Liang Luo  The 2019 animated film White Snake: Origins (Baishe yuanqi), co-produced by Beijing-based Light Chaser Animation and Warner Bros., premiered on January 11 throughout China. It opens with an innovative, hybrid style of ink-painting 3D animation.[1] In the one-minute opening sequence, two snakes who have transformed into beautiful women, White Snake and Green Snake, … Continue reading Queering an Icon, Becoming a Demon: A Review of White Snake: Origins →

Yiman Wang Liu Jian, a Nanjing-based animator and director with a background in painting, has single-handedly launched the genre of black humor adult animation in China, and further catapulted it into the international limelight with two feature-length works, Piercing I (2010) and Have a Nice Day (2018). Produced by the Le Joy Animation Studio, which … Continue reading The Animation that Deconstructs Itself—Liu Jian’s Piercing I and Have a Nice Day →

Jianhua Chen; translated by Isabel Galwey The first ten years of the twenty-first century have passed in a snap of the fingers. Many trends have come and gone, but nothing has prevented the onward march of the globalized economy. The world, the globe, and our everyday lives are undergoing historic changes — and so are … Continue reading The Rise of Wolf Culture: Thoughts on Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf →

Silin Chen China was once proud of its top-notch animation industry. Animation classics produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio impressed generations of Chinese children and inspired internationally renowned directors like Miyazaki Hayao to pursue careers in animation. Having witnessed the decline of the Chinese animation industry, which was overshadowed by the global popularity of … Continue reading In the Empty Name of Zhuangzi ——The Arbitrariness of Semiotics in Big Fish & Begonia →

Haiyan Lee The 2015 animated feature film Monster Hunt (Zhuoyao ji) is a popcorn caper served up by a mainland-Hong Kong coproduction team led by director Raman Hui who cleverly meld the nonsensical (moleitau) conventions of Hong Kong cinema with state-of-the-art CGI technologies. It also rehashes the well-worn Hollywood motif of a bumbling everyman turned … Continue reading Monsters to Die For: On Monster Hunt as an Ecological Fable →