The Manchukuo Film Association and Its Afterlives: Animated Filmmaking in Wartime and Postwar Peking

Abstract

abstract: Scholarship on the Manchukuo Film Association (Manying) has largely attended to documentaries, newsreels, and live-action films featuring Li Xianglan, neglecting animation. This article examines the animated film-making activities of the North China Film Company, a branch of Manying located in wartime Peking, by focusing on Chinese animator Liang Jin and a few Japanese animators such as Asada Isamu and Onozawa Wataru. With an animated filmmaking philosophy of territorialization and localization, Manying nonetheless created a de-territorialized world that enabled it to live multiple afterlives in socialist cinema, despite the institutional efforts to erase it from the history of Chinese cinema.