Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019: 276 pp.: ISBN 978 0 8248 7210 6, $90.00 (hbk); $30.00 (pbk).
In Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s, Daisy Yan Du showcases that Chinese animation was ‘international before it became national’ (p. 1), and that, in fact, transnational movements ‘made Chinese animation Chinese’ (p. 185). Temporally, the book focuses on the late-Republican and the Mao eras, from the late-1940s to the late-1970s. Its spatial focus is primarily Shanghai, where foreign animated films were widely consumed pre-socialism and where the major state-owned Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS) has operated since 1957.
The first two chapters of the book explore the prehistory of Asian animation prior to 1949, highlighting the significant influences of Japanese and other foreign animators on what would eventually become Chinese animation.
Chapter 1 delves into early achievements of Chinese animation in the 1920s and 1930s, noting how already the first animated shorts were transnationally influenced, both in inspiration drawn from imports like Koko the Clown and by training received from figures like the Fleischer brothers. In 1939, finally, Disney’s Snow White motivated the development of the Wan Brothers’ Princess Iron Fan, the first Chinese animated feature film; it was created using hand-drawn animation and live-action rotoscoping. Du then takes up Princess as a central case study to reveal complex transnational journeys of Asian wartime animation. She argues that after the film travelled to Japan in 1942, its original anti-Japanese message was strategically reframed as a general anti-imperialist tale. This reinterpretation, Du further shows, had a gendered impact on future animation as it was the film’s strong heroine and her popularity with audiences that was ultimately the base for the creation of state-sponsored animated male heroes, as seen in Momotaro the Peach Boy. Du thus concludes that this process of “wartime masculinization” demonstrates how cultural products such as animated film are transformed across borders.
Chapter 2 shifts the focus to the influence of Japan on early Chinese animation, particularly through the work of Japanese puppet-animator Mochinaga Tadahito. Serving as the head of animation at the Northeast Film Company in the communist-governed region from 1946 to 1949, Mochinaga played a significant role in shaping Chinese animation during this period. Du highlights how Mochinaga and his colleagues, including other Japanese and Korean animators, used animation to evoke an alternate reality. By incorporating animated subtitles, maps, charts, diagrams, and special effects into documentary features and educational shorts, they constructed a ‘plasmatic empire’ (p. 77) that contrasted sharply with the grim wartime realities depicted in these films. Mochinaga’s first animated film in 1947, inspired by a caricature from the influential Chinese cartoonist Hua Junwu and the puppet work of Czech master puppeteer Jiří Trnka, marked the first puppet-animation under Chinese socialist rule; his subsequent work marks the first cell animation produced in the region. After returning to Japan, Mochinaga founded the country’s first puppet animation studio and continued to influence Japanese as well as American animation, contributing to Western classics such as 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In this chapter, Du interprets Mochinaga’s global journey as emblematic of Chinese animation’s development, where international influences blend with local characteristics, and politics, culture, economy, and arts intersect in unexpectedly creative ways.
The final two chapters expand on the central theme of transnational movements in Chinese animation by discovering similar trends that also after 1949, in a period usually thought about as one of isolationism and cultural autarky
First, Chapter 3 examines the development of a national style in Chinese animation during the first seventeen years, 1949-1966, of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It begins by addressing the widespread story of Why Is the Crow Black winning a top prize in Venice in 1956 supposedly only because it was mistakenly identified as a Soviet production. Allegedly, this incident spurred the SAFS to develop The Conceited General, the first Chinese animation in a distinctly national style. However, Du debunks these claims, showing that the former was not awarded any prize in Venice and that the latter film was not created rapidly enough to realistically act as a response (pp. 119-125). The disproving of this non-event becomes a platform that supports a well-crafted and thoughtful critique of the obsessive search for a uniquely national style in Chinese animation as it was pursued by mainstream animators (and other artists) in the PRC. In contrast, Du pointedly shows that animation ‘is an international art form, and great artistic works can absorb and indigenize other cultures, transcend national boundaries, and appeal to audiences around the world’ (p. 124). Furthermore, during the same seventeen years, an ‘international style’ of animation was also thriving in the PRC that used cartooning and caricature to cover topics related to the capitalist West. This style, Du argues, was, in fact, influenced by Western animation styles such as Disney, Fleischer, and UPA. Ironically, while national style animations were slow-paced and eventually did gain international recognition, the fast-paced, cartoonish critiques of capitalism were intended solely for national audiences. The chapter illustrates these intertangled developments by close reading of three animations: The Fishing Boy (1959), itself an allegory for the ongoing stylistic debates; the minimalist Little Tadpoles Look for Mama (1960), a rare ink-painting animation; and the experimental The Herd Boy’s Flute (1964), which ended up politically censured due to its blending of Chinese and Western styles.
Chapter 4 then illuminates the evolution of animated production during an extended Cultural Revolution period, spanning the years 1964 to 1978. The core inquiry is the changing meaning and appearance of animated animals. Du argues that from the early 1960s, in response to international critiques of Disney-embodied US cultural imperialism and national debates on fantasy versus realism, anthropomorphic animals inspired by folk tales began to vanish from Chinese animation. The 1964 animation Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland marked the first instance where anthropomorphic animals were absent as all animals are depicted mute. In subsequent adaptations of Heroic Little Sisters into comics and ballet, the animals disappear entirely, replaced by more prominence given to machines and technology. Du also notes that ethnic minorities began to feature more prominently in Cultural Revolutionary animations, often depicted with animal-like traits in a racialized and othering manner. Non-Han characters in these animations were portrayed either with animalistic attributes like agility and speed or in narratives where individuals (i.e., people) symbolically died to be reborn as loyal collective (i.e., animal-like) followers of the party and Mao (pp. 164-167). Anthropomorphic animals made a return to Chinese animation only in 1976, heralding the end of the Mao era and a re-emergence of the medium’s fantastical storylines and fluid animation style.
Drawing from a wide array of interviews, memoirs, historical newspapers and journals, as well as closely engaging with film and art theories from a broad selection of secondary literature, Animated Encounters offers fascinating new insights about overlooked aspects in the history of Asian—and thus global—animation. For those interested in exploring Chinese animation further, the website of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies provides a comprehensive database with links to all the films discussed in the book, and more; see https://acas.world/chinese-animation-1947-79/. Animated Encounters can also be seen as a spiritual precursor of sorts to a new wave of scholarship on Chinese animation, including books such as Zhou 2020, Chen 2021, Sun 2022, and Bobrowska 2023 and 2024, and numerous scholarly articles. Daisy Yan Du has also followed-up Animated Encounters with an edited volume of oral histories by SAFS animators, see Du 2022; as well as co-edited a comprehensive collection of essays discussing Chinese animation from a wide array of perspectives, see Du, Crespi, and Wang 2025.
Overall, Animated Encounters is a vital contribution to the multimodal history of animation, highlighting the complex interplay between transnational influences and the local distinctiveness of Chinese animation, making it a rewarding read for both experts and newcomers.
References:
- Bobrowska, Olga. 2023. Chinese Animated Film and Ideology, 1940s–1970s: Fighting Puppets. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
- Bobrowska, Olga. 2024. Chinese Animated Film and Ideology: Tradition, Innovation, and Interculturality. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
- Chen, Shaopeng. 2021. The New Generation in Chinese Animation. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Du, Daisy Yan, ed. 2022. Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspectives. Leiden: Brill.
- Du, Daisy Yan, John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang, eds. 2025. Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Sun, Lijun, ed. 2022. The History of Chinese Animation. Abingdon: Routledge.
- Zhou, Wenhai. 2020. Chinese Independent Animation: Renegotiating Identity in Modern China. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Damian Mandzunowski is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ERC-funded project “Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx)” at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University. His work investigates the interplay of history, politics, art, and ideology in socialist China. In addition to his ongoing research on Chinese comics and caricature, he is currently writing his first book on political study and other official collective reading practices in China after 1949.