang Runnan:
As a paper-folding film, based on its characteristic principles of form, the direction should be simple, rustic and full of appeal to children; the rhythm should be brisk and lively; the style should be exaggerated and broad; and the music should be fresh and bright.7
Shadow plays were tied even more directly to another idea by Shanghai Animation: “paper-cutting films.” These transformed the ancient craft of Chinese paper cutting into stop-motion stories. “The birth of paper-cutting film was influenced by shadow-puppet plays,” wrote artist Pu Yong of the studio. “That character integrated the influence of shadow-puppet[s] and the artistic effects of paper cutting.”8
The first of these was Pigsy Eats Watermelon (1958), and it begins by revealing its own process. Human hands enter the screen and cut Pigsy out of a piece of paper. Then he springs to life under the camera.
Pigsy and the other characters are flat — and their motion is stylized, fully unrealistic. One Shanghai Animation artist noted that shadow plays rely on “strong exaggeration and large movements,” doing away with “trivial” actions in favor of archetypes. So it is here.9
Over the years, paper-cutting films got more and more nuanced. An early gem was The Golden Conch (1963), held in high regard by the team. Later, The Story of Mr. Nanguo (1981) delivered a master class in Shanghai Animation’s style of paper movement.
This blending of different traditions went deep at Shanghai Animation. Mr. Nanguo is one example. Alongside the shadow plays and paper cutting, the film’s design and staging (and more) were based on the pictorial bricks of the Han Dynasty. That was an often-agonizing process of research, planning and revision.
Or take Uproar in Heaven, a feature made in the first half of the ‘60s. Its story comes from Journey to the West, and much of its styling from Peking opera. But there was more: “folk prints” of Sun Wukong, “Chinese New Year paintings” of Nezha, the Yongle Palace murals, monkey kung fu.10 As animator Pu Jiaxiang remembered:
For [the character] Erlang Shen, I drew from the movements of the male martial role (wusheng) in Peking opera. The wusheng moves with an imposing stance, his legs wide apart. On the whole, this is what characterizes Erlang Shen’s movements.
Meanwhile, Lao Mountain Taoist (1981) pairs puppets with Chinese landscape paintings and Kunqu opera. And the sweeping Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (1979) combines the novel Investiture of the Gods with architecture and clothing from the Song and Tang dynasties, Peking opera percussion and ancient bianzhong chimes.11
That last film was especially key for the team. It was made just after the end of the Cultural Revolution, during which the government had crushed Chinese artists — including Shanghai Animation, whose traditional stories and forms were deemed counter-revolutionary. From the mid-1960s until the latter half of the ‘70s, the studio had to abandon its kind of animation. Then Nezha went back to it.
Zhang Ding, a major painter persecuted during the ‘60s and ‘70s, designed this Nezha feature. Per the film’s directors:
He absorbed useful material from Chinese door god paintings and murals, and adopted a decorative style with simple lines, paired with colors commonly used in folk paintings, such as blue, green, red, white and black. It gave people a familiar and fresh feeling, with both traditional elements and refined polish.
Nezha Conquers the Dragon King helped to kick off the “second golden age” of Chinese animation, which lasted until outsourcing and economic policy reshaped the industry in the late ‘80s. Across that period, Shanghai Animation went all-in on its theories — its indigenous type of filmmaking.
“I loved Disney’s films, especially Fantasia … But we are Chinese: we cannot just follow Disney,” said one of Nezha’s directors, A Da, in the ‘80s. “We must make films in our own style, with Chinese stories, Chinese paintings, Chinese drawings and Chinese music.”12
That first Nezha feature remains a classic for many in China. The modern-day Nezha movie series owes a lot to it, as writers have noted. And, although the old film borrows more from traditional aesthetics than Nezha 2 does, neither is just a copy of animation hailing from America, Japan or elsewhere. They’re their own thing.
It’s too early to predict Nezha 2’s place in history. Yet the film could mark another turning point for Chinese animation — another “golden age.” Nezha 2 has found success not despite its embrace of local legends and aesthetics, but because of it. Director Jiaozi has been rewarded for that decision, much as Hayao Miyazaki was when he based Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away on Japanese stories and history.
Which should encourage animators in China, and in every part of the world. Other stories are being told — and a lot of people are excited to see them.
2 – Newsbits
On the subject of Nezha 2, Tony Bancroft (co-director of Mulan) praised it on Chinese television. “I was blown away by what I saw,” he said.
In America, animator Ted Wiggin has dropped his eye-grabbing, very original MIMT online. It’s out via Edge of Frame, a newsletter on experimental animation.
Iranian artists Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani, behind the Oscar nominee In the Shadow of the Cypress, are unable to travel to America to campaign for their film.
Don’t miss the Indian short Desi Oon by Studio Eeksaurus, animated with wool from Deccani sheep. The team explains, “[W]e spent a year developing this film, walking with the flocks and the shepherds, immersing ourselves in their world.”
Netflix plans to invest $1 billion into Mexican productions — time will tell whether animation sees some of it.
In Britain, Magic Light Pictures landed a hit with its Christmas special Tiddler — the studio’s biggest success, apparently, since The Gruffalo.
One other Nezha 2 story from China: director Jiaozi reportedly isn’t giving further interviews about the film, and has shifted his focus to Nezha 3. (Also, Nezha 2’s theatrical run has been extended to the end of March.)
Lastly, we looked into the roots of Vietnamese animation.
Until next time!
The word “guoman” is popular but controversial in China. It’s a contraction of guochan dongman, or “domestic animation and comics.” When read literally, though, the shortened version means just “Chinese comics” — despite its common use to describe animation.
See Duan Xiaoxuan’s essay in the book Chinese Animation and Socialism.
See the essay by Yu Youchen in Studies on Animated Filmmaking (美术电影创作研究), and this write-up by Daisy Yan Du.
As quoted in the book Comics Art in China.
From Tang Cheng’s essay about ink-wash animation in Studies on Animated Filmmaking, a valuable source.
Details about Yu’s invention of paper-folding animation come from this archived page, which appears to be an online version of Shanghai Film Chronicle (上海電影志).
From Fang Runnan’s essay in Studies on Animated Filmmaking.
See the Pu Yong section of Chinese Animation and Socialism.
This is Cheng Zhongyue, writing in Studies on Animated Filmmaking. The details about Mr. Nanguo come from an interview about that film in the same book.
As explained in The History of Chinese Animation I and Pu Jiaxiang’s section of Chinese Animation and Socialism.
See the Los Angeles Times (November 27, 1984).
Great read! I hope this inspires other regions and countries to be bold and tell their stories.
A really fascinating post with an amazing amount of research! Hats off to you guys & thanks so much for mentioning Ted's film and EoF too!