Daisy Yan Du's Animated Encounters presents a transnational history of animation in China during the late Republican era, the Seventeen Years period, and the Cultural Revolution, as well as a brief overview of the state of the animation industry during post-socialism in the text's epilogue. Drawing on both field studies conducted around the globe and expert archival research—and framed by a theoretical model that takes into account cross-cultural flow in terms of politics, economics, and aesthetics—the text sheds light on filmmaking in China from a fresh perspective.
Animated Encounters is organized into an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction explains how the supposedly closed decades of filmmaking in China were quite open to international exchanges that transformed both the industry within China and other nations’ industries abroad. In contrast to studies that focus on the discourse of a national style, this text attempts to “move beyond the reified...
