Animated Encounters

de Daisy Yan Du, Allison Alexy

"China's role in the history of world animation has been trivialized or largely forgotten. In Animated Encounters Daisy Yan Du addresses this omission in her study of Chinese animation and its engagement with international forces during its formative period, the 1940s-1970s. She introduces readers to transnational movements in early Chinese animation, tracing the involvement of Japanese, Soviet, American, Taiwanese, and China's ethnic minorities, at socio-historical or representational levels, in animated filmmaking in China. Du argues that Chinese animation was international almost from its inception and that such border-crossing exchanges helped make it "Chinese" and subsequently transform the history of world animation. She highlights animated encounters and entanglements to provide an alternative to current studies of the subject characterized by a preoccupation with essentialist ideas of "Chineseness" and further questions the long-held belief that the forty-year-period in question was a time of cultural isolationism for China due to constant wars and revolutions."--Back cover.