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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
This is the first book in any language to examine the animated works of the Manchukuo Film Association, known as Manying in Chinese, a studio established by Japanese authorities during the occupation of Manchuria. Long thought lost to the war, Manying’s films were rediscovered in 1989—yet, in contrast to the studio’s newsreels, documentaries, and live-action feature films, its animated works have largely gone ignored. In this book, Daisy Yan Du draws on research in multiple languages and rarely accessed archives to reveal that Manying made animation central to its mission, even harboring ambitions of building an animation empire across China and beyond. This unrealized dream did not simply vanish with the end of the war, however: its specter lingered, playing a previously untold role in the development of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean animation industries. Filling a critical gap in our understanding of the development of East Asian and world animation, this groundbreaking work tells the story of the surprising lives, deaths, and afterlives of Manying animation.
“Daisy Yan Du offers a bold and speculative contribution to recent studies of Manying film history by focusing on the neglected arena of animation, which she describes as ‘ghostly’ because of its elusive, overlooked, censored and self-censored, generically ambiguous, orphaned, and fragmentary qualities. As she did in Animated Encounters, she writes within a transnational framework, allowing her to consider Manying animation in the broader context of East Asian, Soviet, North American, and European animation theory, history, and practice. By focusing on Manying animation’s dispersed and haunting afterlife, Du makes space for failed ambitions, uncertainties, and blank pages as she grapples with the book’s two primary assertions: War needs animation. Animation needs war.”—Karen Redrobe, author of Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War
“Bringing to light various shadows and ghosts, this book remaps the history and genealogy of East Asian animation and related creative industries. This inspiring work of ‘media espionage’ also features amazing detective work that pieces together precious archival remnants to reveal surprising connections across national boundaries and continuities over regime changes.”—Jie Li, author of Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China
“In this groundbreaking work on Manying animation, Du asks us to start seeing ghosts: to make visible what was always there in the history of East Asian animation but had been shunted out of sight, thought dead or forgotten in the graveyard of history; and to interrogate what created such ghosts, from the complex relationships between animation and war to the imperial dimensions of transnational animation production. The specters that appear here challenge us to rethink animation and its place in twentieth-century geopolitics.”—Aaron Gerow, A. Whitney Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages & Literatures and Film & Media Studies, Yale University