This study of ‘independent’ animation opens up a quietly subversive and vibrant dimension of contemporary Chinese culture which, hitherto, has not received as much attention as dissident art or political activism. Scholarly interest in Chinese animation has increased over the last decade, with attention paid to the conventional media circle of production, distribution and consumption. The ‘independent’ sector has been largely ignored however, until now. By focusing on distinctive independent artists like Pisan and Lei Lei, and situating their work within the present day media ecology, the author examines the relationship between the genre and the sociocultural transformation of contemporary China. Animation, the author argues, has a special significance, as the nature of the animation text is itself multilayered and given to multiple interpretations and avenues of engagement. Through an examination of the affordances of this ‘independent’ media entity, the author explores how this multifaceted cultural form reveals ambiguities that parallel contradictions in art and society. In so doing, independent animation provides a convenient ‘mirror’ for examining how recent social upheavals have been negotiated, and how certain practitioners have found effective ways for discussing the post-Socialist reality within the current political configuration.

This book explores the development of the Chinese animation film industry from the beginning of China’s reform process up to the present. It discusses above all the relationship between the communist state’s policies to stimulate "creative industries", concepts of creativity and aesthetics, and the creation and maintenance , through changing circumstances, of a national style by Chinese animators. The book also examines the relationship between Chinese animation, changing technologies including the rise first of television and then of digital media, and youth culture, demonstrating the importance of Chinese animation in Chinese youth culture in the digital age.

This study of ‘independent’ animation opens up a quietly subversive and vibrant dimension of contemporary Chinese culture which, hitherto, has not received as much attention as dissident art or political activism. Scholarly interest in Chinese animation has increased over the last decade, with attention paid to the conventional media circle of production, distribution and consumption. The ‘independent’ sector has been largely ignored however, until now. By focusing on distinctive independent artists like Pisan and Lei Lei, and situating their work within the present day media ecology, the author examines the relationship between the genre and the sociocultural transformation of contemporary China. Animation, the author argues, has a special significance, as the nature of the animation text is itself multilayered and given to multiple interpretations and avenues of engagement. Through an examination of the affordances of this ‘independent’ media entity, the author explores how this multifaceted cultural form reveals ambiguities that parallel contradictions in art and society. In so doing, independent animation provides a convenient ‘mirror’ for examining how recent social upheavals have been negotiated, and how certain practitioners have found effective ways for discussing the post-Socialist reality within the current political configuration.

With an output of more than 250,000 minutes annually, and with roughly 5,000 producers and production units, the Chinese are leading the field of animated films. Although it is almost impossible to completely cover 90 years of filmmaking, this book provides a comprehensible introduction to the industry's infancy, its Golden Age (Shanghai Animation Film Studio) and today's Chinese animation (in feature films, television series and student films). There are classics such as Princess Iron Fan (made at the time of the Japanese occupation) and the color Havoc in Heaven, both starring the Monkey King Sun Wukong, as well as countless TV stars (Blue Cat, Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf) and many almost unknown works by young filmmakers who are not focusing on an audience of children (like most of the industry output).

In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. Happening upon the crucial platform of an older independent film movement, this digital turn has given us a "DV China" that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups, including ethnic and religious minorities and LGBTQ communities. DV-Made China takes stock of these phenomena by surveying the social and cultural landscape of grassroots and alternative cinema practices after the digital turn around the beginning of the new century. The volume shows how Chinese independent, amateur, and activist filmmakers energize the tension between old and new media, performance and representation, fiction and non-fiction, art and politics, China and the world. Essays by scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, history, Asian and Tibetan studies bring innovative interdisciplinary methodologies to critically expand upon existing scholarship on contemporary Chinese independent documentary. Their inquiries then extend to narrative feature, activist video, animation, and other digital hybrids. At every turn, the book confronts digital ironies: On the one hand, its portability facilitates forms of radically private film production and audience habits of small-screen consumption. Yet it also simultaneously links up makers and consumers, curators and censors allowing for speedier circulation, more discussion, and quicker formations of public political and aesthetic discourses. DV-Made China introduces new frameworks in a Chinese setting that range from aesthetics to ethical activism, from digital shooting and editing techniques to the politics of film circulation in festivals and online. Politics, the authors urge, travels along paths of aesthetic excitement, and aesthetic choices, conversely, always bear ethical consequences. The films, their makers, their audiences and their distributional pathways all harbor implications for social change that are closely intertwined with the fate of media culture in the new century of a world that both contains and is influenced by China.

This is the first book in English on Chinese animation and socialism that introduces the insider viewpoints of socialist animators at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. A timely and useful reference book for researchers, students, animators, and fans interested in Chinese and even world animation.

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.