Whenever I think about ye olden days of animation I am filled with nostalgia. I love the handmade look of old cartoons: cel shading, squash and stretch, low frame rates, and painted backgrounds. But when I get down to thinking on the nuts and bolts of the process—the time and resources and dedication that even the simplest traditional animation actually required—I am often dumbfounded. How did anyone ever make this happen?
Never was this truer than when I came across a lecture by Chinese animator and camerawoman Duan Xiaoxuan, in which she reminiscences of making animation during the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s.
“I was 14, and practically everyone I worked with was a teenager like me, fresh out of middle school in Northeast China…
When we made animated films, we didn’t have any film of our own….Sometimes we’d get halfway done only to find out that the film had already been exposed. There was nothing for it, except to stay up all night shooting it all again. That’s all we could do. Later, we used up all our paper, too, so we had to go to the secondhand market to buy more. We had to make the colors ourselves, by hand.”
from “Walking Our Own Path and Making Innovations in Chinese Animated Filmmaking,” by Duan Xiaoxuan
Hardly the conditions for making world-class animation, you would think. But Duan maintains that the war years were a crucible for her and other young animators.
“The conditions were really tough. But we were all dedicated to the cause, and we nurtured an important habit: even under very difficult conditions, we could finish a film.”
from “Walking Our Own Path and Making Innovations in Chinese Animated Filmmaking,” by Duan Xiaoxuan
Duan and others like her went on to become founding members of the People’s Republic of China’s state-run animation company, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS). With the PRC’s rule in China still precarious in the 1950s and early ‘60s, the government put their weight behind legitimising cultural projects. That included the development of a unique Chinese school of animation, where the form was known as “fine art film,” or “meishupian” (美术片 ). Although ideologically constrained in the decades following the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the SAFS was still afforded a remarkable amount of freedom to experiment with new animation techniques and develop its own distinctive voice.
A major result of this experimentation was the SAFS’s animated adaptations of traditional Chinese arts and craft styles. Most famous among these were their ink painting animations, starting with Little Tadpoles Looking for Their Mother in 1960. Based on the style of the popular Chinese painter Qi Baishi and brought to life by the SAFS visionary Te Wei, every frame of this 15-minute animation is its own ink painting—an achievement on the level of Loving Vincent, done decades before. Even watching it now, it stands up as an amazing piece of artwork, but at the time, it was nothing short of a national and international sensation. According to Duan, the film was so innovative that when it was screened abroad at the 12th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia, a festival goer cut out and stole a section of the film reel in order to study it more closely.
Inspired by its success with Little Tadpoles, the SAFS, Duan included, began work on another ink painting animation, The Herd Boy’s Flute (1963). But during the Cultural Revolution, the film was cast aside as a “poisonous weed” by the Maoist government over the absence of overt class struggle in its story. The government also condemned the use of the very traditional Chinese artistic techniques which had previously brought the animators so much acclaim. The remaining few works of animation that found any cultural foothold during the height of the Cultural Revolution would resemble not Chinese art but works of socialist realism of the kind that dominated the Soviet bloc, China’s western neighbor, at the time.
In the years following the Cultural Revolution, however, ink painting came back swinging. From the late 1970s onwards, animators could once again advantage of the advances and availability of new technology to push the boundaries of their art form. By the 1980s, the SAFS had got ink-painting animation down to a fine art, creating masterpieces like Feelings of Mountains and Waters (1988), for which Te Wei and his team actually filmed ink spreading in real-time across mulberry paper. Animators at SAFS also experimented with other traditional Chinese crafts in their animation: paper cutting, puppetry, and even Buddhist cave murals became sources of inspiration for animated works. After years of revolution and upheaval, animation was once again a way for artists to reconnect with China’s visual past and to reinvent it for the modern day.
In recent decades, digital imaging has made ink painting infinitely more accessible for Chinese animation professionals. Once too time-consuming for all but the largest state-owned studios, nowadays small studios and even solo visual artists can use animation to bring their ink paintings to life. For example, experimental Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong repurposed the style for his Ink videos, a series of animatics about modern life starting with Ink City in 2005.
The style’s mainstream appeal has lasted into the 21st Century, too: in 2010, creative director Zhou Jiahong led an international team to create a showstopping 3D ink-painting animation as part of an advertising campaign for China Central Television. The influence of ink painting animation has been felt beyond China, as well. You needn’t look further than the opening sequence of Disney’s Mulan, or the contours of late Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata’s watercolor masterpiece The Tale of Princess Kaguya, to see that the style has gone on to take the world by storm.
In the 60 years since the Shanghai Animation Film Studio started their creative experiments, ink-painting animation has grown and evolved into a new artisic tradition with a life of its own—but there’s still plenty more work to be done. As Duan puts it:
China is a rich treasure house of painting, arts, and culture, and there is a lot that is worth tapping into. We need to keep digging. But of course, we’ll have to depend on the younger generation for that. I think they’ll keep working in this direction.
from “Walking Our Own Path and Making Innovations in Chinese Animated Filmmaking,” by Duan Xiaoxuan
Personally, I can understand why ink painting, in particular, has been so very successful as a source of inspiration for animation. After all, the traditional craft is already so, well, animated. When you look at an ink painting, the lively, flowing lines seem to spring off the paper. Setting them in motion looks so natural that it’s easy to forget exactly how much painstaking labor went into every frame.
Then again, maybe that’s the case with all animation. And maybe that’s the beauty of it, too.
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