Chinese Animated Film and Ideology, 1940s-1970s. Fighting Puppets written by Olga Bobrowska

Sunday, 1. 10. 2023 at 14.00 / Vetrinj mansion, big hall

Publisher: CRC Press (Taylor & Francis Group)

This book examines animated propaganda produced in mainland China from the 1940s to the 1970s. The analyses of four puppet films demonstrate how animation and Maoist doctrine became tightly but dynamically entangled. The first chapter contextualises the production conditions and ideological contents (the so-called “new democracy” concept) of Chen Bo’er’s The Emperor’s Dream (1947), the first puppet film made at the Northeast Film Studio in Changchun. It then examines the artistic, intellectual, and ideological backbone of Zhang Chaoqun’s puppet film Wanderings of Sanmao (1958), especially in regard to the tradition of revolutionary visual and comic arts. The final two chapters attempt to outline the output of You Lei, a controversial film director strongly involved in ideologically radical tendencies within Maoism. This discussion presents the means and methods applied in puppet animation filmmaking that complied with the ideological principles established by Mao Zedong in the first half of the 1960s (Rooster Crows at Midnight, 1964) and in the midst of the Cultural Revolution (The Little 8th Route Army, 1973).

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Olga Bobrowska

is a doctor of Humanities in Arts Studies (she obtained her PhD degree at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in 2020; currently she teaches at the Pedagogical University in Krakow). She is a scholar active in the fields of animation studies, film studies and cultural theory, as well as a film culture activist and curator. Her main fields of interest embrace studies in animation, propaganda, visual discourses of ideological doctrines, problems of politicised representation, theories of narrative, adaptation, feminism and Chinese Studies.