Tag: China

February 12, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Rushed into production in the wake of the 1976 US King Kong remake (and originally intended as a King Kong movie, before the rights proved less in the public domain than the film-makers expected), Mighty Peking Man’s original title in Chinese translates as the much simpler Ape King. And to be fair, […]

January 13, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Daisy Yan Du’s newly published collection Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspectives focuses inevitably on the rise and fall of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS), which might reliably be described as the beating heart of the Chinese animation community for much of the mid- to late twentieth century. Refreshingly, the […]

December 16, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Stevie Suan’s new book, Anime’s Identity, cannot resist telling a story from the production of King’s Avatar (above), a 2019 Chinese animated series that subcontracted some of its animation work to a studio in Japan, only to send back the materials on the grounds that the Japanese work was not of high […]

June 17, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Released as part of a Routledge series of translations of Chinese scholarship, Sun Lijun’s two-volume History of Chinese Animation is the largest work yet published in English on the subject, boasting 572 pages on a century of innovation, tribulation and entertainment in the Chinese cartoon business. The book is unforthcoming about its […]

September 11, 2020 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. In these days of cosplay conventions and K-drama and Chinese sci-fi blockbusters on Netflix, it is easy to forget how little access to – and, let’s face it, interest in – Asian popular culture the West had for the vast bulk of the twentieth century. Not so in the other direction, however, […]