Suspended animation: The Wan Brothers and the (In)animate Mainland-Hong Kong Encounter, 1947–1956

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Wan Brothers produced Princess Iron Fan (1941), the first animated feature film in Asia in wartime Shanghai. In order to produce their second animated feature film, The World of Insects, the Wan Brothers went to Hong Kong in the late 1940s and did not go back to Shanghai until the mid-1950s. The Wan Brothers’ encounter with Hong Kong was noneventful and non-spectacular, because the production of The World of Insects was suspended due to the lack of funds and artistic talents in postwar Hong Kong. The Wan Brothers’ sojourn in Hong Kong can be concluded as a period of suspended animation, a state of deep hibernation in history of Chinese animation. If we locate the Wan Brothers’ encounter with Hong Kong in the longue durée, however, we can see that it was still a necessary and important springboard for their later integration into the animation industry in socialist Shanghai and also for the belated emergence of the local animation industry in Hong Kong. The Wan Brothers’ inanimate encounter with Hong Kong would soon be reanimated and would even explode with outbursts of repressed artistic creativities and energies on both sides of the border, despite being belated.