Keywords

1 Introduction

Since first Chinese animated film of Studio scene designed in 1926, Chinese animation have passed centuries progress (Jin 2004). Wan brothers, the early Chinese animators, started a new chapter of Chinese animation with persistent dream and unlimited creativity, although they had the backward technology and equipment and key technology was monopolized. Since Shanghai Animation Film Studio established, a series of classic animated movies with Chinese traditional special features were created, such as ink animation, paper-cut animation and puppet animation. Their animation works got good reputations both at home and abroad, and also create a nationalization model for Chinese animation (Jia and Yan 2012). Chinese animation went down for the impact of market economy and the entrance of foreign animated films. The animation development stagnates and the related industrial chain lost. Till 1999, the release of Lotus Lantern reversed the embarrassing situation, becoming the magnum opus which represented the transformation of Chinese animation from arts to markets and also started the reconstruction road for Chinese nationalization animation (Liu 2001).

China has a profound cultural heritage, which has given birth to myriad of unique material. In view of the current domestic development of animation industry, animators imitate the styles of America and Japan excessively, which contain a large number of Western elements from character modeling to story building. Chinese animation has been deeply influenced by the ideological trend of America and Japan, and it has been impacted by commercial consideration (Wang 2011). It has showed a serious lack of confidence, and entered into an erroneous zone with a general over-reliance on imitation, including the excessive worship of the Hollywood and the Disney style, and then gradually lost themselves. Cultural products tend to be uniform; personality has become a fantasy.

Capitalist culture, with its strong economic power of developed countries, has a strong influence on the cultures of other countries, becoming the primary force for culture globalization. In the spread of animations made in the USA, Japan, Britain and other countries, their cultures are introduced as well. With the purpose of opening the world market, the culture transmission is not only an introduction of a national culture but also a transplantation of the values of western hegemony from social, psychological, artistic, and other perspectives. Culture globalization and localization have transformed into a two-way interactive process.

To take up with great challenges with Chinese animation, we should explore how we can boost the development, and meanwhile maintain national characteristics. Accordingly, since there is a huge market potential of Chinese animation, making a breakthrough in the mode of traditional thinking is indeed important to upgrade the domestic cartoon industry. The artistic and technical levels of film assure long-term vitality, while good market returns also offer funding for artistic re-creation, and because of this, it is worthy of value if we can find a perfect fit to combine art and business systematically. If Chinese animation wishes to develop normally, the core of the question is to create the excellent works based on Chinese mainstream culture. The animation creation will increase its value for creating from reality, to grasp the direction and form of the core of Chinese culture, which is a very important factor in finding the road to nationalization (Jia and Yan 2012).

The purpose of this research includes: (1) discuss the core elements of excellent animation; (2) analyze different characteristics of animation among China, American and Japan, to explore the development of Chinese animation; (3) deeply analyze the problems of the development of Chinese animation; (4) state the countermeasures of solutions for the problems.

2 Literature Review

Wu (2015) arranged the information of Chinese animation vertically from the beginning, development and integration, adherence and construction, confrontation and intensification. Animation in China, stretching across an 80-year period, has had many milestones, including what have been described as the two golden ages (1957–1966) and for about a decade from 1978 to the late 1980s (Lent and Ying 2003). According to the study, the process of animation is divided into six phases: the development (1920–1949), the classics (1950–1980), the integration (1980–1990), the adherence (1990–2000), the confrontation (2000–2010), and the exploration (2010–2017).

From 1920 to 1949, Chinese animation film began with the experiment of a combination of live-action and animation since 1920s. In American, the animators got rid of the sideshow and the game at last when the first feature length animation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was made by Disney in 1937, which took a substantial step forward in narrative art. Meanwhile, Chinese animation also followed the narrative style of Disney, such as Princess Iron Fan (Bi and Chen 1982).

From 1950 to early 1980, Chinese animation had made great achievements, with many films winning awards in the world such as The Monkey King (1964), Little Tadpole Looking for Mummy (1961) and Ne Zha Nao Hai (1979) (Jin 2004). It was the most glorious parts of Chinese animation, with special style, mystical imagination and classical works. At that time, the most typical feature of American animation was the entertainment like the movie Tom and Jerry. American intends to spread their own national view and values to the audience to reach similar cultural identity.

From 1980 to 1990, there were some excellent works in this decade, which were with profound internal organs and superior quality. But Chinese animation neglected the expansion of markets, with the single sales patterns and the limited creative thoughts, which resulted all followed the creation concepts by the older generations in the 80s (Wu 2015). In terms of creative content, Chinese animation still remained in children education essentially, which lacked of the understanding of contemporary concept for children’s education and research of markets in this period. In contrast, the role dispositions of American and Japanese animation were more youthful, vitality and rebellious, which precisely catered to the youngsters’ pleasure and occupied a considerable portion of Chinese animation market share (Lin 2012).

Till 1990s, the once-grand Shanghai Animation Film Studio almost didn’t have magnum opus. There were some reasons about this phenomenon such as the popular of the processing animation, the impact of foreign TV cartoons and the hysteresis of the management system, resulted in the brain that drained sharply (Lin 2012). In the meanwhile, Lotus Lantern designed in 1999 as a return work for national culture and elaborate works, whereas it also had drawbacks on story structures, characters and scenarios. This film drew on Chinese style but also adapted Disneyesque animal animation, whilst Lotus Lantern was particularly dependent on Pocahontas (1995) for its indigenous (Stephanie 2005).

From 2000 to 2010, the popular Chinese animated films of this period nearly imitated the foreign cartoons, specifically, lack of innovation. In order to let audience be curious about the works and transmit its culture, American was adept at creating with exotic cultures and reorganizing the cultural symbols in shape, narrative and technology by American style (Mi and An 2011). Kung Fu Panda, an animated film produced and distributed by Dream Works in 2008, has attracted worldwide attention. There is a popular tendency in Hollywood movies that Chinese elements have been gradually adopted with a feature of intense cultural impressions and Chinese values (Guo 2010).

From 2010 to 2017, Chinese animation (e.g., Monkey King: Hero is Back, Quebec Pull and Big Fish & Begonia) starts to explore and develop in the progress of cultural globalization. Monkey King: Hero is Back is the modern exploitation of traditional cultural resources, with Chinese spirit in audio-visual language area and cultural expression, and it contains the idea of modernity between a docking with pop culture and visual effects (Yang 2015). The same year, American framers had created masterpieces of different styles under constantly attempt, such as Kubo and two strings.

For the communication theory, Chen et al. (2014) built the research framework of turning poetry into painting, as shown in Fig. 1. from artist (addresser) creating art works (message) to audience (addressee), and the communication process should meet three aspects that are the external perception of technical level, the meaning cognitive of semantic level and the inner feelings of effectiveness level, combined with artist’s creation mode and audience’s cognitive mode, analyzing communication factors and function to explore audience cognition process (Lin 2015), and providing theoretical foundation for the animation model.

Fig. 1.
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The research framework of turning poetry into painting

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3 Methodology

3.1 Animation Research Model

This research is based on animation study model with the method of attribute evaluation, the questionnaire survey and MDS, and will make a large-scale comparative study of domestically and abroad-produced animated films, with the special focus on technical level, semantic level and effectiveness level to deeply investigate the connotation based on the differences between Chinese and Western cultures. Based on the previous studies (Lin 2014), the animation research model which combining communication theory with animation evaluation factors, was proposed to explore the model of animation research as shown in Fig. 2. A visual and acoustic communication of animation is a process of coding through the the artists’ creation and letting the audience decode. To discuss the differences between different times and places of the animation through image, color, lens, music and artistry on technical level; performance, atmosphere, plot, narrative and rhythm on semantic level and audience, theme, story, motif and connotation on effectiveness level.

Fig. 2.
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The animation research model

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3.2 Procedure

This study consisted of 4 steps:

  • Step1. Through initial literature review, taking the historical time as the axis, the researcher selected 13 animated films in three countries from the 6 stages. Every film is closely related to the factors of the cultural background, the economic environment, the political system and the social values with the same period, as shown in Table 1.

    Table 1. 13 animated samples
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  • Step2. Through animation study model, five relative attributes were found out from technical level, semantic level and effectiveness level, and then the descriptive words were presented to establish the questionnaire. There are 13 films, and each film has 15 questions, using the scale of 5-order score. According to the content of the subjects, subjects subjectively evaluated and thought whether they are consistent, and selected 1 if they thought the content was extremely consistent with the meaning of left words, and selected 5 if they thought the content was extremely consistent with the meaning of the right words. The subjects were 60 undergraduates from National Taiwan University of Arts, aged between 18–30 years old. During the test, the films were played one by one, and the subjects evaluated 15 questions of each animation after watching.

    The reliability of the questionnaire: reliability refers to consistency or stability of measurement results, and the reliability of this study coefficient was 0.801, so the reliability of this study has reached the standard.

  • Step3. Through the MDS analysis, the films were recombined. This study used MDS to explore the similarity and the dissimilarity of 13 films so as to understand the characteristics of each animation, and displayed the relative position of individuals in two-dimensional space.

  • Step4. Through the data analysis, to summarize the list, to sum up the three aspects of the evaluation by subjects, so as to compare the different characteristics of animation in China, American and Japan, this study deeply dug into the current problems of Chinese animation.

4 Results and Discussions

4.1 The Construction of Attribute Assessment

Based on the research model, this research cited two relative adjectives from the attributes on three levels, to explore the differences between the animated films. After extensive collection of information about relevant adjectives of Animation assessments, through consultation with relevant experts, they were converted into 15 adjective groups, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. The attribute assessment of 15 adjective groups
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4.2 The Cognition of The Spatial Distribution

Through MDS analysis, its purpose is to use the perceptual map for the analysis of perceptual position, and then we can see the evaluation of animation from technical level, semantic level, effectiveness level and the distribution of animation in the two-dimensional space. 13 films were evaluated by 15 criteria, and the evaluation matrix of the mean was taken as the basis of the reference analysis.

According to the Fig. 3, (1) early Chinese classic animation p3 and Disney animation p2 formed a cluster. Furthermore, two films that were the first colorful feature-length animation in their countries had high value in the history of world animation, and they had similar attributes in style. (2) Chinese animation p5, p1, p13, p6 compared with American and Japanese had different distribution area, which belonging to the fourth quadrant. The attributes of Chinese early animation were significantly different from the foreign animation, and ethnic style was sui generis. (3) p11, p7, p8, p12 that had the similar attributes from the perspective of division formed a cluster, and study tried to explore the reason that the recent return of p8 was combined with other excellent animation. (4) p4 and p10 had many commonalities, but also had great differences. (5) p9 that was distributed separately in a single region was obviously different from other films with a unique personality characteristics.

Fig. 3.
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The spatial distribution map of 13 films

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  • Group1. p2 and p3, with high artistic value and distinctive national characteristics, were early colorful feature-length animation. p3 of Chinese classical myths created a fabulous romantic atmosphere, and p2 from Grimm’s fairy tales was easy to understand and colorful. So it was named: Early Classic.

  • Group2. Even though there was no cluster between p6, p5, p1 and p13, they possessed attributes of traditional skills, single narrative and simple plot. The four cartoons have obvious national characteristics, which emphasized the importance of using national methods and drew on Chinese painting, folk art, Peking Opera, traditional frescoes and modern technology. So it was named: Traditional Skill.

  • Group3. p11, p7, p8 and p12 all used a superb technical means from two-dimensional, three-dimensional till stop-motion to reflect inheritance and innovation in lens language, character design, narrative and plot. So it was named: Cutting-edge Technology.

  • Group4. p4 and p10 could be compared with each other because they were all short sketch animation and extremely humorous. But they have big difference on the artistic quality. For instance, p10 that had rough production methods and it was hard to reach p4 on visual effect. So it was named: Humor and Entertainment.

  • Group5. p9 was a highly stylized Japanese animation. Director Hayao Miyazaki’s works contained the reflective issues of dream, environmental protection and existence, with beautiful image, variegated scene and imaginative color. His animation of the unique world view and the humanistic values influenced the trend of Japanese animation in past ten years, and he was good at using animated techniques to reflect human civilization. So it was named: Unique style.

4.3 Analysis and Comparison of Attributes

Through tabulation analysis, comprehending the views of subjects on the technical level, semantic level and effectiveness level, to compare the differences among three countries, and then looking for the development of Chinese animation context. 3 was the average in the list, and it was the greater tendency if the score was much less or bigger. The numeric list of the gray area represented the scores are similar. Another table summarized the attributes of each film, in order to find the differences from the three levels.

Early Classic: it shows that two films had similar attributes and typical features by themselves. The score of f6 and f8 is greater than 3 between two films, and the score of f1, f5, f11, f14, f9, f7, f12 is less than 3 between two films, and the score of f2 is closer to 3 between two films. P2: f4, f15, f3 at both ends of the list, P3: f15, f10 at both ends of the list, they were the obvious attributes, as shown in Table 3.

Table 3. The evaluation of the sorts by Early Classic
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Traditional Skill: p1, p5, p13, and p6 had the similar attributes such as f14, f12, f11, f3 and f1 which belonged to effectiveness level. Therefore, the four films formed their own distinctive artistic features with different skills through the creation of technical and semantic level. Among which, the unique attributes of p1 were f8, f5, f15 and f10, and the unique attributes of p5 were f5 and f4, and the unique attributes of p13 were f13, f2, f5 and f15. P6 was the 90’s animation work and its unique attributes were f2 and f9, which was regard as the regression of National creation and delicate art. But p6 had the defect that imitated with Hollywood animation from the design of character and the structure of the story, as shown in Table 4.

Table 4. The evaluation of the sorts by Traditional Skill
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Cutting-edge Technology: four films used similar technical level (f5, f15, f14, f6) and semantic level (f7, f9, f10, f8) to reach the different effectiveness level. The score of P8(f14) was 4.39 which was close to p11, the high tendency of cutting-edge technology, and it indicated that subjects thought the level of technology of p8 had been comparable with Hollywood. At semantic level, the scores of the four films were close. At semantic level, p8 was suitable for adults to watch with the romantic theme and the moral story. Moreover, p11 and 12 all had cultural connotations, p11: Chinese elements, p12: Japanese elements, which used Hollywood narrative style to convey the mainstream values of the United States under the cultural form, as shown in Table 5.

Table 5. The evaluation of the sorts by Cutting-edge Technology
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Humor and Entertainment: according to the Table 6, it showed that p4 and p10 had the same market position at effectiveness level. The scores of f11, f1 and f2 were close, but p4 (f2) was higher than p10 (f2). By contrast, the humor of p4 was better than p10. There were quite differences between p4 and p10 at technical level and semantic level, and it could be clearly seen from the scores of f6, f4, f15, f7, f9 and f10 that the original lens language, the memorable characters, the vivid performance and the fleshy plots were the features of p4. By comparison, there were some defects of p10 such as the single lens language, the stiff performance and the boring plots.

Table 6. The evaluation of the sorts by Humor and Entertainment
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Unique Style: As can be seen from the Table 7, f4, f5, f6 and f14 were the higher propensity of attributes of p9 at technical level, which was very appealing with the somber tinge, the distinctive style and the excellent lens language. f7, f9, f8, f10 and f13 were the higher propensity of attributes at semantic level, with “time and space cross “ construction and the multiple perspectives narrative. Finally, it achieved the subject cognition on the effect level, which reflected the reflection of the social reality, and had the function of educational influence.

Table 7. The evaluation of the sorts by Unique Style
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Chinese early classic animation with the elegant artistry, the exquisite conception and the elegant color had a lower proportion of favorite by subjects. There were some problems of these cartoons, such as the simple plot, the single lens language and the kid audiences. If national tradition wants to be accepted by the modern audiences, it should add modern elements appropriately, such as support of advanced technology and the contemporary humanities. Monkey King: Hero is Back was the exploration of the cultural regression to realize the modern mining of cultural elements.

Pleasant Goat and Big Wolf which earned good ratings in China with easy understanding cartoon mode, had grasped a group of young audiences. This animation, which had the commercial success, cannot conceal a wide gap with Tom and Jerry in artistry. Tom and Jerry could be classic because of rich imagination, vivid expression and subtle actions. If Chinese animation intends to gain praise by public, it should enhance the artistic aesthetic value.

5 Summary

The core elements of excellent animation: exquisite craftsmanship, vivacious character design, elegant and meticulous color collocation, gripping background music and proceed from the camera language on Technical level; appropriate situation atmosphere, living performance, rich storyline, pluralistic narrative technique and unique rhythm on semantic level; the clear theme, the cultural connotation or reflect reality on effectiveness level.

At present, Chinese animation is still at the stage of exploration, and there is a big gap between America and Japan. On technical level, it’s lack of modeling diversity and innovation, and it has younger-age trend; on semantic level, role performance is not good at creating a favorable atmosphere, and the plot of the narrative is single and simple; On effectiveness level, lack of emotional touching, it didn’t pay attention to the mining of traditional art and culture connotation. But at present there are also several exploratory animation powerful return, such as the Monkey King: Hero is Back, which has a successful exploration on cultural context in terms of technology.

There are some reasons for the lack of Chinese animation. For instance, “China School “ emerging from 1960s to 1980s showed a serious limitation for artistic creation, such as the variation for traditional culture and the shortage of national culture education. Thus, younger generations are not familiar with local culture and traditional artistic form lack of ideas, values and imagination on the using of Chinese cultural elements. Another factor is the loss of the talented, which is the key to the competition between current Chinese animation and foreigner’s. Still another factor concerns the swift development of modern society and economical transition as well as the expansion of national animation market. Under such circumstances, animators still have to satisfy the various demands of the public, and as a result, they have been lost in blind imitation.

According to the analysis, we can see that early Chinese animation has strong ethnic characteristics, whereas they are gradually disappeared after the 90’s. It is the key to restore national tradition that we should focus on potential talents, train them to be more culturally-oriented in education, and pay attention to the integration of tradition and modern. The animation talents must be cultivated in the aspects of the script, the design, the performance, etc.

The creation of Chinese animation still depends on imitation from technical level to effectiveness level. The government must support the originality, which will become the strong backing for animation industry. Moreover, it is important to expand perfect animation markets and substantially build up successful brands and Monkey King: Hero is Back has provided a successful reference.