UnAmerican Animation: Rockin' Outside the USA (Part IV)
Now before anyone (not looking at anyone in particular, Batty!) starts whining on about my racism, how animation isn't only a white and western form of entertainment, don't bother. I know. I've just been reading up on it and waiting for the proper time to cross over to the east.
And now is that time.
Time to look into
Of course, anyone who knows even the slightest bit about animation will know that the Japanese form of it called Anime more or less took over in later years, leading to some stunning advancements in the trade, however that will be dealt with when we come a little more up to date on things. But while all these developments, large and small, were going on in the west, how was the other side of the world looking at this? Well, like most things, China can almost claim to be the original inventor of animation; as far back as the first century BC, during the Han Dynasty, Ding Huan, an engineer, claimed to have invented a prehistoric version of the zoetrope, but it was the 1920s before proper animation began to be explored in China, with the arrival of the first foreign animation to their shores in 1918, Max Fleischer’s “Out of the Inkwell”.
I’ll probably go into this in more detail in another feature on Fleischer later - seems there’s quite a bit I missed out about him - but just looking at this cartoon it’s pretty incredible for the time. Fleischer begins by drawing a face, then each new shape is drawn, and then placed on top of the previous one by him, till a clown’s head begins to emerge, after which the clown draws the other pieces of his body towards him till he’s entire. After this he has a conversation with Fleishcer in which he mocks his drawing skill. This must surely mark the first time that a character talked back to its creator (even Gertie the Dinosaur just looked at Winsor McCay) and even argued with him, so very ground-breaking. This obviously tickled the Chinese, who began having a go themselves.
Wan Laiming (1900-1997)
Considered China’s first animator, Wan and his brothers would go on to produce the greater part of Chinese animation in the early period. As children, the Wans would eagerly await the return of their father, a silk merchant, from his business trips, when he would bring picture cards, paintings, drawings, illustrations, cigarette cards and all kinds of art home to them. The boys would then study them and practice drawing. Their father had personal cause to regret this though, as believing art to be a mere distraction he was aghast when his children chose it as a career, believing they could never make a living at it.
Wan (Laiming) became interested in book illustration, believing that this helped one appreciate the characters better, and also shadow puppet theatre, performances of which he and his brothers put on themselves. But static images was one thing, and the Wans agonised over how to make the images move, gaining inspiration from a Mutoscope they saw at the Great World, an entertainment centre.
Wan’s first animation was a commercial for a Chinese typewriter company, after which he was invited, with his three other brothers Wan Guchan, Wan Chaochen and Wan Dihuan to the Great Wall Studios in Shanghai, where they produced China’s first cartoon, 10 to 12 minutes of
Uproar in the Studio (大闹画室), no footage of which seems to exist. It seems to follow the idea, not surprisingly, of Fleischer’s
Out of the Inkwell series. In
Uproar in the Studio, an artist is working on his cartoons when they suddenly come to life and start running around the studio, causing trouble.
In 1932 Wan Dihuan decided that photography was a better and safer career for him, and left the studio, while the remaining brothers produced China’s first animation with sound,
The Camel’s Dance (骆驼献舞) about which little is known, and no copy survives. In fact, it’s becoming depressingly clear that though even very old western cartoons right back even the end of the nineteenth century can be found on YouTube, virtually nothing from China at least is available - I guess I’ll find out about the rest of Asia as I go along - so for now here’s a video someone helpfully made about the history of Chinese animation. Obviously, this goes further than we want to look right now, as we’re only exploring the beginnings of the industry in the east, but it will give you an idea of what was happening over there at the time.
The Wans produced two cartoons based on tales, these being
The Race of the Hare and the Tortoise and
The Grasshopper and the Ant, and then in the 1930s patriotic films such as
Wake Up (1931),
Compatriot (1932) and
The Price of Blood (1934), all to decry the Japanese attacks on Shanghai and Shenyang. Then from 1933 to 1937 they produced
Cartoon Collection, some of which were again patriotic films, such as
The Year of Chinese Goods, which encouraged viewers to buy Chinese products, while
The New Wave and
The Painful History of the Nation denounced imperial aggression.
The Wan Brothers were effusive in their praise for western animation, particularly American, German and Russian, but wanted to find their own national style rather than just copy Disney and Co. They also stated their intention of educating as well as entertaining, to teach history and moral lessons through their animation. Not that western animation does not do this sometimes too, of course, but it’s hard to see what lessons can be learned from
Plane Crazy or
My Old Kentucky Home... Speaking of that old “bouncing ball” animation, the Wans copied Fleischer’s lead, but in order not to necessarily entertain but to, as they had said, educate, making films about the Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion of their homeland and encouraging those who watched the films not only to sing along patriotically, but to join the fight.
Having by now moved to Wuhan, the remaining Wan brothers experienced the phenomenon of Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1939, and decided to see if they could come up with anything similar. Attached now to the Xinhua Film Company, the only studio left after the Japanese occupation of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, they cane up with an adaptation of the novel
Journey to the West resulting in the release in 1941 of
Princess Iron Fan, the first full-length Chinese feature animation.
And yay! Here it is!
Now you can see obviously that it is massively inferior to Disney’s masterpiece. For one thing, it’s still in black and white, and this is after all four years after Disney had wowed the world with full colour animation and synchronised sound. In fact, you can go back to the Silly Symphonies of the early thirties and see that America had already well sorted out the colour and sound aspect, and hell, even Winsor McCay’s
Little Nemo was in colour, if not sound, and that was back at the turn of the century almost. But it should also be taken into account that this was a) a country which had never attempted real animation before, whereas the USA and to some extent Europe had at this point had about forty-odd years to tinker around with it and iron out the bugs, and that b) we’re talking also about a country that had been at war, been invaded and occupied and finally c) this is a much more, let’s not say repressive but not exactly as permissive or expressive country as those of the west, where ideas were not always received with enthusiasm and where financing might have been difficult. So with all that in mind, this ain’t half bad.
The first thing that strikes me about it though is the way white light keeps bleeding through. It’s very harsh on the eyes, like someone shining a torch in your eyes, or like a candle flame that keeps flickering behind the screen. The figures are more one than three-dimensional - drawings more than animated figures, though there are some good touches, like the tears/beads of sweat and the use of perspective, especially at the castle or temple. I can see that
Journey to the West would be well known to people of my generation as the story behind the action/comedy TV series
Monkey, which aired in the eighties, about four pilgrims, one of whom is a Buddhist monk, travelling to India to obtain sacred Buddhist texts and bring them back to China. Obviously the Wans had not got the idea of sound synchronisation sussed, as the mouths move but nowhere near in rhythm with the words, but it’s a good effort for a nation which is a fledgling in animation while its western cousins are soaring in the clouds, riding the updrafts.
The film was a major influence on Osamu Tezuka when it reached Japan in 1942; Tezuka would go on to be the most famous and respected and influential animator in Japan, earning himself the title “The Godfather of Manga”.
Princess Iron Fan took three years to animate, and ran for seventy-three minutes, ten shy of Disney’s ground-breaker. Here though I’d like to take a quote from Giannalberto Bendazi’s excellent book
Animation: A World History, which perhaps illustrates the kind of conditions this movie was produced under.
This production, on the ‘orphan island’ of the French Concession in the middle of the war, was a real feat not only on the artistic level but also on the technical level: seventy artists, in two teams, worked without a break for a year and four months, all in the same room, in limited space, in the cold of the winter, and in the atrocious heat of the summer.
Can’t see Disney’s animators going for those sort of conditions, can you? To ensure accuracy, human actors were often filmed as a guide to the animators, and if you look closely, yes, you can see what appear to be real faces looking out of the cartoon ones. In 1950 the Shanghai Animation Film Studio would be established and two years later Wan Laiming would be elected its director, leading to his creation of, in 1956, China’s first colour animation,
Why is the Crow Black Coated (乌鸦为什么是黑的), again looking back to folk tales for its inspiration.
Wan’s next project,
Uproar in Heaven, would fail to see the light of day due to the withdrawal of investors and would not resurface until 1961 as
Havoc in Heaven, a full colour animation which would even go on to win international awards and establish China as a force in world animation. This burgeoning industry would however come to a shuddering halt in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao Zedong would purge China of any western influences and establish the iron grip of Communism over the country, throttling the animation industry for decades. Wan Laiming passed away in 1997 in the city in which he had worked most of his life, Shanghai honouring him by erecting a statue to him in recognition of his contribution to Chinese animation.