Event

Daisy Yan Du

The Dream of an Animation Empire

Films produced by Manying (Manchukuo Film Association, 1937-1945), a Japanese film studio established in Changchun, China during World War II, have long been considered lost to the war. Since some Manying film prints were accidentally discovered by several Japanese scholars in Moscow, Russia in 1989, Manying began to attract scholarly interest. However, the existing scholarship largely focuses on newsreels, documentaries, and live-action feature films starring the Japanese actress Li Xianglan (Yamaguchi Yoshiko). Few have explored animated filmmaking in Manying in any real depth.

While academia and the public are still unaware of Manying’s animated films, my research demonstrates that in the spring of 1939, Manying aimed higher than producing animated films, as it aspired towards building an animation empire in China and beyond, a dream that was later thwarted by the end of the war in 1945. The animation empire Manying attempted to build did not truly die when the war ended; rather, its ghost kept haunting postwar East Asian animation industries until Manying’s wartime dream of an animation empire was finally realized in postwar East Asia, across China, Japan, and South Korea. Excavating the suppressed shadow histories of postwar East Asian animation haunted by Manying’s ghost, my research will revise all our existing knowledge of wartime and postwar animation industries in East Asia and beyond

Daisy Yan Du is an Associate Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is the author of Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s–1970s (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), which is her first monograph. Her refereed journal arti­cles have appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Discourse, Positions, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cine­mas, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Gender & History, among others. She is the lead editor of Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion (Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2025), which is the first edited scholastic book about Chinese animation. She is also the editor of Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspec­tives (Brill, 2021), the first of its kind collection that comprises essays written by renowned animators rather than scholars. She is currently working on two monographs and edit­ing several volumes about animation and new media. She is the founder of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (https://acas.world), established in Hong Kong in 2015, and is dedicated to introducing and promoting Chinese animation studies to the English-speaking world.