Toward a Locational Theory of Chinese Animation

I wrote this short article in response to Prof. Karen Redrobe’s essay “Failed Animation, Limited Theory: Feminist Reflections in a Transnational Context,” published on the ACAS website on March 14, 2024. Her essay was based on an invited lecture she delivered in February 2024 for the ACAS Distinguished Lecture Series at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Given that the lectures in this series are expected to be somehow related to China or Chinese animation and Prof. Redrobe is not a China or Chinese animation scholar, it would perhaps be impracticable for her to conduct in-depth research about Chinese animation for the lecture in the short time she had to prepare. I therefore suggested that for convenience’s sake, she could link some ideas in her edited book Animating Film Theory (2014) to China or Chinese animation. Even though the topic of Chinese animation is absent in that book, there is still certainly much she could say about it, such as the role of Chinese animation for theorizing animation. I want to clarify that my suggestion is by no means a gesture of criticism. In other words, the absence of Chinese animation in that book should not be taken as a failure, nor the editor’s negligence, nor a limitation of that book. In fact, I have been using that groundbreaking book for my graduate courses over the past decade and I do regard it as a milestone in animation studies, a classic indeed. Chinese animation was absent in that book largely because the topic was still invisible in the English academia at that time. When Prof. Redrobe embarked on that book project, I was still writing my PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was the first in the West.[1]

Later I was invited by Prof. Redrobe to give a lecture for her graduate class Global Film Theory at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2025. Since I had no clue of what I could say to meet the needs of that class, Prof. Redrobe suggested that I speak about the status of “theory” in Chinese film and animation studies. Since my own publications are largely based on archival and historical research, which is a common practice in area studies, or China studies to be specific, we must ask: What’s the role of theory in Chinese film and animation studies? Is theory important for Chinese film and animation studies? If so, what does theory allow for and reveal in Chinese film and animation studies? I wrote this essay to address her questions as well as some of my own.

First, let me answer this question: What is theory? People may have different understandings, especially depending on their disciplinary location and background. Most people would probably associate “theory” with big names such as Deleuze, Derrida, Freud, Lacan, and Baudrillard. Theory has often been understood as the abstraction of ideas that can transcend socio-historical specificity and can be applied to explain many cases from different contexts. As such, theory, due to its universal appeal, has been largely treated as an antithesis of socio-historical concreteness. Here arises the different approaches in film and media (especially digital media) studies in Film and Media Departments and area studies in East Asian Departments. While scholars based in East Asian studies, often called the old-fashioned “sinologists,” guard the socio-historical territories by frequently using prepositional phrases like “???? in China” or “Chinese ????” in their work, Film and Media Studies scholars tend to critique such kind of essentialist sounding phrases for they suggest a bounded area shared by the same language, culture, history, and identity. Digital media scholars are especially critical of such boundedness as they argue that digital media can transcend socio-historical identities and resist geopolitical capture. In “What’s ‘in’? Disaggregating Asia through New Media Actants,” Ani Maitra and Rey Chow point out that “new media,” or digital media is often associated with “notions of rootlessness and placeness, as borne out by the decentered nature of rhizomatic networks that transcend spatial and temporal constraints.”[2] Digital media has the propensity to resist “being clearly defined, held, or captured.”[3] Due to the different approaches, film and media scholars, especially those working on theory, are skeptical of the socio-historical concreteness of the scholarship produced in area studies as such solidness and rigorousness may suggest an inability to theorize, over-generalize, universalize, abstract, and think beyond case studies and raw materials. As a result of their archival/historical approach, scholarship in area studies has sometimes been devalued by media theorists as pure intellectual labor. On the other hand, area studies scholars are often intimidated by and remain skeptical of pure abstraction and pure theories, questioning them for their universalizing tendencies and the lack of socio-historical groundedness.

The discrepancies between the two approaches are more pronounced in Chinese film studies than in Japanese film studies. Discussing area studies and film/media studies for their different approaches to Japanese cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto asks, “Why can the Japanese cinema be so easily incorporated into theoretical discourses of Anglo-American film studies, while theory seems to become problematic in the analysis of, say, the Chinese cinema?”[4] Yoshimoto explains that it is because of Japan’s double identity, as Japan is “perceived to be sufficiently different from, but have some common elements within, Western capitalist nations.”[5] Unfortunately, China does not have this double identity, as it is often perceived by the capitalist West as the Other that is radically different, a trend that is further exacerbated under the reign of Donald Trump.

I am aware of the two approaches, and I think we should combine the two, for each side has its own strengths and together they can amplify one another. If we only adopt the method of “thick description” in area studies and just pile up the cases and raw materials one after another without any critical engagement and interpretations, our scholarship will likely become what Charles Baudelaire calls “a riot of details.”[6] If we think in terms of pure abstraction and project universals out of nowhere, our theories may become groundless and too homogeneous. I therefore propose a locational theory, which is an argument that is based on critical engagement with socio-historical materials. It is a grounded, bottom-up theory coming from somewhere yet still has the universal power to explain, or at least be applied to, some cases in other contexts. As I explain to my graduate students, “If you make a list of all kinds of wild cats in Hong Kong, it is raw data. But if you, after closely examining these cats, argue that the wild cats in Hong Kong are descendants of Siberian tigers in northeast China, then it becomes a theory, a theory distilled from empirical data.”

My term “locational theory” draws on Susan Stanford Friedman’s concept of “locational feminism,” which she uses to refer to third-wave feminism. Third-wave feminism emerged to respond to the problems of second-wave feminism. Unsatisfied with the universalizing tendency of second-wave feminist theory, where the homogeneous concept of “global sisterhood” under the same patriarchal oppression was based on the experience of middle or upper-middle-class white women and then applied to all women in the rest of the world, third-wave feminism advocated for the concept of “intersectionality” to account for women’s differences in terms of location, race, nationality, class, age, and other important factors. Friedman’s locational feminism is “based not upon static or abstract definition but rather upon the assumption of changing historical and geographical specificities that produce different feminist theories, agendas, and political practices.”[7] Virginia Woolf’s famous statement, “as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world,” has often been cited as a manifesto of feminist cosmopolitanism that resists geopolitical capture. In “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” written in 1984 to address the pitfalls of the second-wave feminism, Adrienne Rich contends, “As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or by saying three times ‘as a woman my country is the whole world.’”[8] Rich thus calls for a feminist struggle against dislocation and the “idolatry of pure ideas,” for the female bodies are always already differently located. Further, Rich argues that “Theory—the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees—theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth.”[9]

My call for a “locational theory” resonates with what Judith (now Jack) Halberstam calls “low theory,” a concept that Halberstam derived from Stuart Hall in his essay “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” “We expose ourselves error when we attempt to ‘read off’ concepts that were designed to operate at a high level of abstraction as if they automatically produced the same theoretical effects when translated to another, more concrete, ‘lower’ level of operation.”[10] Here “high theory” is associated with a high level of abstraction, a top-down theory, while “low theory” is linked with historical concreteness, a bottom-up theory. Prepositional phrases, such as “Chinese animation” and “animation in China” seem to have the power to lower the level of abstraction and align the topic within area studies confined in a bounded territory, thus limiting the universal appeal of a theory.

A “locational theory” acknowledges the necessity of abstraction and universalization, but it also affirms the historicity and social groundedness in theorization. To explain, I will provide a few examples of what I mean by “locational theory” in Chinese film studies. Victor Fan’s Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (2015) is a locational theory. He uses a localized Chinese term bizhen (approaching reality), which was frequently employed by Chinese film critics between the 1920s and 1940s, to critique and negotiate the film theories by Bazin, Kracauer, Agamben, and Deleuze, generating a unique localized Chinese film theory grounded in the analyses of Chinese films and society. In a similar vein, Zhen Zhang’s monograph An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1986-1937 (2005), Weihong Bao’s monograph Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (2015). Jason McGrath’s monograph Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from Silent Era to the Digital Age (2023), Jie Li’s Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China, Chenshu Zhou’s Cinema off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (2021), and Ying Qian’s Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (2024), all demonstrate the tendency to theorize Chinese film based on concrete socio-historical context. They are both theoretically informed and historically situated, striking a balance between abstraction and particularity.

Here I want to mention a few pioneering books on Chinese film, which some film and media theorists may see as fully historicized yet insufficiently theorized, such as Jay Leyda’s book Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (1972), Paul Clark’s classic Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (1988), Yingjin Zhang’s Chinese National Cinemas (2004), and Paul Pickowicz’s China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy (2012). Despite potential qualms from film and media theorists, these pioneering books introduced Chinese cinema to the English world, and they indeed opened the field of Chinese film studies to English academia. They laid a solid foundation for the rise of more theoretically engaging volumes written by the younger generation of scholars, as mentioned in the previous paragraph. Outlining film histories is often the first step toward more theoretical engagement with the topic.

Now, of course, we must also wrestle with the vexing question of applying Western theories to Chinese film studies. There is a clear uneven power relationship between the West and China in that Western scholars invent theories, and they are then applied to the Chinese case studies. As for the whiteness of theories (white people write widely applied Western theories), Adrienne Rich writes, “That only certain kinds of people can make theory; that the white-educated mind is capable of formulating everything; that white middle-class feminism can know for ‘all women’; that only when a white mind formulates is the formulation to be taken seriously.”[11] To be able to theorize and taken seriously in that theorizing is thus a privilege of white people in the West. This framing follows that Chinese minds can only engage on a lower level of thinking: apply Western theories to Chinese cases or get stuck in historical concreteness and unable to see the forest.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of approach. In my own teaching and research, I use Western theories. I offered a graduate course Animation Theories, and the theoretical writings I use for that course are mostly from white scholars, mainly located in the U.S, such as Prof. Redrobe’s book Animating Film Theory, Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (2009), Marc Steinberg’s Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (2012), among others. In fact, I even think that graduate students in Hong Kong, or in Asia at large, need to be trained more in theory. Here in Hong Kong, most of our graduate students are from mainland China. They are very knowledgeable about the history and society of China, and they are already well-trained in archival and historical research methodologies, but they know little about film theory. Introducing film theory to them is thus necessary in my role as an educator. I welcome more graduate courses on film theory in Hong Kong, and I always encourage my graduate students to step out of their comfort zones to take these theory courses. I also actively urged my department to hire new faculty members who can teach film and media theories at the graduate level.

I am not against the practice of citing and applying Western theories to Chinese or Asian cases. On the contrary, I think that Western theories can be used as a powerful tool for us to explain and understand Chinese or Asian cases from a theoretical perspective. For instance, in the spring of 2023, I taught an undergraduate course titled Anime, in which we discussed the famous Japanese TV series Evangelion (1995). Most of my students, who were anime fans, were interested in the character Gendo, the authoritative commander and father of the boy protagonist. I, however, directed my students to pay attention to the role of the vanished mothers, who become liquid in Eva, the mega fighting machine created under the leadership of Gendo. Here I introduced Prof. Redrobe’s monograph Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003), in which she engages with Laura Mulvey’s famous discussion of the male gaze and cogently argues that even when women’s bodies vanish and move away from the male gaze, they are still subject to patriarchal oppression and violence. The mothers in Evangelion vanish and become liquid (something like amniotic fluid in the womb) inside the mega fighting machine to revitalize it and establish a kind of communion between the mega machine and its pilots, who are their young sons and daughters. At this point in the course, I connected the vanishing mothers with a real incident that happened in Hong Kong at the time of the course: the murder of Abby Choi. On Feb 21, 2023, Abby, a beautiful model in Hong Kong, was murdered by her husband, father-in-law, and brother-in-law, assisted by other in-law family members. Her corpse was dismembered and cooked into a soup. She became liquid in a pot like the mothers in Evangelion. In both cases, men became the powerful magicians who made these Asian women vanish and liquefy at their will. As such, Prof. Redrobe’s theorization of the “vanishing women,” although based on Western materials, does have an explanatory power here in the Asian context.

Of course, we should not apply Western theories blindly and neglect the local specificities endemic to the object of study. Otherwise, we will be reduced to what Rey Chow calls the “postmodern automatons,” the third-world feminists, who, controlled and ventriloquized by first-world feminist theories, can only speak in the voice of first-world feminists and are unable to address the real issues faced by their local sisters.[12] Some Western theories, though powerful in certain contexts, may lose traction in certain Asian cases. Sergei Eisenstein’s widely cited concept of “plasmaticness” is probably one of the earliest and most well-known animation theories. Based on his examination of early Disney animated shorts, Eisenstein argues that the medium of animation demonstrates a tendency toward fluidity and malleability, of what he calls “plasmaticness,” defined as “a rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form.”[13] The animated characters have elastic outlines, prone to bodily transformation and metamorphosis. I have frequently cited Eisenstein’s “plasmaticness” in my discussions of Chinese animation. However, after I talked to many Chinese animators, I realized that Eisenstein’s “plasmaticness” cannot account for all Chinese animated films. In the summer of 2017, I interviewed Dai Tielang (1930-2019), the “father” of the TV animation series Police Chief Black Cat (1984-1987). I asked him why the protagonists are not plasmatic and do not change their body forms like they do in American and Japanese science-fiction animations. Dai Tielang replied by saying that while “plasmticness” is a typical feature of American animation, it is not part of the Chinese way of animation.[14] He deliberately distanced his work from the American animation style. During my numerous conversations with Duan Xiaoxuan (1934-), a woman animator in charge of animation technology in socialist China, Duan reiterated that Chinese ink-painting animation tends toward “inaction,” “slowness,” “quietness,” and “lyricism,” thus marking its difference from American animation characterized by hilarious movements, plasmatic body forms, and eventful plots. If the characters in Chinese ink-painting animated films become plasmatic and transform their bodies, the Chineseness and the flair of ink-painting animation will be lost.

At first, I thought that perhaps these veteran socialist animators, who flourished during the Cold War, had a nationalistic take on “plasmaticness,” having perhaps categorized it as American and other. But after I mined the archives, I found that even during the Republican era when American culture was welcomed in China, similar arguments already existed. In an essay published on September 15, 1942, the author (anonymous) argues that the contrast between Chinese and American animated cartoons arises from Chinese and Americans’ different preferences for forms. Chinese people tend to prefer squares, not circles and roundedness. For instance, Chinese-designed houses are often built with many square shapes with angular eaves, and Chinese characters are also squares, with many fold lines, not curved lines. Such a style is reflected in Chinese animated cartoons, which exhibit a distinct form and aesthetics different from American animated cartoons that are drawn with more rounded, curved lines prone to metamorphosis and plasmaticness.[15] Although Eisenstein’s concept of “plasmaticness” is a powerful theory that can be universalized, it still cannot be used to analyze all Chinese animated films, as many of them are characterized by a resistance to plasmaticness.

We need to be aware of the unequal power relationship between Western theories and Asian cases. Why are Western theories so often applied to Asian cases, and not the other way around? Are the Asian minds situated on a lower level of thinking, prone to get stuck in details and figurative trees, making them unable to theorize and see the forest? Is it possible to generate a theory based on an Asian context that is also applicable to Western cases? Paul Pickowicz, one of the earliest historians of Chinese films active since the late 1960s, asks, “Is there no Chinese theory? Is there no Asian theory? … Some will complain that theory is ‘universal’, so there is no reason why Jameson’s theories about capitalist societies cannot be applied to China. But why are all the ‘universal’ theories of European or American origin? How would Europeanists or Americanists react if ‘universal’ theories based on empirical studies of China were applied to the European case? I suspect that they would not like it at all.”[16] I once wrote a theoretical essay about “suspended animation,” which argues that political power and aura decreases with one’s increasing physical movements and emotions.[17] The theory is mainly based on Chinese animated films, but I conceptualized it with the goal of addressing a more universal context. I developed the theory many years ago but only got the time to write it during the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. I used it to argue that Donald Trump was losing political power and aura because he was very much animated, with excessive physical movements (he even danced during a formal speech!), exaggerated facial expressions, and fervent emotions. Perhaps it was no surprise that Donald Trump was made into the protagonist of a TV animation series titled Our Cartoon President (2018). Was Trump the most animated, and thus the most depowered American president in history? For the sublime figures of (in)animation, to be animated means to be depowered, according to my theory.

Our Cartoon President (2018)

Chinese animation studies is still a new field that has gained momentum since the mid-2010s with the publication of a few monographs written by Rolf Giesen, Sean McDonald, Weihua Wu, and me.[18] At this early stage, the approaches were still largely historical, based on the materiality of socio-historical milieu and the close reading of the animated films themselves, with the aim of introducing the topic to the English world and opening a possible new field of research. Even at the field’s early stage, some scholars, like Paola Voci and Teri Silvio, made groundbreaking attempts to theorize Chinese animation. As such, Chinese animation theories jumped ahead in time, unlike Chinese live-action film studies, where theories were developed much later than histories. Notably, Paola Voci did not publish books, because, according to her, publishing a book takes a decade while animated digital media is quickly changing, so ephemeral and volatile that by the time her book is out, the topic is out of date already. She therefore publishes numerous articles and book chapters. Her most representative work is a book chapter, titled “DV Animateur Cinema in China,” published in DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film (2015), edited by Zhen Zhang. In the chapter, Voci theorizes an “animateur cinema” (animation + auteur), which refers to the named and even anonymous online animated filmmaking activities, so crude, fragmented, and volatile that they cannot even be called independent animation.[19] I think her theorization of the “animateur cinema,” which is based on Chinese cases, can be applied to other contexts to explain Japanese, Korean, Asian, American, and European cases, as similar online digital activities exist across the world. Voci’s “animateur cinema” is undoubtedly a powerful locational theory.

Teri Silvio’s book Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (2019) is an ambitious locational theory based on digitalized pili puppetry in Taiwan.[20] Through diligent, solidly-grounded anthropological fieldwork on Taiwanese Pili puppetry, which is somewhat like the archival research in film studies, Silvio powerfully argues that we have entered the “age of animation,” an argument that can be applied to Western cases as well. It seems unlikely that anyone would disagree with her that America, Japan, and other countries have entered the “age of animation” as well, probably more so than Taiwan. The localized Taiwanese materials can still spawn a powerful theory that can be universalized.

Jason McGrath, who mainly works on Chinese live-action films and theories, recently turned to Chinese animation and published a locational theory on suppositionality and virtuality in Chinese cinema.[21] But I wonder if Jason’s, Silvio’s, and Voci’s theory will be properly cited by scholars working on American and European materials and theories. It has been normalized for scholars working on Asian studies to cite scholarship regarding Western materials and theories, but the other way around is quite rare.

In addition to the theories formulated by scholars, we should pay attention to the indigenized, practice-based theories in Chinese writings. Chinese animators, from the Wan Brothers to contemporary CGI (computer-generated-image) animators, developed their own theories based on their animated filmmaking practices. In 1936, Wan Laiming, Wan Guchan, and Wan Chaochen published an essay titled “On Animation” (Xianhua katong), which was probably the earliest theory on Chinese animation. In that essay, the Wan Brothers theorized a possible national style for Chinese animation.[22] The first systematic exploration of the medium specificity of animation took place at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1962. Many Chinese animators participated in the discussion to explore the ontological issues of animation.[23] In 1984, a Chinese book, titled Studies on Animated Filmmaking (Meishu dianying chuangzuo yanjiu), was published. Edited by Te Wei, then president of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, that book collected many animation theories based on animators’ own filmmaking practices. Many chapters in that book are highly theoretical, but they are unknown in the English world, because they have not been translated into English. Here translation plays an important role to introduce the indigenous animation theories to the English world. Recently, I published an edited book, Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspectives (Brill, 2022), which collects essays written by senior animators at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. Some chapters, such as the renowned animation composer Jin Fuzai’s “Synesthesia of Music and Image” (translated by Sean Macdonald), are highly theoretical. They are unknown in the English world, unless they are translated. Because translated work is not recognized as a scholar’s typical research output, not many scholars are willing to devote their time to translation. Here I want to acknowledge my colleague Sean Macdonald’s pioneering work in translating and introducing Jin Xi’s puppet animation theories into the English academia.[24] With the generous support of many colleagues, I am now working on a new project, Anthology of Animation Theories and Criticism in China, to translate these indigenous, practice-based animation theories into English.

In the globalized, digital age when many people are talking about the collapse of geopolitical boundaries and the floating rootlessness of digital media, I want to go against the grain by reaffirming the politics of location. Even the body with which we speak is localized. Our skin color, or our accent, always suggests a place from which we come from. The reassertion of the politics of location may become a notable trend in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic: borders were raised, nation-states were emphasized, and the rhetoric of the new Cold War (China versus the U.S. in particular) was evoked, a trend that will be even more reinforced with Donald Trump’s recent re-ascent to the throne. Shortly before the pandemic in 2019, Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai advocated for “the end of area” in area studies amid the global flow of capital and “the emergence of new relations and forms,” but they still acknowledged that “the discourse of the ‘clash of civilizations,’ the substantializing of the ‘civilizational difference,” is in fact being strongly reinforced.”[25] In Japanese animation studies, although there is a tendency to move away from the Japan-centered nation-state approach (the approach in area studies), as represented by Stevie Suan’s groundbreaking monograph Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form beyond Japan (2021), it is still impossible to entirely erase Japan and disassociate anime from Japan. As Suan himself puts it, “Indeed, even as I assert the transnational and global dimensions of anime, the importance of Japan for anime’s transnationality becomes emphasized. Thus, I must also insist on the prominence of Japan—in the history of anime, its cultural relations, its development on multiple levels…”[26] In a similar vein, Alexander Zahlten coins a new term, “animation associated with Japan,” to avoid a homogeneous and essentialized imagination of Japanese animation rooted in the bounded areas of Japan in terms such as “animation in Japan” or “Japanese animation.” However, “No matter that scholars of anime have by now long critiqued a nation-centered approach, or habitually acknowledge anime as transnational (albeit often in the loosest, least rigorous usage of the term). Anime sticks, at this point, stubbornly to Japan.”[27] Chinese animation, no matter how transnational, probably sticks to China more stubbornly than anime to Japan. Reasserting the politics of location for theorizing Chinese animation is not an essentialist or nationalistic gesture, but rather a return to the places and positionalities from which we are from and from which we articulate ourselves. As Rich says, “Theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over.”[28]

I want to end this essay with my son’s “cucumber theory.” During the pandemic, my then nine-year-old son started to plant cucumbers in the flowerpots on our balcony (see the image above). Due to the constrained planting situation, not all baby cucumbers could grow into big cucumbers. My son, who had a penchant for science, kept tracking the development of the baby cucumbers every day. He noticed that baby cucumbers with darker green butts were more likely to grow into big cucumbers. One day after school, he told me that his schoolteacher began to teach theories in class, but he still could not understand what a theory meant. I explained to him, “After you tracked the development of numerous baby cucumbers every day over a few months, you generated the idea that the baby cucumbers with darker green butts would grow into big cucumbers, then you developed your own theory. Your theory does not come from nowhere but is based on numerous case studies. Although your theory is located here, in the small flowerpots on our balcony on HKUST campus, you can try to test it for bigger and more universal claims, in the farms outside. If you find that all baby cucumbers in the world are like that, then you’ve developed a big theory that has universal appeal, like Newton’s theory of universal gravitation by first observing an apple falling from the tree. You may win the Nobel Prize for your theory.” My son was skeptical, “Is theory that simple?” I replied, “Yes, a theory is meant to be understood by us. Otherwise, it ceases to be a theory.” Thus, I conclude this essay with my son’s “cucumber theory,” in defense of the low, the down-to-earth, the groundedness and concreteness, the insignificant, and the subjugated. A theory, no matter how low it is, deserves a note and consideration that it may apply beyond the grounds on which it was created.

[1] Daisy Yan Du, “On the Move: The Trans/national Animated Film in 1940s-1970s China,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 2012. The first PhD dissertation in English was from Hong Kong. See Weihua Wu, “Animation in Postsocialist China: Visual Narrative, Modernity, and Digital Culture,” City University of Hong Kong, 2006.

[2] Ani Maitra and Rey Chow, “What’s ‘in’? Disaggregating Asia through New Media Actants,” in Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia, edited by Larissa Hjorth and Olivia Khoo (London: Routledge, 2015), 17.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order,” boundary 2 no. 18.3 (Autumn 1991): 242-257, here 254.

[5] Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “The Difficulty of Being Radical,” 256.

[6] Quoted in Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 11.

[7] Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5.

[8] Adrienne Rich, “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 210-231.

[9] Adrienne Rich, “Notes,” 213-214.

[10] Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 15.

[11] Adrienne Rich, “Notes,” 230.

[12] Rey Chow, “Postmodern Automatons,” in Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 55-72.

[13] Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, edited by Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988), 21.

[14] Dai Tielang, “In Love with Science Fiction Animation,” in Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspectives, edited by Daisy Yan Du (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), 115-123, here 120.

[15] Anonymous, “Tan Zhongxi katong de yiqu 谈中西卡通的异趣,” Huabei yinghua 华北映画 (The Hua Pei Movie, September 15, 1942): 22-23.

[16] Paul G. Pickowicz, “From Yao Wenyuan to Cui Zi’en: Film, History, Memory,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas no. 1.1 (2007): 41-53, here 47.

[17] Daisy Yan Du, “A Theory of Suspended Animation: The Aesthetics and Politics of (E)motion and Stillness,” Discourse 44, no. 1 (Winter 2022): 42-77.

[18] For all books published in English about Chinese animation, see <https://acas.world/category/research-center/research-center-book-reviews/>, accessed January 15, 2025.

[19] Paola Voci, “DV Animateur Cinema in China,” in DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, edited by Zhen Zhang and Angela Zito (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), 260-288.

[20] Teri Silvio, Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019).

[21] Jason McGrath, “Suppositionality, Virtuality, and Chinese Cinema,” in boundary 2 (2022) 49 (1): 263–292.

[22] Wan Laiming 万籁鸣, Wan Guchan万古蟾, Wan Chaochen 万超尘, “Xianhua katong 闲话卡通 (On animation),” in Mingxing 明星 (Stars), no. 5.1 (1936).

[23] Li Zhen 李镇, “Zhang Songlin de gongxian” 张松林的贡献 (Zhang Songlin’s contributions), Dangdai dianying 当代电影 (Contemporary cinema) no.7 (2012): 89-92, here 91.

[24] Jin Xi, “On the Distinguishing Characteristics of Puppet Films,” translated by Sean Macdonald, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 59. No. 3 (Spring 2020): 119-131.

[25] Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai, “The End of Area,” positions: asia critique no. 27 (February 2019): 1-31, here 27.

[26] Stevie Suan, Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form beyond Japan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 32.

[27] Alexander Zahlten, “Afterword: Lessons from Japanese Animation Studies: On the Future Directions of Chinese Animation Studies,” in Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion, edited by Daisy Yan Du, John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2025), 370-381, here 380.

[28] Adrienne Rich, “Notes,” 213-214.