The animation of China: An interim report

This essay offers an overview of new scholarship on Chinese animation. It provides a survey of recent work on the emergence of a classical animation form in China and on contemporary Chinese digital animation and online video. In keeping with the range of scholarship addressed, this essay introduces a new paradigm for working through the genealogy of animation. It shows how animation, across a wide variety of materials, techniques and forms, fundamentally entails an assembling of disparate ways of constructing reality. Animation assembles (a) non-Newtonian spaces in which natural laws of physics do not hold with (b) quasi-Cartesian spaces in which historically engrained cinematic techniques for organizing space in accordance with geometric or linear perspective and scalar proportions are difficult to sustain. Thus, in methodological terms, it approaches Chinese animation in terms of media genealogy instead of media archaeology. In addressing what is Chinese about Chinese animation, it adopts the stance of critical area studies and postcolonial theory in order to delineate a genealogical paradigm for animation studies to be able to address the ongoing regionalization and globalization of animation production and labor as well as the increased rationalization of distribution networks.