Walking Our Own Path and Making Innovations in Chinese Animated Filmmaking By Duan Xiaoxuan; translated by Nick Stember (Panel Chair) Thank you, Ms. Mochinaga, for your wonderful speech. It was very moving. It really took us back to that special historical era. The next speaker is Teacher Duan Xiaoxuan. Teacher Duan was born in 1934, and first entered the Chinese animation industry at the Northeast Film Studio in 1948. After 1950, she served as the Deputy Head of the animation division at the Shanghai Film Studio, later serving as the Chief Engineer of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, and also working as an animation camerawoman and photographer. Her film credits include the feature-length cel animated films Uproar in Heaven (1961-1964) and Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (1979), ink-painting animations Little Tadpoles Look for Mama (1960), The Herd Boy’s Flute (1963), The Deer’s Bell (1982), and Feelings of Mountains and Rivers (1988), to name just a few of the over 30 films she has worked on over her career. Please, let us welcome Teacher Duan! (Duan Xiaoxuan) Hello everyone! I’m so happy to have been able to accept the invitation from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to be here today and have the chance to reminisce about the development of Chinese animation with our friends and the students in Hong Kong. Animated films go back more than 60 years in socialist New China, and this year is the 60th anniversary of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. As for me, I’ve spent almost 70 years of my life working on animated films. I started when I was 14, and I haven’t left the profession or the work unit since. I’ve seen and experienced a lot of the developments first-hand, so I’m quite partial to animated films. In my talk, I'll sketch out the early days of animation, how things grew from there, and some of the problems that developed. Those topics will make up the first part of my talk, and for the second part of my talk, I’ll touch on some of the challenges we encountered in the four ink-painting animated films that I worked on. I’ll do my best to try to keep everything under thirty minutes. In 1948, after graduating from the third class of trainees at the Northeast Film Studio, I was assigned to the cartoon section of the Art Department. At the time, the Northeast Film Studio was located in the mountains, in a valley. That was Xingshan, the place that Ms. Mochinaga brought up just now in her talk. During the Civil War, the studio had retreated to there. At the time, the Art Department had a cartoon section that specialized in making animation. What kind of animation? We made those maps with arrows that they used in newsreels to show all of the victories of the People’s Liberation Army, one by one. That’s what we were doing when I first got there. But our department also made two animated films: The Dream to Be an Emperor (1947) and Capturing the Turtle in a Jar (1948). The Dream to Be an Emperor was the first film that our department worked on. Originally, The Dream to Be an Emperor was a comic by Hua Junwu that was published in the newspaper. Thanks to Comrade Chen Bo’er’s support, it was made into a puppet animated film. You’ve Associationheard all about that just fornow, so IChinese won’t go into too much Animation detail. But I will say I know Studiesthat it was an incredibly tough film to produce. To make the puppets, they needed all kinds of materials for the puppets’ joints, for example, and for the puppets’ heads. The “heads” in The Dream to Be an 1 Emperor were made out of newspaper pulp dipped in starch. There were supply shortages of everything then, so it was really difficult. There simply weren’t good conditions for making animation, so they had to overcome all kinds of challenges to make the puppets and finish the film. I hadn’t joined the team then yet, but I was already there when we started working on Capturing the Turtle in a Jar. This was the second film we made, a cel animated film. It showed the victories of the Liberation Army, how Chiang Kai-shek was being encircled and trapped, just like a turtle in a jar. When I arrived there, Mochinaga Tadahito became my first teacher. You’ve just heard about his contributions to Chinese animation. At the time I was still a young girl. We were all young. I was 14, and practically everyone I worked with was a teenager like me, fresh out of middle school in Northeast China. There were also some students from military academies. We all studied together, but there were only 5 or 6 of us who worked on this film. After the two films were finished and we showed them to the troops, the reaction was really something else. After the troops watched the films, it was a big boost to their morale. Some of them got so hooked on them, two times wasn't enough, so we played them four times in a row. So this film was very successful. The two films had an enormous impact on the northeastern part of China. After we finished this film, our leaders knew what we could do, and they learned how difficult the conditions that we finished this film under were. When we made animated films, we didn’t have any film of our own. So where did we get it? The sound recording team. It wasn’t official, but we took whatever they had left over, and we put it in our cameras to shoot with. 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 second-hand market in Harbin to buy more. We had to make the colors ourselves, by hand. 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. Our spirit of hard work and struggle, of self-reliance, the foundations come from this time. I think my colleagues at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio were always able to do a good job after, because we had this conviction. No matter how bad the conditions were, we could overcome them to finish a film. After we finished this film, everyone was overjoyed. Even if it was still relatively rough, from a technical perspective, it still has a special place in my heart. But the more important thing was that our film established a solid foundation for the development of Chinese animation. That’s why I still feel this is the most noteworthy thing we accomplished while we were working together in Xingshan. By April 1949, most of the northeast had already been liberated, and the whole studio moved back to Changchun. That was when the Animation Team (katong zu/gu) was established, during the National Literary and Art Workers Congress. Te Wei, Jin Xi, and Jin Jin were assigned to join us in making animated films. Te Wei was a cartoonist, and Jin Xi had served in the army, making art. Jin Jin specialized in writing scripts for children’s stories. Why did they pick these three? Because we had been given the directive, among other things, that going forward, our animated films were to serve the children. That was the general policy. The second thing that Associationwas decided was that infor the past, Chinese animated films were called Animation “cartoons” because they cameStudies from outside of China. But after Te Wei arrived, we looked into the words that were used to describe animated films. That’s how we came to use the term “Chinese fine arts films” (meishu pian), as 2 we now call them, instead. We called them that because we had cel animation and puppet animation, and they both fell under the umbrella of fine arts. So we started calling them fine arts films. And we were called the Fine Arts Film Division (Animation Division) at the time. The third thing that was decided then was that we would move the base of development for our animated films from the Northeast Film Studio south, to Shanghai. That was because the material conditions were better there. It was easier to find talent, and the whole cultural atmosphere was better suited to the development of animated films. These are the three big directives that changed our work after that point. At the same time, we started work on our next film. The script for Thank You, Kitty (1950) was already written. The director, Fang Ming (Mochinaga Tadahito’s Chinese name), and the screenwriter, Jin Jin, took the five or six of us (pictured here) to the countryside, just outside of Changchun. We were supposed to spend some time delving into daily life there. We had to take guns with us, though, Type 38 rifles. That was because there were still bandits in the countryside even then. We did the prep work at the Northeast Film Studio and put everything we hadn’t finished yet into big boxes, in preparation for the big move down to Shanghai.