Momotoro’s Eagles and Rudolph’s Red Nose: the Chinese Cartoon Connection

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Two quick pieces of Chinese-Japanese cartooning and animation trivia that I brought up of today during a conversation with @Brett_Fujioka who felt my post on Chinese manhua unfairly left a discussion of non-Chinese influences, 1 plus one more that I forgot to mention to Brett.

Trivia #1: Japanese Anime (Probably) Would Not Exist Without the 1941 Chinese Cartoon Princess Iron Fan

tezuka_princess_iron_fan

Chinese film scholars like Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow love to point out that Osama Tezuka, the godfather of Japanese anime and manga, drew inspiration from the 1941 Chinese animation Princess Iron Fan 鐵扇公主,2 which directly inspired the Japanese Navy to produce the first feature-length Japanese animated film, ever:

The immediate and wide-reaching success of Princess Iron Fan left a deep impression not only on its domestic Chinese audiences, but on the Japanese Imperial Navy, which promptly commissioned ambitious animation projects of its own aimed at bolstering the patriotic spirit of Japanese children-resulting most notably in Seo Mitsuyo’s Mornotaro’s Sea Eagles (Momotaro no Umiwashi, 1943) and Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors (Momotaro Umi no Shinpei, 1945), the latter of which is recognized as Japan’s first feature-length animated film. Among those who watched these unabashedly propagandistic yet lyrical and delicately drawn animations of patriotic monkey-soldiers coexisting happily with colonized simian jungle natives was a Japanese youth by the name of Osamu Tezuka 手塚 治虫.3

Rojas and Chow also point out that Tezuka explicitly references the influence Princess Iron Fan and the Wan brothers had on his career in his last film Boku wa Son Goku (I Am Son Goku)：4

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  1. I’m glad he raised this point, because I agree I could have been much more clear about this. I should have a post up in the next day or two with some examples of the ways manhua have been influenced and inspired by North American and European comics. [↩]
  2. (Produced by the Chinese animator Wan Laiming and his three brothers in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, who were in turn in turn influenced by Disney’s 1939 animated feature-film, Snow White. [↩]
  3. Rojas, Carlos, and Eileen Chow. The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford University Press, 2013, pg 648. [↩]
  4. The whole film is available online here. [↩]

Don’t Call it ‘Manga’: a short intro to Chinese Comics and Manhua

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Chinese comics, or manhua 漫畫, as they are known in Chinese, are hard to pin down, in large part because the term ‘manhua’ is used in so many different and often contradictory contexts.

Context 1. Manhua which are exclusive to China

Manhua by Yao Feila

“Take Love to the Limit” by Yao Feila // 《將愛情進行到底》 姚非拉

Generally whenever the term is used in English, it refers to Sinophone1 comics, or what are generally called guochan manhua 國產漫畫, or ‘domestic comics’2 within the PRC.3 In English the term ‘manhua’ is often used highlight the differences between Chinese comics and Japanese manga, similar to the way in which the term ‘manhwa’ is used to describe Korean comics. All the same, these comics tend to be very similar in appearance to Japanese comics. One notable exception are wuxia 武俠 (martial chivalry) comics from Hong Kong which were developed by Tony Wong Yuk-long 黃玉郎  during kung fu craze the 1970s, which seem to have more in common with hyper-muscular American superhero comics.

Context 2. Manhua as inclusive global medium

Manhua by Yan Cong

“Narcissism” by Yan Cong // 《自戀》 煙囪

In Chinese, manhua is a general term which refers to the global comics medium and therefore includes Japanese, Korean and American comics.4 One of the most interesting ways in which manhua is being created in this context today is the dixia manhua 地下漫畫, or ‘underground comics’ movement which is being spearheaded by artists such as Yan Cong 煙囪 and Chi Hoi 智海, who have helped organized the groups secret comics (aka SC 漫畫) in Beijing and Springrolllll in Hong Kong.

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  1. Belonging the Chinese script, language and/or cultural context. [↩]
  2. Domestic being used in the economic sense here, as in ‘gross domestic product.’ [↩]
  3. This is often abbreviated to guoman 國漫. Manhua from Hong Kong and Taiwan seem to use more neutral terms such as bendi manhua 本地漫畫 (local comics) or bentu manhua 本土漫畫 (native comics) for Taiwanese comics in particular. [↩]
  4. Nowadays, it’s also less commonly used than the term dongman 動漫, a portmanteau of the Chinese words for animation, donghua 動畫, and manhua, similar to how someone might say that they like anime to describe an interest in both Japanese animation and also manga. Dongman also carries connotations of video games, as fans of one tend to be fans of the other. [↩]

Graffiti Artist Squid Talks About His Monkey King Graff

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I have to admit I had not heard of the graffiti artist Squid  until I came across this image on @101GreatGoals twitter feed:

Vincent Tan (陳志遠), the billionaire Chinese-Malaysian owner of Cardiff City F.C., who is depicted here in red, about to be eaten by an irate Sun Wukong, aka the Monkey King, Painted by Cardiff Graffiti Artist Squid

I also had not heard of Vincent Tan (陳志遠), the billionaire Chinese-Malaysian owner of Cardiff City F.C., who is depicted here in red, about to be eaten by what appears to be an irate Sun Wukong, aka the Monkey King. Tan, it turns out, is not a very popular figure among fans of the Bluebirds, having changed the colors of their uniforms from blue and white to red and black when he purchased the team in 2010.

The upper left corner of the mural identifies the artist as Squid. There isn’t much on him online, although a quick Google search turns up a profile on the graffiti forum Fatcap which mentions that he is affiliated with the MK crew. His name also turns up on various Cardiff graffiti sites. Eventually I was able to track down his Flickr page, which includes a photograph of the mural dated March 12, 2014.  I emailed him to see if the allusion was intentional or not:

Have you ever heard of the Chinese legend of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong? Are you familiar with any Chinese comics or cartoons?

Yeah I’ve heard of the monkey king, I have quite a few books by Chinese tattoo artists with him in, I’ve read a few Lone Wolf and Cub comics, mostly samurai stuff which is probably Japanese now I think of it…..

For the sake of comparison, here is two-page spread showing Sun Wukong in ‘fierce mode’ (兇性) drawn by Hong Kong comic James Khoo Fuk-lung (邱福龍):

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Only Ten Percent of Ma Wing-shing’s Epic Chinese Manhua _Chinese Hero_ Has Been Translated Into English

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I recently found out that one of the first and only manhua to be translated into English and published in North America was edited to remove anti-Caucasian racism. In the first issue of the original version of Chinese Hero 中 華英雄, created by Ma Wing-shing (馬榮成) which was published in the early 1980s in  《金報》 [Golden Daily?] , the protagonist’s parents are killed by ‘foreign devils‘ 洋鬼子:

chinese hero 2

chinese hero 1

According to the publisher of the 2006 English translation, DrMaster, however “[a]s a child, Hero’s1 family was attacked and killed by a practitioner of Northern Mantis kung fu.”2 Rather than going back and re-drawing the comic, though, DrMaster skipped the first [undetermined number of issues of] Chinese Hero comics and jumped ahead to the birth of Hero’s son. The publisher also had the art re-colored and re-touched.

The murder of Hero’s parents by foreign devils is not the only plot point that Anglophone readers of Chinese Hero are missing out on. The original series ran for 159 issues with Ma Wing-shing at the helm before being passed on to Cheung Ma Yau (張萬有) in 1989, with each issue averaging around 130 pages. The eight translated volumes published by DrMaster average around 270 pages, meaning they each contain two issues of the original run. This means only  about 10% of Ma’s Chinese Hero have been translated into English.3

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  1. The protagonist of Chinese Hero is named Hua Yingxiong [Wah Ying-hung] (华英雄), literally ‘Chinese Hero’. [↩]
  2. DGN Production/DrMaster Publications： Chinese Hero: Tales of the Blood Sword vol 1 [↩]
  3. And that’s not even counting the more than 250 issues that were done by Cheung and other artists though the 90s and 00s! [↩]

Heaven and Earth

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天和地

很久以前，没有天和地， 只有一个很大的蛋。蛋里头睡着一个叫盘古的神。盘古在那个蛋里睡了一万八千年。

有一天，盘古睡醒了，他睁开眼睛，想看看世界是什么样子。可是蛋里很黑，什么也看不见。盘古用力一踢， 蛋破了，从里头流出来了很多东西。这些东西有的轻有的重，有的干净有的不干净。那些轻的、干净的东西慢慢地上升，变成了天。那些重的、不干净的东西，慢慢 地下沉， 变成了地。

天和地分开以后，盘古就在天和地的中间站着。天一天一天地变高;地一天一天地变厚;盘古的身体也一天一天地变高变大。又过了一万八千年， 天和地不变了，这时候盘古就死了。

盘古死了以后，他的气变成了风和云，他的声音变成了雷，他的眼睛变成了太阳和月亮。他的手、脚和身体变成了大山小山。他的头发变成了树木，他的血变成了河，他的汗变成了雨。盘古死了，可是他的身体变成了一个新世界。

A Primer for Advanced Beginners of Chinese: Volume 1, Lesson 5, Edited by Irene Liu and Hailong Wang (Columbia University Press, 2004)

Heaven and Earth

A long time ago, there was no Heaven and no Earth, there was only a very large egg. A god name Pangu was sleeping inside the egg. Pangu slept inside that egg for eighteen thousand years.

One day, Pangu woke up and opened his eyes. He wanted to see what the world looked like. However, the inside of the egg was very dark, and he couldn’t see anything at all. Pangu kicked with all of his strength and the egg broke [causing] many things to leak out from inside. Some of these things were light and some of them were heavy, some were clean and some were unclean. The light, clean things slowly floated upwards and became the heavens. The heavy, unclean things slowly floated downwards and became the earth.

After Heaven and Earth had split apart, Pangu stood up between them. Day by day the heavens grew higher, and day by day the earth grew thicker [while] Pangu’s body became taller and more robust. After another eighteen thousand years, Heaven and Earth had finished changing and it was at this time that Pangu died.

After Pangu had died, the air in his body became the wind and clouds, his voice became the sound of thunder and his eyes became the sun and the moon. His hands, feet and body became the mountains, large and small. His hair became the trees and plants and his blood became the rivers. His sweat became the rain. Pangu died, but his body was transformed into a new world.

(Translation my own)