Shanghai Animation Film Studio

Based on Wikipedia: Shanghai Animation Film Studio

In 1960, a Chinese animator named Te Wei sat watching the delicate brushwork of Qi Baishi, one of China's most celebrated ink wash painters. Qi was famous for his shrimp—translucent creatures that seemed to float off the paper, rendered in gradations of black ink that suggested both form and movement with impossible economy. Te Wei had a radical thought: what if animation could move like this? What if cartoon characters could flow and fade like ink dissolving in water, rather than marching across the screen with hard outlines like their American counterparts?

The result was "Where is Mama," a film about tadpoles searching for their mother. It won awards at Locarno, Annecy, and Cannes. More importantly, it represented something the animation world had never seen: characters that breathed and blurred at the edges, backgrounds that looked like hanging scrolls come to life. This wasn't Disney. This wasn't Soviet animation. This was something genuinely new.

The studio behind this innovation was the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, and the story of how it rose, fell, and rose again mirrors the turbulent history of twentieth-century China itself.

Beginnings in the North

The studio's origins lie not in Shanghai but in Changchun, a city in China's frigid northeast that had served as the capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo during World War II. When the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, the new government's Ministry of Culture gathered a small group of young artists and sent them to the Changchun Film Studio—previously called the Northeast Film Studio—with a simple mandate: learn to make animated films.

There was just one problem. They had almost no idea how.

Te Wei, who would become the guiding spirit of Chinese animation, was a caricaturist by training. Jing Shi was a painter. Neither had formal animation experience. So Te Wei did what any resourceful artist would do: he studied what existed. Soviet animation became their textbook, frame by frame.

But Changchun was cold, isolated, and lacked resources. In 1950, the team transferred south to Shanghai, where China's film industry had flourished before the war. Shanghai had equipment. It had experienced technicians. Most importantly, it had connections to the wider world of art and culture.

Young artists arrived from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Suzhou. And then came reinforcements that transformed everything: the Wan Brothers returned.

The Pioneers Come Home

To understand what the Wan Brothers meant to Chinese animation, imagine if Walt Disney himself had been exiled during the formative years of American animation, only to return and join forces with a new generation. The four Wan brothers—Wan Laiming, Wan Guchan, Wan Chaochen, and Wan Dihuan—had essentially invented Chinese animation.

In 1939, they had created "Princess with the Iron Fan," the first animated feature film ever made in Asia. This was just two years after Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," and the Wan Brothers had accomplished their feat with a fraction of Disney's resources, working in Shanghai while Japanese bombs fell around them.

The war scattered them. Political upheaval kept them scattered. But by the early 1950s, the brothers had reunited in Shanghai, ready to pass their knowledge to the next generation.

In 1957, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio was formally established as an independent department under the Ministry of Culture. Te Wei became its director, overseeing more than two hundred workers. The stage was set for what would become known as Chinese animation's golden age.

Finding a Chinese Voice

The animators faced a philosophical question that would define their work: what should Chinese animation look like?

They could imitate Disney, with its smooth character animation and realistic movement. They could follow the Soviet model, with its socialist realist narratives. But Te Wei and his colleagues wanted something different. They wanted to create animation that could only come from China.

This wasn't just artistic ambition—it was also political timing. In 1956, the Chinese Communist Party launched what became known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, encouraging intellectual and artistic experimentation. "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend," Mao Zedong proclaimed. For a brief window, innovation was not just permitted but celebrated.

The studio's animators looked to Chinese artistic traditions that had no equivalent in Western animation. They found inspiration in places that seem obvious in retrospect but required genuine creative courage at the time.

Paper cutting, for instance. Chinese folk artists had been creating intricate cut-paper designs for centuries, their figures flat and stylized with bold graphic shapes. In 1958, Wan Guchan and a young animator named Hu Jinqing adapted this technique into what they called jianzhi animation. Their first film in this style was "Pigsy Eats Watermelon," based on a comic episode from the classic novel "Journey to the West." The characters moved like paper puppets come to life, their flat forms casting no shadows, their movements deliberately jerky in a way that honored the source material.

Then came ink wash, Te Wei's breakthrough. Traditional Chinese painting uses water-based black ink applied with brushes to rice paper or silk. The ink can be diluted for lighter tones, creating subtle gradations that Western oil painting rarely achieves. "Where is Mama" proved this could work in motion. The tadpoles weren't drawn with outlines; they were painted as ink blots that swam through backgrounds of lotus leaves and water plants rendered in the same ethereal style.

There was also zhezhi—paper folding, similar to Japanese origami. In 1963, director Yu Zhenguang created "A Clever Duckling" using folded paper figures, giving the film a three-dimensional quality while maintaining a distinctly craft-based aesthetic.

Shadow puppetry. Puppetoon stop-motion. Beijing Opera styling. The studio became a laboratory for merging animation technology with Chinese folk traditions.

Havoc in Heaven

All of these experiments culminated in one film that remains the studio's masterpiece: "Havoc in Heaven."

Directed by Wan Laiming, the elder statesman of Chinese animation now in his sixties, "Havoc in Heaven" adapts the most beloved section of "Journey to the West." The Monkey King, Sun Wukong, rebels against the Jade Emperor of Heaven, fighting his way through celestial armies with his magic staff, his invulnerability, and his irrepressible spirit.

The film took years to complete, released in two parts in 1961 and 1964. Wan Laiming drew heavily from Beijing Opera, particularly its "military style" with its acrobatic combat and stylized gestures. The Monkey King moves like an opera performer, striking poses, somersaulting through the air, his face painted in the distinctive mask patterns of the stage.

The color palette is extraordinarily rich—golds and reds and deep blues that reference Chinese decorative arts. The backgrounds suggest classical Chinese architecture without slavishly reproducing it. And the animation itself has a fluidity and energy that rivals anything Disney was producing at the time.

When "Havoc in Heaven" screened at the Locarno Film Festival in 1965, international audiences were stunned. This wasn't primitive propaganda from behind the Iron Curtain. This was world-class animation with a visual language entirely its own.

Premier Zhou Enlai himself praised the studio's work: "Animation films are rather outstanding with their special and unique style in the Chinese Film Industry."

By the mid-1960s, Shanghai Animation Film Studio had produced dozens of acclaimed films. "The Magical Pen." "The Conceited General." "Buffalo Boy and the Flute." "The Spirit of Ginseng." Chinese animation had arrived on the world stage.

And then the world collapsed.

The Cultural Revolution

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long political campaign that would devastate Chinese society. The goal was to purge "capitalist" and "traditional" elements from Chinese culture. In practice, this meant destroying much of what the country had built in the arts and sciences.

The Red Guards—students mobilized as Mao's foot soldiers—shut down the Shanghai Animation Film Studio entirely. From 1965 to 1972, no films were made. The studio sat empty.

Almost everything the animators had created was banned. The irony was cruel: these films had been made to celebrate Chinese culture, yet now they were condemned for it. "Havoc in Heaven" was prohibited because the Monkey King's rebellion against heavenly authority could be read as advocating the overthrow of government. "Buffalo Boy and the Flute" was banned for "ignorance of class struggle"—apparently a peaceful pastoral fantasy was ideologically suspect.

Only two films survived the purge. "The Cock Crows at Midnight," a puppet film about peasants overthrowing evil landlords, had the right class-struggle narrative. And "Two Heroic Sisters of the Grasslands" explicitly praised Mao Zedong and the Communist Party, complete with songs about how the sheep's wool was white but not as white as the Communist Party's benevolence.

The artists themselves were not spared. Many of the studio's leaders and senior animators were "sent down" to peasant villages for "reeducation," forced to perform manual labor and engage in endless self-criticism sessions confessing their supposed anti-revolutionary crimes. Te Wei, the studio's founder and guiding light, was among those exiled.

When animators gradually returned to the studio starting in 1973, they found themselves making propaganda films with titles like "Support Vietnamese to Fight Against America" and "Expose the Peace Negotiation Conspiracy of America." The delicate ink wash technique, the paper-cut artistry, the Beijing Opera flourishes—all were replaced by bold graphic propaganda poster aesthetics serving immediate political needs.

This period produced one notable film, almost despite itself. "The Little Balu" told the story of a boy joining the Red Army, but its stark visual style—influenced by the propaganda posters plastering every wall in China—had its own harsh beauty.

Recovery

The Cultural Revolution effectively ended in 1976 with the arrest of the so-called Gang of Four, the radical politicians who had driven its worst excesses. Mao Zedong himself died that year. Slowly, painfully, China began to rebuild.

The animators who returned to Shanghai Animation Film Studio found they had lost a decade. Some of their colleagues had died. Others had aged out of the demanding work of hand-drawn animation. The institutional knowledge had gaps.

But they also found they still had their techniques. They still had their traditions. And they had unfinished business.

In 1979, the studio produced "Nezha Conquers the Dragon King" to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the People's Republic. Based on another episode from Chinese mythology, it became China's first full-length animated feature film—running over an hour, a format the studio had never attempted before.

The following year brought "The Story of Afanti," a puppet-animation series depicting a legendary trickster figure from China's Xinjiang Uyghur ethnic group. The character Afanti rides a donkey and outwits the greedy and powerful with his wit—a folk hero type found in cultures around the world, from Nasreddin in the Middle East to Anansi in West Africa.

In 1981, "Three Monks" adapted a Chinese proverb into a simple, nearly wordless film about cooperation. It won the first Golden Rooster Award, China's equivalent of the Oscar for film. The studio was back.

The 1980s brought new leadership and new ambitions. "Calabash Brothers," a paper-cut series about seven magical children born from gourds, became a beloved children's classic. "Black Cat Detective" created one of China's first animated action heroes. "Shuke and Beta," based on a popular children's book about two mice, ran for hundreds of episodes.

The Market Arrives

But a new challenge was emerging that ideology couldn't solve: economics.

Starting in 1985, Japanese anime and American animation flooded the Chinese market. Shows like "Transformers" and "Astro Boy" captivated Chinese children who had grown up with nothing but government-produced content. The Shanghai studio's handcrafted artistry couldn't compete with the sheer volume of imported programming.

The studio had to adapt. In 1992, an American company called Prrfect Animation made contact, hoping to bring Western production efficiency to Shanghai. In 1999, the studio released "Lotus Lantern," its first commercial animated feature—meaning the first Chinese animated film designed primarily to make money rather than fulfill a government cultural mandate.

"Lotus Lantern" featured celebrity voice actors and pop songs by famous singers. It made money. But it also represented a fundamental shift in what the studio was trying to do.

In 2001, the studio became part of the larger Shanghai Film Group Corporation, losing its independence as a cultural institution. It produced more commercially oriented work: "Music Up," a series about a campus band; "Big Ear Tutu," a children's show that ran for 130 episodes across five seasons and became genuinely beloved by a new generation of Chinese kids.

The studio even returned to its greatest hit. In 2011, fifty years after the original release, a new 3D version of "Havoc in Heaven" was produced in partnership with international post-production companies. The Monkey King now leaped through a digital heaven.

Legacy

What does Shanghai Animation Film Studio represent today?

The numbers are impressive. Around 500 films produced. Over 40,000 minutes of original animation. By some measures, the studio has accounted for 80 percent of China's domestic animation production over its history.

But the numbers miss something important. In its golden age, from 1957 to 1966, the Shanghai studio proved that animation could have a national voice. At a time when Disney's house style dominated global animation, when even Japanese anime was still decades away from international recognition, Chinese animators created something unmistakably their own.

The ink wash technique has been imitated but never truly replicated. The jianzhi paper-cut style influenced artists around the world. The studio's integration of Beijing Opera movement into animated performance anticipated the "Chinese animation style" that would later emerge in Hong Kong action films and beyond.

The Cultural Revolution destroyed much but not everything. Te Wei, who had studied Soviet animation as a young man in 1949, lived until 2010, long enough to see his studio's work rediscovered by international animation scholars. Wan Laiming, the eldest of the pioneering brothers, died in 1997 at ninety-seven years old, having witnessed Chinese animation's birth, death, and rebirth.

Today the studio faces different challenges. Chinese animation now competes globally, with massive productions and international co-productions that dwarf anything the early pioneers could have imagined. The handcraft traditions that made the studio unique—the brush techniques, the paper cutting, the folded paper—struggle to survive in a digital age.

But the films remain. "Havoc in Heaven" is still screened. The tadpoles in "Where is Mama" still swim through their ink wash waters. The Calabash Brothers still emerge from their gourds to fight evil. And somewhere in these frames, the dream persists: animation that could only come from China, techniques that honor centuries of artistic tradition, stories that speak in a voice the world had never heard before.

The Shanghai Animation Film Studio didn't just make cartoons. It proved that animation, like all art, can carry the weight of a culture—and survive even when that culture tries to destroy itself.