Tag: China

January 27, 2018 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Hapless slacker Tianyin (Jing Boran) inadvertently becomes the surrogate father of Wuba, an orphaned monster prince fated to be the ruler of his race. Accompanied by Xiaolan (Bai Baihe), a hunter initially only interested in the bounty on their companion, he runs for the big city, unaware that Wuba is wanted not […]

December 16, 2017 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. As its subtitle suggests, Wu Weihua’s book Chinese Animation: Creative Industries and Digital Culture delves into two specific elements of cartoons in China – the effects of disruptive transitions on a struggling business, and the massive transformations wrought by computers. Both these areas are under-represented in previous studies of the medium, and […]

December 6, 2017 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. As a rite of passage in her own world, the teenage Chun spends a week on Earth in the form of a red dolphin. A human boy drowns while rescuing her from a net in a storm, leading the guilt-ridden Chun to swap half her lifespan with the Soul Keeper to bring […]

January 9, 2017 · 0 comments

The best Irish-Matt-Damon-fighting-space-lizards movie you will ever see, says Jonathan Clements. In the 11th century AD, the last survivors from a group of European mercenaries finally reach their destination – Imperial China. Amid the rainbow-coloured rocks of China’s arid north-west, Irish brawler William (Matt Damon) and Spanish tough-guy Tovar (Pedro Pascal) surrender to the Nameless […]

July 3, 2016 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Although the title of Sean Macdonald’s new book is Animation in China: history, aesthetics, media, it keeps largely to an account of the group of animators and facilities that formed the nucleus of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1957. He has plainly realised that a little coverage of the pre-war Wan […]