A Study on the Reconstruction of Cultural Confidence in Chinese Animation

Abstract

Before the 1980s, the Chinese film industry had released many excellent animations with distinctive Chinese characteristics, such as The Monkey King and Prince Nezha's Triumph Against Dragon King, which were deeply loved by Chinese domestic and foreign audiences and created brilliant achievements in the artistic creation of domestic animations. However, since the middle and late 1980s, faced with the fault of domestic animation talents and the impact of the rapid development of Japanese and American animation, the Chinese animation industry has presented a situation of "continuous decline" and "being over the hill". In the era of globalization and digitalization, the development of Chinese animation shows the profound cultural anxiety, with technology covering up the story and other pressures and difficulties. At present, Chinese animation is in a critical period of national cultural reconstruction and high-tech integration. It is necessary to take history as a mirror, study and organize the animation elements in traditional national culture, create original animations in line with contemporary aesthetics, and build animation art and culture with Chinese new era characteristics. This has become an important task for Chinese animation workers.

Contemporizing the National Style in Chinese Animation: The Case of Nezha (2019)

“…With China’s opening-up policies from the 1980s, there continued to be production of animated films such as A Deer of Nine Colors (1981) and Feeling from Mountain and Water (1989). However, this era is often characterized as ‘stagnant’ or suffering from competition with Japanese and Western animation, which is also sometimes positioned as problematic because the latter ‘spread the culture and values of these countries’ (Wu and Wang, 2020: 287). It is important to note, however, that this characterization of the 1980s–2000s ignores the extent to which a lot of Japanese anime, as well as other countries’ animation, was outsourced to China – but it is not generally nominated as being ‘Chinese’; despite being Chinese in production, it was not in ‘content’ (Du, 2019: 227).…”

“…Similarly, The Magic Aster (2009) or The Magic Lotus Lantern (2005) were criticized for too many aesthetic similarities to Japanese anime and Disney (Li and Li, 2017). The recent successes of Monkey King: Hero is Back (2015), Big Fish and Begonia (2016), The Wind Guardians (2018), White Snake (2019), Nezha (2019) and Jiang Ziya (2020) have been characterized as a turning point for Chinese animation, in being not only technically accomplished regarding their digital effects, but also due to their representation of ‘Chinese national cultural values’ (Wu and Wang, 2020: 290). This serves to articulate these films to much earlier ones through an appeal to the notion of the ‘national style’, despite their numerous differences from earlier animation.…”

“…Nezha’s fight against his fate as a ‘demon’, rendered explicitly through his line ‘If fate is unfair, fight it to the end’, is here linked to a more general fight against ‘prejudice’. This reading is made explicit in Wu and Wang’s (2020: 290) description of the film as being about ‘racial discrimination and prejudice against certain groups of people’. However, framing the film as promoting ‘ young people to persist with their dreams’, and Nezha’s largely personal battle, delimits this as a problem for the youth (not a ‘race’), and individualizes such resistance, rather than clearly calling for collective social change in the face of specific forms of discrimination.…”

“…Unlike the criticism of The Magic Aster (2009) which focused upon aesthetic similarities to Disney (Li and Li, 2017), Nezha’s (2019) Pixar-like visuals are not read as a ‘foreign influence’ by most reviews, but instead evidence the ‘technological advancement of Chinese animation’ (Sun, 2019; Wu and Wang, 2020). As ‘computer animation of traditional Chinese characteristics’, the 3D visuals of Nezha (2019) are not read as ‘transnational’, but are instead discursively situated as ‘culturally odorless’ (to appropriate Iwabuchi’s, 2002, term regarding anime) as signifiers of modernity.…”

“…Because of this, ‘the film has been called “the glorious light of domestic anime” (国漫之光 guoman zhiguang) by netizens and media’ (Sun, 2019). The importance of Nezha’s (2019) box-office success was that it was taken as evidence that Chinese animation could compete with Japanese or American animation, but was also discursively framed as being indebted to an intrinsic ‘Chineseness’: ‘The success of [ Nezha ] lies in its success in conveying traditional culture’ (Wu and Wang, 2020: 290). Such mainstream reviews implicitly situate Nezha (2019) as a continuation of what is called the Chinese ‘national style’, a positioning which harks back to nationalist discourses which have often underlaid Chinese discussions of its own animation.…”