Lecture by Dr Stephen Teo: Chinese anime wave – converging art and industry

Chinese anime film has been a popular and commercially successful form in the Chinese film market over the past decade but has become a 'new hashtag' only in recent years.

The record-breaking commercial success of Nezha in 2019 paved the way for a string of critical and box-office hits such as Legend of Deification (aka Jiang Ziya, 2020), New Gods: Nezha Reborn (2021), New Gods: Yang Jian (2022), and last year’s spectacular epic Chang’an (2023). Together with past efforts like The Monkey King: The Hero is Back (2015), Big Fish and Begonia (2016), The Legend of Hei (2019), a veritable anime wave in the Chinese cinema is apparent.

Anime is also a crucial entertainment form across various Chinese media platforms including manga, games, and television. Adding further critical mass to the wave is the animated TV series Yao—Chinese Folktales, broadcast in 2023 in eight episodes, showing a comprehensive media impact of this new anime wave. 

The talk will discuss how this wave has come about and why we need to pay attention to it. What are the past foundations and fundamentals of Chinese anime film? What are its classics and how do they determine the present development? One of the most distinctive characteristics of Chinese animation is its close association with fine arts and traditional cultural forms, such as ink brush painting, papercuts, puppetry, as represented by the works of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio founded in 1957, and the recent Chang’an with its fascinating blend of Tang poetry and martial arts. This classical heritage is still very much in play amidst greater commercialisation and media transformations of the form. Does it ultimately detract and hamper the modern development of Chinese anime? Does it complement the post-socialist ethos of the modern Chinese state? Is there an independent movement of Chinese anime? 

About the speaker
Dr Stephen Teo is an independent scholar specialising in Chinese and other Asian cinemas. He was formerly associate professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University.

He is the author of many books, including Hong Kong Cinema, The Extra Dimensions (British Film Institute, 1997), Wong Kar-wai (BFI, 2005), Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2009, and 2016 second edition), The Asian Cinema Experience: Style, Spaces, Theory (Routledge, 2013). His most recent book is Chinese Martial Arts Film and The Philosophy of Action (Routledge, 2021).