Animation in China

History, Aesthetics, Media

Sean Macdonald

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317382157
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoria: Film e video

By the turn of the 21st century, animation production has grown to thousands of hours a year in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Despite this, and unlike American blockbuster productions and the diverse genres of Japanese anime, much animation from the PRC remains relatively unknown.

This book is an historical and theoretical study of animation in the PRC. Although the Wan Brothers produced the first feature length animated film in 1941, the industry as we know it today truly began in the 1950s at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS), which remained the sole animation studio until the 1980s. Considering animation in China as a convergence of the institutions of education, fine arts, literature, popular culture, and film, the book takes comparative approaches that link SAFS animation to contemporary cultural production including American and Japanese animation, Pop Art, and mass media theory. Through readings of classic films such as Princess Iron Fan, Uproar in Heaven, Princess Peacock, and Nezha Conquers the Dragon King, this study represents a revisionist history of animation in the PRC as a form of "postmodernism with Chinese characteristics."

As a theoretical exploration of animation in the People's Republic of China, this book will appeal greatly to students and scholars of animation, film studies, Chinese studies, cultural studies, political and cultural theory.

1
It all started with a monkey

The history of animation in China begins with the Wan Brothers – Wan Laiming (1900–1997), Wan Guchan (1900–1995), Wan Chaochen (1906–1992), and Wan Dihuan (dates unknown) – four brothers from Nanjing who grew up in Shanghai. The Wan Brothers join two other well-known sibling animation teams, the Disney Brothers, Walt (1901–1966) and Roy (1893–1971), and the Fleischer Brothers, Max (1883–1972) and Dave (1894–1979), as early animation producers. Three of the Wans – Wan Liaming, Wan Guchan, and Wan Chaochen – were instrumental links between early animation and animation produced at the SAFS. All three brothers would be instrumental in productions at the studio. Wan Chaochen was involved in puppet animation, and Wan Guchan was one of the key developers of jianzhi pian, cutout animation. But the most well-known figure of animation in China is Wan Laiming. Disney claimed that his studio began with a mouse, and in some ways Chinese animation begins with a monkey, Wan Laiming’s Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, that perennial character from the sixteenth-century novel Xi Youji, known in English as Journey to the West. The Wans produced the first feature-length Chinese animation, Tieshan gongzhu (Princess Iron Fan) in 1941, based on an episode from this novel, and Wan Laiming would produce Danao tiangong (Uproar in Heaven) in two parts in 1961 and 1964. Based on another well-known episode from Journey to the West, Uproar would not be seen by the general public in its entirety until the late 1970s in China and abroad. This chapter’s title is a paraphrase of the famous statement by Walt Disney, “I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse” (Disney 2001: 41). In a similar manner, in China, the Monkey King was for a long time the main cartoon figure standing for animation. Wan’s Sun Wukong, the original character modeled on the design by the important cartoonist Zhang Guangyu (1900–1965), remains the logo for the SAFS that appears on merchandise related to the studio, including the DVDs themselves. The most appropriate way to begin a discussion of the history of animation in China is with these two figures, Wan Laiming and Sun Wukong.

Wan’s oral autobiography, Wo yu Sun Wukong (Me and Sun Wukong), cannot be taken at face value as a historical document. Nevertheless, Wan was of roughly the same generation as the first modern leaders of New China such as Mao Zedong (1893–1976), Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), and Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), that generation born at the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) who lived through the Republican period (1912–1948, but which continued in Taiwan) and witnessed the founding of the PRC in 1949. Framed as the reminiscences of an animation producer, Wan Laiming’s autobiography is the story of the emergence of animation in China and the PRC. Wan links film, art, and animation in one historic narrative of modern China. Wan’s autobiography is charted as a teleological story that links animation to modern Chinese history, while doubling as a history of media in China. His reminiscences are presented as a series of memories of media, all teleological precursors to the animation he produced at the SAFS, especially his magnum opus, Uproar in Heaven.

In Wan’s autobiography, the Monkey King Sun Wukong is a trope for animation. According to Wan, their father was a failed scholar who became a silk merchant. The Wan brothers were born in Nanjing and lived in four different places before they moved to Shanghai. In one scene Wan describes the Wan Brothers and the neighbors’ children: “We brothers consisted of so many active little boys, with the addition of the neighbors’ children we practically made up a class, and of course I was the class monitor. Under my supervision, this bunch of ‘monkeys’ climbed up and down, chattered, making such an uproar neither the family nor our neighbors could have any peace.” Wan as class monitor/director. The operative words here are haodong, active or animated, and nao, an uproar, as in Uproar in Heaven. Wan repeatedly notes that his interest in movement began as a young child: “Ever since I was young I was interested in movement, I always enjoyed watching things that move, always enjoyed playing with small animals, catching butterflies and other creatures was something I especially enjoyed … ” (Wan 1986: 6 my translations). Wan manages to use the root word dong for movement or animation three times in one sentence (haodong, dong de dongxi, xiao dongwu); the narrative never strays far from the trope of animation.

Wan’s story is the gradual development of media culminating in the production of animation and finally Uproar in Heaven. Wan’s descriptions of his childhood in the late Qing are important reminders of the rich visual culture that existed during this period. Art is described as a distraction for the Wan brothers, something their parents used to keep them occupied: “In order to try and get some peace, my mother talked it over with my father, and so when he would return from Shanghai with all kinds of pictures, cigarette cards, popular prints, illustrations, brush-paintings, and collections of Chinese paintings they had us sit around the table and practice drawing.” (Wan 1986: 7). But much to the chagrin of Wan’s father, this distraction becomes a vocation as Wan comes to consider painting as a career choice, despite the warnings from his father and an older artist that artistic production is often unremunerated (Wan 1986: 17–19).

Wan’s choice of visual genre is important for an animator. According to his own accounts, Wan was largely self-taught, and one of the genres of illustration he focused on was a form with an important place in China and perhaps an even more significant place for animation; namely, book illustration (chatu). As Wan puts it, book illustration was an aid to appreciating the characters in the novel (Wan 1986: 25). Wan’s background in pictorials such as Liangyou huabao (Liangyou pictorial) and in the field of manhua, a form not dissimilar to political cartoons, indicates links to other types of illustration amenable to animation. Wan’s references to visual print culture consistently prepare the way for his work in animation, but just as important is Wan’s description of early types of theatrical performance such as piying xi, shadow puppets, a type of performance in which light was projected from behind flat figures with articulated limbs that were manipulated to act out opera and theatrical works. This form of folk performance is sometimes viewed as a precursor to cinema and is often mentioned in connection with animation in China. According to Wan, he and his brothers staged homemade versions of shadow puppet performances.

The childhood memories of homemade folk performances are the preface to the arrival of Western technical forms of early cinema. Just as the Wans took a do-it-yourself approach to puppet theater, in Wan’s narrative they took the same attitude to early moving images. Wan recounts visiting Da shijie, the Great World, an entertainment center built in 1917. Wan describes a “ haha jing,” which sounds like a fun house mirror, and a “ dong de xiyangjing,” a “moving peep-show,” which sounds like it was a Mutoscope, an axle with a reel of photos or images that moved when they were flipped, in a similar way as animated film. According to Wan, for him and his brothers such a device was an introduction to the technical problems of animation, of creating moving images, problems that had preoccupied the Wans since they were children (Wan 1986: 37–39). Much of Wan’s narrative is clearly constructed in hindsight from the perspective of the 1980s to account for a career in animation. But Wan engages with the medium he would be associated with, and the terminology is telling at points. Wan describes the Wan brothers’ first experiments (shiyan) and he is frank that the medium, then referred to as “cartoons” (using the early transliteration katong), is an import from Europe, the U.S., and Japan. But the Wans look to this medium as a technical and artistic form, and their first attempts are certainly not hampered by a lack of desire to experiment, only a lack of technical and financial resources (Wan 1986: 40–42).

According to Wan, the brothers’ first animated production was an ad for a typewriter, and Wan distinguishes commercial from “artistic” production during this time. In Wan’s words, the difficulty of producing artistic animation was due to the capitalism of old society in China. Nevertheless, he and his brothers are finally given the go-ahead to produce a short with access to a camera thanks to Lianhua Studios. According to Wan, this first production led him to consider other uses for animation in live-action fictional film, notably as special effects in the martial arts film Huoshao honglian si (The Burning of Red Lantern Temple, 1928) (1986: 39). The link Wan makes between animation and special effects also suggests a link between animation and genre film, a point I will come back to in later chapters. According to Wan, in the early 1930s the brothers’ wartime work included propaganda shorts: “The reason we were able to use the weapon of fine arts as an anti-imperialist tool and participate in patriotic movements, to allow animation to enter the ranks of anti-Japanese, was because we were influenced and educated by progressives from the literary and artistic world” (1986: 57).

I discuss two of the Wans extant wartime works in the next chapter, but Wan is considerably less sanguine after the war when he and his brothers worked in the film industry in Hong Kong. Wan bemoans the influences of Western culture and capitalism in Hong Kong. The Wans could not raise enough money for one of their projects, and there was also a lack of film people with experience in animation. Nevertheless, Wan Laiming and his brother Guchan were working in the film industry in set design (bujing meishu) and he refers to himself and his brother as meigong, art designers at Changcheng, also known in English as Great Wall Studios.¹

Wan finally answers the call and returns to the PRC. This return is described mostly in connection with the feature-length film Wan Laiming directed at the SAFS, Uproar in Heaven. The story of Uproar is narrated as the culmination of a lifelong desire. Wan’s autobiographical narrative constantly refers to Sun Wukong and Journey to the West. When the brothers perform their do-it-yourself shadow puppet plays, Wan informs us that the children’s favorite was “Sun Wukong Trapped Beneath Buddha’s Palm,” coincidentally the episode in Journey to the West that immediately follows the Monkey King’s destruction of Heaven of Uproar. As Wan puts it, he and his brothers had produced twenty odd films but he had always felt he wanted to work with the plot and characters of Journey to the West (1986: 114). The problem for Wan in New China was that although he had accumulated experience in animation, he had been influenced by Hollywood animation: “my old artistic perspective would certainly be reflected in the work” (1986: 116). So Wan proceeds to study Marxist-Leninist literary and art theory, especially Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art.” Wan describes the screening of the completed film in 1964 as a culmination of personal and national goals: “I have dreamed of this day since I was a child, after half a lifetime, and only after liberation could this be truly realized; without New China there would be no Uproar in Heaven!” (1986: 117). Wan’s emotional statement, a sort of apostrophe he claims to repeat to each person who comes to congratulate him, carries considerable truth. But just how New China influenced Uproar is a complex story.

Uproar in Heaven opens with the Monkey King emerging from behind Water Curtain Cave in the Blessed Land of the Flower-Fruit Mountain, a utopian space inhabited by the Monkey King and his “children,” the smaller monkeys he commands. Sun Wukong orders his monkeys to practice battle drills and when he joins in he breaks a sword and frets about having a reliable weapon. An elderly monkey recommends the Monkey King go to visit the court of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, Ao Guang. Sun Wukong tricks the Dragon King into allowing him to take an iron staff, supposedly used by the Great Yü to fix the sea during the great flood. The Dragon King complains to the Jade Emperor about Sun Wukong. After listening to ministers in his court, the Jade Emperor employs a strategy of appeasement and appoints Sun Wukong to take a low official position as pimawen, stable-master for the heavenly horses. But Sun Wukong takes pity on the corralled horses and lets them roam freely. He even transforms into a cloud at one point to rain on them as they roll and play in the water. When the Lord of the Horses comes for inspection he is furious and informs Sun Wukong that he was sent by the Emperor to supervise the Monkey King. Angered by this, Sun Wukong humiliates the Lord in a comic battle and returns home to Flower-Fruit Mountain, declaring himself “Great Sage Equal to Heaven.” The Emperor sends gods down to defeat Sun Wukong to no avail and the first part of Uproar ends here.

The second part of Uproar opens with the Jade Emperor and his court once again forming a strategy of appeasement for the Monkey King by inviting him up to be groundskeeper of the heavenly Peach Orchard. In the Peach Orchard Sun Wukong eats the peaches of immortality, and when he finds out he is not invited to a banquet Sun Wukong grows indignant, gets drunk, and steals all the settings from every table, including the peaches of immortality, to take back to his monkey children. Sun Wukong then drunkenly floats to the residence of Laozi where he eats golden pills of immortality. Once again the Jade Emperor sends more gods to defeat the Monkey King. Finally, the Jade Emperor’s nephew Erlang, with the help of Laozi, manages to capture Sun Wukong in chains. The Jade Emperor tries unsuccessfully to execute him. Laozi attempts to burn him in the Brazier of Eight Trigrams, but the Monkey King survives all and finally destroys the Emperor’s palace. In the final shot, Sun Wukong rejoices with his monkeys on Flower-Fruit Mountain.

An almost canonical animated film, Uproar in Heaven is a central production for film and media culture in China. Since the 1980s at least the film has remained a staple for children and a memory for their parents. Uproar represents a nostalgic referent conjuring up childhood and the reform era. Played and replayed on television and now online, it is easy to forget that this well-known interpretation of Journey to the West represents a particular selection of plot elements, and the film’s protagonist represents a very particular interpretation of Sun Wukong. For one thing, Uproar starts at the beginning of the third chapter of the Journey to the West novel, thus omitting a large section in which Sun Wukong studies under a Buddhist patriarch and defeats a monster. Most significantly, the film ends with a clearly triumphant and unrepentant Monkey King, whereas in the novel Buddha subdues Sun Wukong in the palm of his hand and places him beneath a mountain for five hundred years. The Sun Wukong of Uproar is specific to this film and the perio...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: It all started with a studio
• 1 It all started with a monkey
• 2 Cartoons and Chinese studies
• 3 Meishu pian as national style
• 4 A discussion and a princess
• 5 Nezha naohai (Nezha Conquers the Dragon King): Scar animation and an ending
• 6 Industry and animation
• Glossary
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index