MCLC: Animation in China review

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Animation in China review
Sorry, there was a problem with the previous posting of this announcement. This one is correct. MCLC and MCLC Resource Center are pleased to announce publication of Li Guo's review of Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media (Routledge 2016), by Sean Macdonald. The review appears below and at its online home: http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/li-guo/. My thanks to Jason McGrath, MCLC media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk A. Denton, editor
Animation in China:
 History, Aesthetics, Media
By Sean Macdonald
Reviewed by Li Guo
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright February, 2019)
In the introduction to his ground-breaking monograph Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media, Sean Macdonald describes his approach as an examination of “a quasi-official corpus produced during a key period of PRC film and cultural history, from the 1950s to the 1980s” and conducting “a reading of the historically mainstream animation produced at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (or SAFS)” (2). Prior to Macdonald’s book, Rolf Giesen’s study Chinese Animation, A History and Filmography, 1922-2012 had provided a chronological overview of China’s animation industry and works.[1] Macdonald deepens our understanding of the national narrative of animation in the People’s Republic of China by shifting focus to the specific processes through which China’s state interventions in animation production can be problematized and historicized. To explicate the contexts for the “official, canonical, national history of China’s animation,” Macdonald begins with the story of SAFS, tracing its connections back to film production in the Sino-Japanese War period. The book re-contextualizes the national history of animation within transnational animation history while simultaneously reflecting on animation itself as “a nation-building industry” (2).
Chapter 1, “It All Started with a Monkey,” begins with discussion of the pioneering animator Wan Laiming 万籁鸣 and the animation figure Sun Wukong. Macdonald first examines Wan’s important autobiography Sun Wukong and I (我与孙悟空), which connects “film, art, and animation in one historic narrative of modern China” (16) and depicts the rise of animation in Republican China and the PRC. Macdonald offers insightful discussions of Wan’s early background in pictorials and political cartoons as well as of the cross-genre references to opera found in Wan’s animated Uproar in Heaven (大闹天宫). The chapter teases out the nuances and inconsistencies in the animator’s reflections and argues that the animated Sun Wukong is a powerful figure who comes to represent a period of historical transition; Wan’s Uproar erases the mythological legacy of Sun Wukong and recasts him as one “of historical actuality set against a negative, historical past represented by the novel” (23). To rehistoricize the Maoist reading of Sun Wukong as a figure of the masses, Macdonald draws from archival materials to suggests the possibility that Mao Zedong himself identified with Sun Wukong (27).In the introduction to his ground-breaking monograph Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media, Sean Macdonald describes his approach as an examination of “a quasi-official corpus produced during a key period of PRC film and cultural history, from the 1950s to the 1980s” and conducting “a reading of the historically mainstream animation produced at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (or SAFS)” (2). Prior to Macdonald’s book, Rolf Giesen’s study Chinese Animation, A History and Filmography, 1922-2012 had provided a chronological overview of China’s animation industry and works.[1] Macdonald deepens our understanding of the national narrative of animation in the People’s Republic of China by shifting focus to the specific processes through which China’s state interventions in animation production can be problematized and historicized. To explicate the contexts for the “official, canonical, national history of China’s animation,” Macdonald begins with the story of SAFS, tracing its connections back to film production in the Sino-Japanese War period. The book re-contextualizes the national history of animation within transnational animation history while simultaneously reflecting on animation itself as “a nation-building industry” (2). (more…)
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 6, 2019
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