Film

posts related to Chinese-language film

Hollywood in China summer course

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Colleagues,

I’ll be offering a course on the relationship between Hollywood and the Chinese film industry at Columbia University this summer. Pls pass along info to students and colleagues who might be interested in the topic.

Hollywood in China: A Course on the Relationship between Hollywood and the Chinese Film Industry.

Come tease out a cluster of issues concerning the politics, economy, and culture of transnational entertainment and media practices — all at the heart of one of the most vibrant artistic and international cities in the world.

Admissions are open to all who would like to study with us this summer – – Go to arts.columbia.edu/summer for application details and deadlines.

All the best,

Ying ZHU

Liu Xiaoqing Studies–cfp

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Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal (A&HCI)
Special Issue: Liu Xiaoqing Studies
Guest Editor: Chang Liu

Chang Liu from Heidelberg University’s Centre for Transcultural Studies invites you to contribute to a special issue on what he terms “Liu Xiaoqing Studies” for the journal Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, published by Taylor & Francis.

Liu Xiaoqing (刘晓庆, b. 1950) is arguably one of the most famous and controversial actresses to have risen to fame after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). In a career spanning nearly five decades, while most of her peers have long been forgotten, she has remained highly visible and continues to enjoy widespread popularity. This special issue will explore how Liu Xiaoqing’s personal transformation and evolving star image interact with broader societal changes and the transformation of Chinese women’s identity in post-socialist China.

In Chinese language media, Liu Xiaoqing is often referred to as “a product of her time.” Born in 1950, shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, she witnessed the height of the socialist era in the 1960s and experienced the full impact of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She began her career near the end of the Cultural Revolution and rose to fame during China’s early reform era in the 1980s. Initially a film actress, she later navigated the decline of China’s film industry in the 1990s and the rise of TV drama productions, balancing her career between big and small screens. Liu Xiaoqing also had firsthand experience with Chinese government’s tax law reforms, which led to her imprisonment in 2002. Yet, after her release, she made a remarkable comeback, restarting her career as a nameless background actress drifting between roles in Hengdian in 2003. Her personal life has been equally eventful, marked by several high-profile marriages and extramarital affairs. Most recently, at the age of 74, she was found to be dating someone several decades younger than herself, sparking a new wave of public debate on female sexuality. Throughout her career, many have speculated that her popularity would soon fade. However, her recent appearance on a reality TV show has earned her an entirely new generation of fans. It is nearly impossible to summarize her accomplishments in just one paragraph. Continue reading Liu Xiaoqing Studies–cfp →

Of Color and Ink: The Chang Dai-chien Story

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The Chu-Griffis Asian Art Collection at Connecticut College is pleased to present:

OF COLOR AND INK: The Chang Dai-chien Story
Documentary Film Screening & Director Talk
(Thursday, March 27, 6-8:30 pm)
with Director Weimin Zhang, Award-winning Filmmaker and Professor of Film Studies, San Francisco State University
Charles Chu Asian Art Reading Room, Charles E. Shain Library

Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian 张大千1899–1983) has long been hailed as one of China’s foremost 20th-century painters. Sometimes referred to as “Picasso of the East,” Chang’s paintings have outsold Van Gogh (CNN) and have broken records at auction (New York Times). Yet his thirty-year global journey after leaving mainland China in 1949 remains widely misunderstood and shrouded in mystery.

(Chang Dai-chien and Picasso, 1956)

(Chang Dai-chien, Charles Chu, and Fred Fang-yu Wang, ca. 1963)

Of Color and Ink is the first film (2023, 101 minutes) to document the 30-year exile of Chang Dai-chien through South America, Europe, and the United States. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Weimin Zhang, it is also the culmination of Zhang’s own 12-year journey to unravel the mysteries and controversies surrounding Chang Dai-chien’s political, artistic, and spiritual quests. The film delves into Chang’s extraordinary life in exile, highlighting the global context of his art and its broad impact as it crossed cultural and political boundaries between East and West.

Of Color and Ink has received wide critical acclaim for its cinematic achievement and scholarly contribution and has won Best Feature Documentary Film Awards at film festivals in Brazil, China, and the United States. Continue reading Of Color and Ink: The Chang Dai-chien Story →

Ne Zha 2 and the Evolution of CGI Blockbusters (5)

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Thanks for the source! I saw that film too. I think it’s the one where father king is asked by the dragon king to kill Nezha as punishment for his naughtiness, but can’t do it, and instead hands his sword to Nezha, his son, ordering him to commit suicide and due to filial piety, he obeys, and kills himself with the sword. A huge pool of blood covers the ground, in this stunning animated scene.

It appears none of this is in the new films.

Sangren has updated discussions of it in his newest book, Filial Obsessions, which I cited. Note that Sangren’s research is not restricted to Taiwan but relates to the mainstream Chinese traditions, especially the Fengshen yanyi.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Ne Zha 2 and the Evolution of CGI Blockbusters (4)

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In response to Magnus Fiskesjö’s appeal for studies on Ne Zha films, I published a paper on the important 1979 iteration of Nezha from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (Nezha naohai 哪吒闹海 ). Sangren’s research into Nezha in Taiwan was very helpful to my paper. The father-son dynamic was “reworked” for this film: “Animation as Intertextual Cinema: Nezha naohai (Nezha Conquers the Dragon King).” Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, vol. 10, no. 3 (2015): 205-221.

Sean Macdonald <smacdon2005@gmail.com>

Ne Zha 2 review

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Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (3/17/25)
Spectacular Digital Maximalism: Some Thoughts on Ne Zha 2 (2025)
By Mihaela Mihailova

Since its US release in February 2025, the Chinese computer-generated feature Ne Zha 2 (Yu Yang, aka Jiaozi, 2025) has continued to fascinate and confound the Anglophone entertainment press. Popular animation blog Cartoon Brew has been obsessively tracking the film’s impressive box office run and chronicling the various profit records it has shattered on its way to achieving its current $2 billion gross.[i] Hollywood news site Deadline has attempted to explain “how it happened” and speculated on the film’s implications for both the American and Chinese animation industries.[ii] Ne Zha 2’s success appears to have taken the majority of US entertainment news outlets by surprise, prompting some to openly wonder how “a sequel that you have likely never heard of” has grossed so much.[iii] These reactions are entirely predictable, as the entertainment blogosphere’s persistent and willful ignorance of global animation remains largely unchecked. Never mind that the original Ne Zha (Yu Yang, 2019) is available to stream on various subscription services and that its box office popularity was covered, with the same incredulous tone, by the very same sources back in 2019.[iv]

To those of us who have followed recent trends in Chinese CG animation, the film’s success did not come as a surprise.[v]I teach White Snake (Amp Wong and Ji Zhao, 2019) as a case study of contemporary digital animation in my “Global History of Animation” course at San Francisco State University. I’ve been singing the original Ne Zha’s praises to anyone interested in looking beyond Hollywood for visually ambitious, fast-paced commercial animation. As a scholar and teacher of digital animation, I am constantly looking for – and always thrilled to find – international animated features which affirm an understanding of digital animation as a rich and diverse global medium with a wide range of aesthetic possibilities, rather than an artform and visual style synonymous with Disney/Pixar or DreamWorks. Continue reading Ne Zha 2 review →

Ne Zha 2 and the Evolution of CGI Blockbusters (2)

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Yes, Magnus. People are talking a good deal about all of what you query, and more. Whether they are writing and in which fora is unclear. Writing is not available in digital forms, in large part because of the scrubbing the China Digital Times notes. I’ve seen both films — Ne Zha 1 & 2, as well as the 1979 version — and have had a large number of conversations about them. You might recognize the limits of what can be said/written/ done in public at this point, in China or Hong Kong. Given the tech-heavy tech-concentrated sets of concerns in China/HK today — China’s desire for superiority in tech-related matters, HK universities’ huge investments in AI and technology, coupled with the gutting of US institutions and funding for everything under the sun — the technological achievements are receiving a lot of attention. Obviously, this and nationalist pride are modes of avoiding discussion of content. But NO ONE I’ve spoken to is unaware of the radically transformed family relations of the movie from the original story. And nor is anyone in doubt about how the mother is sacrificed to secure the patriarchy towards the end of Ne Zha 2. So, yes, you are not the only person to have noticed these issues. They are widely discussed and topics of huge numbers of conversations.

Rebecca Karl <rek2@nyu.edu>

Nezha 2 and the Evolution of CGI Blockbusters (1)

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Has anyone seen any discussion of the actual content of Nezha 2?

I saw the film in the cinema, and what is perhaps most notable is that it omits (obliterates?) the core theme of the classic story: the tension between the father king and the son Nezha.

This father-son psychodrama, in which Nezha is entangled, has been brilliantly analyzed by Steven Sangren, not least in his book Filial Obsessions: Chinese Patriliny and its Discontents (2021). His theoretical insights, including on Nezha, were previewed in the article “The Chinese family as instituted fantasy: or, rescuing kinship imaginaries from the ‘symbolic’.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19.2 (2013): 279-299.

Are feminists and other scholars of China’s patriarchal authoritarianism reading this stuff in relation to the new NeZha film? Are they, or anyone, writing on the yawning black hole at the heart of the new Nezha 2 film?

And ps. Is the film really regarded as “good” because the flashy animation sells? The film itself is actually pretty bad. Not sure why so many tickets sold. A more complex picture of opinions inside China, now mostly and predictably censored, is here at China Digital Times.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Nezha 2 and the Evolution of CGI Blockbusters

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Techno-Nationalism and the Rise of Chinese Animation: Nezha 2 and the Evolution of CGI Blockbusters in China
Speaker: Daisy Yan Du (HKUST)
Date & Time: Mar 26, 2025 11:00 AM EST
Register Here

Description

3D CGI (computer-generated imagery) animation has long been regarded as an American innovation, pioneered by Pixar’s groundbreaking animated feature film, Toy Story (1995). For Chinese animators, mastering 3D CGI technology—a more complex and technically demanding medium compared to 2D animation—has represented an important step in advancing the country’s animation industry. The journey began with the release of China’s first 3D CGI animated feature film, Little Tiger Banban (2001), and progressed through technological milestones such as Thru the Moebius Strip (2004), marking the gradual maturation of Chinese 3D CGI animation. However, it was not until the release of blockbusters like Monkey King: Hero is Back (2015) and Nezha (2019) that Chinese CGI technology began to achieve significant commercial success domestically. The recent global acclaim for Nezha 2 (2025), with its stunning visual effects proudly touted as “made in China,” has sparked a sense of national cultural achievement. Watching the film and contributing to its record-breaking box office sales became a way for audiences to celebrate the progress of Chinese animation. As the highest-grossing animated feature film in world history, surpassing Disney and Pixar, Nezha 2 not only signifies the rise of Chinese animation on the global stage but also underscores the growing influence of Chinese CGI technology in the realms of computer graphics and the creative industries worldwide. This program is part of China Center’s “Considering China Webinar Series”, exploring important topics related to China’s many facets with the local community. Continue reading Nezha 2 and the Evolution of CGI Blockbusters →

Hostile reaction to Huo Meng’s ‘Living the Land’

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Soure: China Digital Times (3/6/25)
Hostile Weibo Reactions to Filmmaker Huo Meng’s Berlin Film Fest Win: “Chinese Cinema Has Never Been As Conflicted As It Is Today”
By Cindy Carter

While Weibo and other Chinese social media platforms continue to generate congratulatory content about the animated box-office smash “Ne Zha 2,” the reception for “Living the Land,” a moving and realistic film about life in the Chinese countryside in the early 1990s, has been decidedly less welcoming. After its director and screenwriter, Huo Meng, won the Silver Bear Award for Best Director at the recent 2025 Berlin Film Festival, Weibo was flooded with negative comments, including accusations that the filmmaker played up rural poverty in China to curry favor with foreign audiences.

The poster shows a small boy and a young woman, both dressed in white funeral garb and white head-coverings, standing in a lush green field. The Chinese and English titles of the film appear in white and orange text at the top.

A promotional poster for Huo Meng’s film “Living the Land”

“Living the Land,” whose Chinese title is 生息之地 (Shēngxī zhī dì), depicts a year in the life of a Chinese farming village in 1991, as several generations of farmers try to come to terms with the massive socio-economic shifts that will soon remake their lives. The film’s young protagonist, a boy named Chuang, is part of the first generation of “left-behind children.” After his parents decamp to Shenzhen to seek work, taking their two older children with them, third-born Chuang is left in the care of his uncle Tuanjie, who never lets Chuang (who has a different surname) forget that he doesn’t quite belong in the village. When the boy innocently wonders where he will someday be buried, his uncle mutters, “This is not your place.” With non-professional actors and realistic settings, “Living the Land” explores complex intergenerational family dynamics, state-enforced family planning policies, developmental disabilities, “left-behind children,” farmers seeking ways to supplement their incomes, encroaching industrialization and urbanization, and more. Continue reading Hostile reaction to Huo Meng’s ‘Living the Land’ →

Window to America

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is delighted to announce the publication of Yuqian Chen and Christopher Rea’s translation of the film Window to America (Meiguo zhi chuang 美國之窗, 1952).
https://chinesefilmclassics.org/window-to-america-1952/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gtQlxBQeQo

ABOUT THE FILM:

Are current conditions in the United States of America making you want to jump out the window? Not so fast—there’s money to be made…on your death! Window-washer Charlie Kent has just finished cleaning the last window of a Wall Street skyscraper, and, now facing indefinite unemployment, plans to jump to his death from that very window on the 42nd floor. Mr. Butler, the capitalist from whose office he plans to jump, persuades Kent to stop—stop long enough to let Butler & Co. turn his suicide into a live radio spectacle and sell advertisements, ostensibly so that Kent can leave his family a legacy. Advertisers come calling, including H-Bomb Cigarettes, Maclini’s Suits, Harriman Unbreakable Glasses (“When a man jumps from the 42nd floor wearing Harriman glasses, his body may break, but the glasses won’t!”), Green Horse Whisky, Atomic Hair-growth Ointment…even the Spiritualist Society, which signs an exclusive contract for post-mortem ownership over Charlie’s soul. All the deal-making builds suspense about the do-or-die moment at which we will find out: Will he jump? And, more importantly, will we get rich? Continue reading Window to America →

Rethinking the Tibetan New Wave–cfp

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CFP: Rethinking the Tibetan New Wave
Editors: Zhaoyu Zhu, Chris Berry, Lei Hao, and Françoise Robin

The Tibetan New Cinema has emerged since the mid-2000s as a significant movement centred on minority ethnic identities in Chinese cinema, offering a unique perspective on the crises of traditional Tibetan culture and Buddhist spirituality as they face rapid modernisation and assimilation in Chinese society. It began with the late Pema Tseden’s 2004 film The Silent Holy Stones (ལྷིང་འཇགས་ཀྱི་མ་ཎི་རྡོ་འབུམ།, jingjing de manishi), one of the first feature films made in the Tibetan language by a Tibetan director. During a young monk’s homecoming for Tibetan New Year, his fascination with a new television set explores the tension between modernity and tradition in Tibetan everyday life.

Scholars have written widely on the Tibetan New Cinema, but so far, they mostly focus on Pema Tseden himself. One of the earliest articles on Pema Tseden is Smyer Yu (2014)’s ethnographical reading of Pema’s filmmaking from the perspective of transnational cinema. He argues that Pema’s oeuvre reflects the destabilization of the traditional Buddhist values under globalization and modernization. A 2016 special issue on Journal of Chinese Cinemas unveiled multiple perspectives on Pema’s films, including the road movie (Berry), ‘minor cinema’ (Frangville), the palimpsest (Yau) and the connection between landscape and identities (Grewal). More recent research examines gendered constructions in Pema’s films (Robin, 2020; Li, 2023; Pecic, 2023), as well as religion, everyday life and contemporary social change (Ding, 2017; Yang, 2024). Continue reading Rethinking the Tibetan New Wave–cfp →

Ne Zha 2 becomes highest-grossing animated film

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Source: Variety (2/25/25)
How China’s ‘Ne Zha 2’ Beat ‘Inside Out 2’ to Become the Highest-Grossing Animated Film in History
By Rebecca Rubin, Naman Ramachandran

NE ZHA 2, (aka NEZHA: MO TONG NAO HAI), 2025. © CMC Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

Courtesy Everett Collection.

This year’s biggest blockbuster (so far) isn’t from Marvel, Pixar or James Cameron. In fact, most Americans aren’t even familiar with the box office juggernaut — because it’s barely playing in the United States.

“Ne Zha 2,” a Chinese animated movie, has become an unprecedented smash, racking up $1.9 billion from nearly 80,000 screens after four weeks — and with little help from the world’s largest theatrical market. It’s now the highest-grossing movie in a single territory, overtaking 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which earned $936.7 million in North America. “Ne Zha 2” cemented the benchmark in 11 days; “The Force Awakens” took a comparatively glacial 165 days.

And the milestones don’t stop there: “Ne Zha 2” is the biggest animated movie in history, surpassing 2024’s “Inside Out 2” ($1.66 billion). Soon, it will be the first animated movie to cross $2 billion. All these laurels have turned the family film into a point of pride in China at a time when President Donald Trump is imposing new tariffs on the country.

“Since ‘Ne Zha 2’ is now competing with Hollywood films for records, it has become a duty to promote and support the film,” says Stanley Rosen, a political science and international relations professor at USC. “It’s become a litmus test of whether you’re patriotic or not.” Continue reading Ne Zha 2 becomes highest-grossing animated film →

Chinese Film, SOAS webinar

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Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age
Jason McGrath
SOAS China Institute Webinar
Date: Monday 10th March 2025
Time: 5pm to 6.30pm, GMT/ 1pm – 2.30pm, EDT

This webinar will take place online via Zoom. All welcome, but registration is required here.

Abstract

Discourses of “realism” have been crucial to Chinese cinema since its beginning in the early 20th century, but what exactly is “realism”?

Instead of having one steady meaning, realism gets redefined periodically in response to historical changes and in a dialectical relationship with various sorts of conventions – either by conforming to the conventions of a particular conception of realism or by claiming a break with all conventions to force a new confrontation with the real. The historical dialectics of realism and convention in mainland Chinese film history is the topic of the recent book Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age (2022).

In this talk, Professor Jason McGrath discusses the progression from critical realism to socialist realism to socialist formalism to post-socialist realism by means of this tension between realism and convention. Continue reading Chinese Film, SOAS webinar →