Film

posts related to Chinese-language film

Transnational Memories in Asian Cinemas — cfp

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Call for Papers: L’Atalante 42: Transnational Memories in Asian Cinemas

L’Atalante, a peer-reviewed journal edited by the cultural association El Camarote de Père Jules (main editor) and Associació Cinefòrum L’Atalante, is now accepting submissions for Issue 42 on the theme of “Transnational Memories in Asian Cinemas.”

Overview

Parallel to the increasing competition of China, South Korea and Japan for global economic and cultural influence, the region has been subject to the world’s most vivid debates on wartime atrocities in recent decades. The current geopolitical context has given shape to a revival of memories of wartime violence perpetrated in Asia during the so-called “dark valley” (1931-1945) (Holcombe 2017).  While wartime issues at stake happened many decades ago, it has not been until the end of the 20th century that new “memory struggles” have emerged so intensely that they have shaped diplomatic relations in the region to the present day. For example, discussions about the Unit 731 development of biological weapons and lethal human experimentation on prisoners was not subject to public discussion until the 1980s (Keiichi 2005; Dickinson 2007). Likewise, the Nanking Massacre, as well as the “comfort women” issue under the Imperial Japanese Army, only became an international public concern since the 1990s after the publication of documents, diaries and other testimonies (Fogel 2007, Yoshida 2009; Seo 2008).

Asian cinemas are playing an important role in these “memory struggles”, giving shape to the ways that historical atrocities are being revisited through cultural products in the present (Jager and Mitter 2007; Schneider 2008). Thus, the goal of this issue is to examine the ways that fiction and nonfiction films like features and documentaries have later memorialised and appropriated the memory of atrocities perpetrated across Asia-Pacific in the 20th century. In this sense, both documentary and feature films proposed here may create a sort of postmemory (Hirsch, 2008), wherein generations that did not directly experience traumatic events are nevertheless marked by these experiences so deeply that they constitute memories in their own right. In fact, the relation between war and film are key as postmemory communities must rely on images as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission. Continue reading Transnational Memories in Asian Cinemas — cfp →

Worlding of Sinophone Cinemas (ACLA) — cfp

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I am co-organizing a seminar at the ACLA conference in Montreal, Canada (February 26 – March 1, 2026)! The topic is “Worlding of Sinophone Cinemas: Textures, Politics, and Aesthetics of the Everyday ,” and the CFP is now live on the ACLA website. Submissions are due by October 2, 2025. Here are the details:

https://www.acla.org/seminar/76c042e7-a5e6-4a7c-88c1-de865f147925

Seminar Overview:

This seminar invites papers that examine how Sinophone cinemas contribute to global cinematic discourses through the lens of the everyday: ordinary people, quotidian life, mundane routines, intimate relationship, unremarkable events, and the small-scale. Across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Southeast Asia, and diasporic communities, Sinophone filmmakers have long captured the textures, politics, and aesthetics of daily life.

Sinophone refers not only to films produced in Mandarin or other Sinitic languages, but also to a cross-regional cinematic framework shaped by linguistic heterogeneity, postcolonial histories, diasporic mobility, and intercultural interaction. Participants are invited to rethink how the everyday in Sinophone cinemas as a space where political tension, cultural experience, and aesthetic innovation converge. Continue reading Worlding of Sinophone Cinemas (ACLA) — cfp →

Review of ‘NeZha 2’ avoids issues

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This Washington Post review essay (below), on the Chinese mega-anime-movie Ne Zha 2, unsurprisingly continues to avoid the issues already obscured by the film itself, as discussed earlier here on MCLC: Ne Zha as the Chinese Oedipus.

Partly for this reason, the related psychological and social issues are also avoided by most if not all reviewers — and, not a single WaPo commenter (or the WaPo built-in AI opinion bot) mentioned this, either.

To begin with, it is understandable that the government-supervised filmmakers wanted to obscure this core issue in the original take. The Chinese government is a patriarchal dictatorship (remember Peng Shuai?), and does not want discussion of the psychological consequences of patriarchy in the light of the Nezha exposure of the issues of filial piety and so on (issues that have been brilliantly exposed and analyzed by anthropologist Steve Sangren in his book Filial Obsessions and other writings).

Patriarchal rule in China depends, we can surmise, on turning Nezha into some sort of nationalistic hero, rather than a troubled son. Even worse, the preferences nurtured in the Chinese filmmakers and in the Chinese public may well be contaminating US, Hollywood, and other moviemakers who are concerned with reaching profitable blockbuster audiences, much more than they are concerned with making good movies.

(Ne Zha 2 is awful, by the way)

Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: Washington Post (8/27/25)
Why the world’s biggest movie bombed in America
The same epic storytelling conventions that delight moviegoers in China often turn off critics abroad.
By Jeff Yang (Jeff Yang is the author of “The Golden Screen: The Movies That Made Asian America.”)

In this weekend’s cinematic battle of Asian monster slayers, there was a clear flawless victor: Netflix’s solid-“Golden” juggernaut, “KPop Demon Hunters,” whose sing-along events did a “Takedown” of the theatrical charts, earning $18 million from 1,700 screens across North America. Continue reading Review of ‘NeZha 2’ avoids issues →

Journal of Chinese Cinemas — cfp

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Journal of Chinese Cinemas Special Issue CFP
Before, Besides, and Beyond the Taiwanese New Cinema

Consecrated by European film festivals and cinema studies, the Taiwanese New Cinema represents a rupture between past and present, striking a seeming divide between an agricultural past and “modernity.” The dramatic flair of rupture obscures the rich archive of Taiwan’s cinematic history, which, read in new and even unforeseen ways, allows us to reevaluate and disturb the monumentalism of the New Cinema. How might we look beyond the model of periodization that culminates in the New Cinema? How might this narrative shift if we instead situate film within a broader media ecology, including but not limited to television, art, literature, photography, music, architecture, infrastructure, and advertisement? How might exhibition contexts and histories of circulation and translation outside of art film festivals redraw the broader circuits of Taiwanese cinema? We may ask, perhaps, which films might be able to reframe some of the pet themes of the New Cinema canon: environmentalism, historical memory, urban ennui, modernization, and coming-of-age.

The Journal of Chinese Cinemas invites papers for a special issue that explore what lies outside the historiographic framework of the New Cinema and yet crucial to its formation, definition, and legacy. Our mission is to retrieve the undiscovered, sidelined, and excluded intermedial and transnational cultural market in postwar Taiwan that conditions the infrastructure of the New Cinema and beyond. Abstracts for the issue will be due by September 30th, 2025; decisions will be announced on October 15th, 2025 with an anticipated deadline for full drafts (6,000 and 8,000 words) on January 11th, 2026. Please limit your abstracts to 250-300 words and include a brief author biography with your submission, sent to changmyu@ntu.edu.tw and yslin727@berkeley.edu.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact special issue editors Yvonne Lin (University of California, Berkeley) and Chang-Min Yu (National Taiwan University).

Posted by: Chang-Min Yu changmyu@ntu.edu.tw

Dongji Rescue

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Source: BBC News (8/21/25)
‘He owed his life to those Chinese fisherman’: Dongji Rescue and the true story of a forgotten act of WW2 heroism
A new film dramatises the rescue during WW2 of hundreds of British POWs from the Lisbon Maru, a Japanese cargo liner. The story has not been widely recounted – until now.
By Emma Jones

Trinity Cine Asia Still from Dongji Rescue (Credit: Trinity Cine Asia)

On 1 October 1942, a Japanese cargo liner, the Lisbon Maru, was being used to transport 1,816 British prisoners of war (POWs) to captivity in Japan. It was torpedoed off the coast of China by a US submarine, unaware that Allied prisoners were on board. According to survivors, the Japanese troops battened down the hatches of the hold before they evacuated the ship and left the British prisoners inside.

As the Lisbon Maru sank, the British mounted an escape, only to be fired at by the Japanese troops. Help arrived in the form of Chinese fishermen from the islands nearby, who rescued 384 men from the sea. These true events were the inspiration for first a documentary by Chinese film-maker Fang Li, The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, released in China in 2024, and now a lavish Chinese blockbuster, Dongji Rescue.

The voice of Jack Hughieson from the Royal Navy describes, in an interview for the Imperial War Museum in London, how he heard doomed men still trapped inside the hold of the Lisbon Maru singing the wartime marching song, It’s A Long Way to Tipperary. “I can still hear it to this day,” he says. “Between the yells, the cries for help, was the singing. You could hear from the water… the cries of men going to meet their maker.” Continue reading Dongji Rescue →

Nanjing Massacre haunts China-Japan relations

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Source: BBC News (8/14/25)
‘We were never friends’: A massacre on the eve of WW2 still haunts China-Japan relations
By Fan Wang, BBC News, in Singapore

STR/AFP via Getty Images An elderly man wearing a suit with an ear piece in his ear wipes tears off his face. Behind him more elderly men can be seen, slightly blurred

Nanjing massacre was the darkest chapter of the years-long Sino-Japanese war. STR/AFP via Getty Images

Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.

But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.

“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.

Dead To Rights, or Nanjing Photo Studio, is a star-studded tale about a group of civilians who hide from Japanese troops in a photo studio. Already a box office hit, it is the first of a wave of Chinese movies about the horrors of Japanese occupation that are being released to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. But a sense of unfinished history – often amplified by Beijing – persists, fuelling both memory and anger.

Speaking in Chinese on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, Kato recounted scenes from the film: “People were lined up along the river and then the shootings began… A baby, the same age as my daughter, was crying in her mother’s arms. A Japanese soldier rushed forward, grabbed her, and smashed her into the ground.” Continue reading Nanjing Massacre haunts China-Japan relations →

Coming of Age in Chinese Literature and Cinema

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NEW PUBLICATION: Coming of Age in Chinese Literature and Cinema: Sinophone Variations of the Bildungsroman
Edited by Andrea Riemenschnitter, Kiu-wai Chu, Mung Ting Chung
Amsterdam University Press, 2025

With the inclusion of twelve original articles by established and emerging international scholars, this volume offers critical reading of literary and cinematic texts produced in China and Sinophone communities between the 1950s and 2010s. The articles portray the lineage and mutations of the Chinese Bildungsroman, providing insights into the tensions between individual and society; nation and the world; and the multiple social, ecological, and virtual realities of recent decades. Concerned with how coming-of-age narratives have persistently returned and evolved over time, the book addresses themes such as family and social change; gender, class, and generational divides, local/global politics, and the ecological and posthuman turns in Chinese/Sinophone culture. It offers a fresh look on how the transnational and transgenerational journeys of Bildungsroman and coming-of-age narratives continuously transform and reinvigorate generic conventions, to explore adolescence as a formative social force and aesthetic experience in Chinese/Sinophone literature and film. Continue reading Coming of Age in Chinese Literature and Cinema →

The Films of Ikram Nurmehmet

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Source: China File (7/3/25)
Balancing What Can Be Said with What Can Only Be Implied: The Films of Ikram Nurmehmet
By Shelly Kraicer

A still from Ridiculous Nurshad (2022).

The young Uyghur filmmaker Ikram Nurmehmet is now in a Chinese prison. Arrested in May 2023, he was accused by the Chinese government of “actively participating in terrorist activities.” Human Rights Watch called the charges “politically motivated,” and reported that Ikram was “tortured . . . until he gave a false confession.” Convicted in January 2024, Ikram was sentenced to six and a half years behind bars. He was likely targeted because he had studied in Turkey between 2010 and 2016. His arrest and imprisonment has occurred in the context of Chinese authorities’ continuing persecution of minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that has intensified since 2017.

It is always difficult for what China calls “ethnic minority” (i.e. non-Han Chinese) filmmakers to make the films they want to make inside China, where review by the state Film Administration is mandatory for all. Staying inside the system allows filmmakers to have their work shown publicly in China and, if they can get official approval, abroad. What may be surprising is that filmmakers from Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang have succeeded in making important and eloquent works of cinema that grapple, at least indirectly, with the particular situations of their communities in China, despite the constraints under which they work.

Since 2017, a new generation of Uyghur filmmakers, including Ikram Nurmehmet, Tawfiq Nizamidin, Emetjan Memet, Mirzat Abduqadir, and Pahriya Ghalip, has emerged. Most studied at the Beijing Film Academy, and all have made creatively challenging, formally interesting, socially engaged short films that carefully explore—with humor, passion, and a savvy sense of how to balance what can be said with what can only be implied—what life is like for Uyghurs in China today.

A close reading of Ikram’s four short films—from Elephant in the Car’s mysterious energy, through the absurdly dark comedy of Ridiculous Nurshad and rambunctious humor of Tu Cheshang Erbai (200 Per Puke), to the brilliant formal control of A Day by the Sea—can elucidate some ways that a filmmaker under systemic political pressure can navigate the closely regulated Chinese censorship system while preserving an articulate, sustainable, and authentically expressive voice. Continue reading The Films of Ikram Nurmehmet →

Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies

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Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (7/10/25)
Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies in Socialist China
By Jie Li

Figure 1. A 1966 propaganda poster of a rural projectionist foregrounds the multi-lens slide projector over the film projector.

Thanks to Daisy Yan Du’s invitation to lecture for the Association for Chinese Animation Studies Distinguished Lecture Series, I had the opportunity to extend an underdeveloped topic in my recent book Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press, 2023). The cover image (figure 1) is a 1966 propaganda poster of a female rural projectionist with a pair of bamboo clappers and two projectors. While relegating the film projector to the backdrop, this model image foregrounds a lantern slide projector with four lenses to facilitate animated special effects. In addition to exploring the history referenced by this image, the current essay also brings together the two parts of my book—“Projectionists as Media Infrastructure” and “Audiences as Creative Agents”—to focus on projectionists as creative agents. Given the considerable creative collaboration that went into animated slideshows, I propose that projectionists in Socialist China were not merely machine operators, but also inventors, artists, writers, and performers.

Largely forgotten by the 21st century, the lantern slideshow (huandeng 幻灯) was an important form of local propaganda and entertainment from the 1950s to the 1980s. Technically simple to produce from cheap and locally available materials, lantern slides could be projected using gas lamps in areas without electricity. Grassroots propaganda artists and film projectionists thus wrote, drew, projected, and narrated their own slideshows, creating local audiovisual media content when film production was centrally orchestrated. Whereas rural audiences celebrated cinema for being “live” or “animated” 活的 and slideshows for being “still” or “dead” 死的, innovative experimentation with slideshow animations launched a “Three Sisters Projection Team” 三姐妹放映队 from a rural county to nationwide fame by the mid-1960s (see figure 2). Over the next two decades, local cultural cadres from all over China recruited artists, writers, performers, and technicians to develop similar animated slideshows until the rise of local television.

Figure 2: Clip on animated slideshows from a 1966 newsreel on the Three Sisters Movie Team.

Continue reading Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies →

China through the Camera Lens

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NEW PUBLICATION: China through the Camera Lens: A Multimedia Reader for Advanced Chinese
镜头中的中国: 多媒体高年级中文读本
By Shuqin Cui, Ying Gao, Hsin-hsin Liang, and Julian Wheatley.
Routledge, 2024. ISBN 9781032487045. 302 Pages 84 Color Illustrations

Description

China through the Camera Lens combines Chinese language learning with film analysis, offering a unique and comprehensive learning experience beyond traditional methods.

The book consists of twelve chapters, each based on a carefully selected short film or video. Each chapter is divided into a presentation section and a practice section. The presentation includes short narratives illustrated with color screen shots, with vocabulary glossed alongside for easy reference. It also introduces relevant film terms to help students focus on filmmaking techniques as well as the content of the films. The practice sections cover word collocations, near synonyms, word meanings, idiomatic phrases, paragraph structure, topics for class discussion, composition practice, and extended reading. By integrating short films, cultural insights, and film analysis, learners not only enhance their language skills but also gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between film and content.

This book is an innovative and engaging advanced Chinese language textbook that immerses advanced Chinese learners in language and culture through short films and videos.

Ecological and Environmental Turns

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NEW PUBLICATION: Ecological and Environmental Turns: (Re)mapping China’s Sociocultural Landscape through Ecocinema
By Shuqin Cui
Cambria Press, 2025, 382PP|44 B&W illustrations| ISBN 9781638573296|Hardcover & Ebook

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ecological and Environmental Turns: (Re)mapping China’s Sociocultural Landscape through Ecocinema offers an essential new perspective on one of today’s most urgent global concerns: the relationship between humans and the environment. As climate change and culture, pandemics, and ecological crises reshape the world, this groundbreaking study explores how ecocinema and environmental film can transform environmental awareness. Bridging ecocriticism, environmental humanities, and film and environment analysis, this timely book examines fourteen influential films—including blockbusters, independent documentaries, and animations—that challenge anthropocentric worldviews and reveal the deep interconnections between human and nonhuman life. Through insightful analysis of disaster cinema, environmental activism, industrial landscapes, animal representation, and environmental justice, Ecological and Environmental Turns demonstrates how Chinese cinema contributes to global conversations on sustainability, ecological ethics, and cinema and ecology. Featuring 44 black-and-white images, this is a vital resource for scholars of film studies, Chinese studies, and environmental humanities—and an engaging read for anyone concerned with the planet’s future. Continue reading Ecological and Environmental Turns →

Never-ending screenings of ‘Ne Zha 2’

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Source: China Digital Times (5/27/25)
Netizen Voices: Never-Ending Screenings of “Ne Zha 2” Are “Off the Rails”
By Arthur Kaufman

The Chinese animated film “Ne Zha 2” has continued its record-breaking run, grossing over $2 billion worldwide and remaining on China’s top-five box-office list over 110 days after its release. But the film’s success has belied its curated image and masked a broader chill for the Chinese box office. Many Chinese companies and schools have organised patriotic outings and repeat viewings to boost box-office figures. Articles and comments critical of “Ne Zha 2” have been deleted from social media platforms, and Chinese bloggers and reviewers have reported being criticized or attacked online for expressing dissenting views about the film. Now, news that screenings of the animated blockbuster will be extended to June 30—the fourth extension thus far—has drawn mockery from netizens who wonder whether there will ever be an end to official efforts at promoting the film:

专踢周宁海那条好腿: Wouldn’t it be nice if they could bring things full circle by extending its release to next Lunar New Year?

waldeinsamkeit: This is turning into a joke. Why not extend it straight through to the end of summer vacation?

还不是尽头: Haha, might as well extend it until “Wolf Warrior 3” comes out.

专属小杰哥哥: If you don’t watch “Ne Zha,” you’re not Chinese.
无敌暴龙战士: We’ve fast-forwarded to: “If you don’t watch ____, you’re not Chinese.”

NN: I was banished to Singapore because I didn’t watch “Ne Zha.”

余杭: While it’s normal for theatrical releases to be extended, it’s obvious that the wall-to-wall publicity for “Ne Zha 2” has sapped whatever goodwill it once had.

横蛮但却恐惧: Couldn’t you theatres and film associations manage to coordinate with each other to show some other movies? Over the past few months, there have been a few new movies I honestly wanted to see, but they never showed up in theatres. Theatres have just been extending release dates and rescreening old films day after day. I’m baffled—I want to go out and spend money but they won’t let me.

立鑫: In the past, no matter how good a movie was, it would never stay in theatres this long. Besides investors trying to wring the last bit of profit out of a dying market, there’s an acute shortage of resources being invested in film.

Joe.: It’s kind of gone off the rails. These endless extensions just to chase box office clout seem pointless.[Chinese] Continue reading Never-ending screenings of ‘Ne Zha 2’ →

Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies in Socialist China

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LECTURE: Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies in Socialist China
Speaker: Professor Jie Li, Harvard University
Moderator: Professor Daisy Yan Du, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Format: 40-50 minutes’ lecture, followed by around 30 minutes’ Q & A
Time: 4:30-6:00pm, June 9 (Monday, Hong Kong time)
Venue: Cheung On Tak Lecture Theater (LTE), HKUST

Abstract

From the 1950s to the 1980s, lantern slideshows, dubbed “rustic cinema” (tu dianying), were deployed as an important form of local propaganda and entertainment.  Technically simple to produce from cheap and locally available materials, lanternslides could be projected using gas lamps without electricity.  Local propaganda artists and film projectionists thus wrote, drew, projected, and narrated their own slideshows, often featuring local heroes and local histories, thereby enabling the creation of local media content when film production was centrally orchestrated.

Whereas rural audiences celebrated cinema for being “live” or “animated” (huo de) and slideshows for being “still” or “dead” (si de), innovative experimentation with slideshow animations launched a “Three Sisters Projection Team” from a rural county to nationwide fame by the mid-1960s.  This projection team invented a slide projector with multiple lenses to create illusions of movement—such as red flags waving, horses running, and masses celebrating—to the sound accompaniment of clapper talk with rhyming verses. To emulate such animated slideshows, local cadres around the country recruited grassroots artists, writers, performers, and technicians to participate in propaganda endeavors over the next two decades.

Through a media archeology of animated slideshows, this talk seeks to excavate the creative ecology of Socialist China as well as to reflect on human creativity in the age of generative AI.  This talk will show how propaganda, censorship, and technology promoted or stifled, mobilized or immobilized creativity through their complex interactions with talent, skill, economics, politics, and institutions. Continue reading Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies in Socialist China →

Periodising HK cinema

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New publication: Jessica Siu-yin Yeung, “Periodising early Hong Kong cinema (1914–41): Tianyi Hong Kong Studio, Cantonese resistance, and colonial paradox.” Early Popular Visual Culture (May 2025).

I hope this piece will help some listserv subscribers teach early Hong Kong film history. It is written with the intention of serving as reading for novice students who have no prior knowledge of early Hong Kong cinema, providing accurate information, many images, and minimal jargon. Here is the abstract:

This article asks, ‘What do we mean when we say “early Hong Kong screen culture and cinema?” It answers this question with a threefold response. Against the scholarship that has been focusing on Shanghai-Hong Kong connections, this article emphasises the overlooked Canton-Hong Kong connections. It highlights the separationist government Chen Jitang’s contribution to preventing Cantonese filmmaking from being banned by the Kuomintang government in the 1930s when the Nanking government promoted Mandarin as the national language. Also, existing studies have overemphasised ‘The Father of Hong Kong Cinema’, Lai Man-wai and his family as important personages in early Hong Kong cinema for making the first fiction film and some national defence films. Yet this article argues that it was the Shaw Brothers’ Tianyi Hong Kong Studio that inaugurated the era of quality Cantonese filmmaking. Lastly, this article periodises early Hong Kong cinema (1914–41) into three stages: the silent film and the partially-sound Cantonese film age (1914–32), the talkies, the boom, and the censorship of Cantonese filmmaking (1933–36); and the peak and decline of Cantonese filmmaking (1937–41). Hong Kong’s status as a colony paradoxically endowed it with the criteria to preserve Cantonese filmmaking, as this article shall explicate such serendipity with Barbara Ward’s framework of ‘colonial paradox’. In other words, it was the nonchalance of the British Hong Kong government towards Cantonese filmmaking that preserved this endangered indigenous art through the Kuomintang censorship and the wartime, so that Cantonese filmmaking could be continued in the post-war period.

Jessica Siu-yin Yeung <jessicayeung@LN.edu.hk>

Toward a Locational Theory of Chinese Animation

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Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (5/25/25)
Toward a Locational Theory of Chinese Animation
By Daisy Yan Du

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. Continue reading Toward a Locational Theory of Chinese Animation →