The Roots of Vietnamese Animation

Artists in wartime.

A still from The Talking Blackbird (1967)

Welcome! In this issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re going back to mid-century Vietnam — to the beginnings of an animation scene.

It was mid-1959. A tiny team of artists, maybe six strong, was at work in a building in Hanoi — on 72 Hoang Hoa Tham Street. The mission was to make Vietnam’s first cartoon.¹

They drew under flickering lights in a room of maybe 100 square feet. Their desks weren’t desks: they used repurposed glass windows. Cels, the plastic sheets that powered most cartoons back then, weren’t available. The replacement was ultra-thin onionskin paper — intended for typewriters. A treatment with oil made it just transparent enough.²

Young art students comprised around half of this team. The animation knowhow came from just two people: director Le Minh Hien and artist Truong Qua. They doubled as leaders and teachers — for everything. They explained editing, shooting and the art of movement. Their old 8 mm camera, a German-made Pentacon AK8, captured the final drawings on film.³

After a year, Vietnam’s first homegrown animation was done: What the Fox Deserves (1960). It was a sort of graduation project for the team. Truong Qua wrote, “It’s hard to express the joy and emotion of we brothers and sisters when we saw on screen, for the first time, the film we’d made with our own hands.”

The theme of What the Fox Deserves was war propaganda. Workers, each with their own skill, band together to beat a sly enemy. The Vietnam War was on, and North Vietnam’s animators were part of it. “Culture and arts are also a front. You are soldiers on that front,” Ho Chi Minh had told artists in the ‘50s. Many took his words to heart.⁴

That first film is roughly executed — as the team itself admitted. There are technical problems, and the story isn’t nuanced. But it has a special energy: the kind imparted by young artists excited and struggling to do something they shouldn’t be able to do.

Stills from What the Fox Deserves (1960) — on YouTube with subtitles