Contemporary Chinese Animation Canon: Institutions, Festivals and Transnational Exchanges in Comparative Perspective - Olga Bobrowska, Chunning Maggie Guo

PANEL 2: WRITING ANIMATION HISTORY Utorak, 9. lipnja, 14:50-15:20

Contemporary Chinese Animation Canon: Institutions, Festivals and Transnational Exchanges in Comparative Perspective
Olga Bobrowska (Institute of Art and Design, UKEN University in Kraków), Chunning Maggie Guo (Renmin University of China, Confucius Institute of Geneva University)

This paper analyses the formative processes in contemporary Chinese animation canon-building endeavours in China and abroad. It focuses on twenty-first-century films acknowledged as particularly significant for the development of Chinese art-house animation and for the rise of new voices and modes of expression recognized by domestic and foreign audiences. Certain institutions and festivals serve as essential reference points for understanding canon-building practices in China, including Shanghai Animation Film Studio, Beijing Film Academy, Communication University of China in Beijing, First Film Festival in Xining, Pingyao Film Festival in Shanxi, Feinaki Beijing Animation Week. The specificities of the Chinese art-house film culture’s architecture are explained with attention to economic, media-technological and social factors shaping its development and institutional framework. Animafest Zagreb is treated as the main reference for surveying Chinese films’ presence in the Western festival circuit, as Zagreb has traditionally bridged Sino-Western art-house animation exchanges (see A Da, 1983; Ehrlich, 2001; Bobrowska, 2024). We argue that the development of artistic animation in China may be divided into four stages, three of which fall within the twenty-first century: (1) 1980s-1990s, Chinese-Western collaborations through ASIFA in Zagreb, Annecy and Shanghai; (2) 2000-2015, the debuts and pursuits of a generation of independent animators, including Chen Xi and An Xu, Lei Lei, Liu Jian, Shen Jie, Guo Chunning and Yan Baishen, Xun Sun; (3) 2015-2020, intense exchanges between professional and academic communities and the steady presence of student films in festival programmes; and (4) 2020-currently, when art-house animation faces COVID-19 and post-pandemic challenges while a new generation successfully enters the festival stage (e.g., Sun YiYang, Xie Li, Tang ShiYu). These stages are explored through a comparative analysis of selected films treated as case studies illustrating the aesthetic and thematic orientations shaping Chinese and Western cultural ecosystems in contemporary animation canon formation. 

Olga Bobrowska, PhD, is an animated film scholar, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art and Design of the UKEN University in Kraków (Uniwersytet Komisji Edukacji Narodowej), co-founder and festival director of StopTrik International Film Festival (Maribor, Slovenia), film culture activist and curator. She authored two monographs published by the CRC Press (Chinese Animated Film and Ideology, 1940s-1970s. Fighting Puppets, 2023; Chinese Animated Film and Ideology. Tradition, Innovation, and Interculturality, 2024). She co-edited books Obsession, Perversion, Rebellion. Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation (2016) and Propaganda, Ideology, Animation. Twisted Dreams of History (2019). She is a permanent contributor of Zippy Frames.

Chunning (Maggie) Guo teaches at Renmin University of China. She earned her PhD in independent animation. She has been invited to present 20 papers in more than 10 international conferences, including at Animafest Scanner, SAS, IAC, Under the Radar, Expanded Animation. Her collaborative animation work Ketchup has been screened at more than 20 international film and animation festivals and received the Best Short award at the Chinese Independent Film Festival in 2014 and the NETPAC Award at the Busan International Short Film Festival in 2015. She has published more than 40 papers in Chinese and international journals, including Contemporary Cinema, Contemporary Animation, Aesthetics, National Art, Cartoon and Animation Studies, and Epistémè. She has also contributed papers to publications in Poland and to Global Animation Theory, published by Bloomsbury in New York.