Academic Presentation: Xia Animation in the 21st century in China

Xia Animation in the 21st century in China

As one of the earliest popular genres in China, the culture of xia (侠, or roughly translated as swordsman) inspires many creative works and adaptations in literature, fine arts, cinema, and animation. Animation in particular has demonstrated a close affinity with the genre since the beginning of the Chinese animation history, especially the subgenres of wuxia, which insert their characters in a martial arts world, and xianxia, where the world also has Daoist magic. Arguably, the first xia animation, The Magic Brush, was created by Jin Xi and You Lei in 1954, featuring a young villager Ma Liang using a magic brush to punish the selfish and arrogant emperor. Xia genre’s characteristics, however, were frequently borrowed by other genres, like folktale and mythic animation. Entering the 21^st century, xia animation has grabbed more animators’ attention in TV series and films, partially owing to the popularity of online novels and video games.

However, animated xia films have received less scholarly attention than Chinese classic and mythic literature, historical folktales in animation, or xia cinema, in part due to the slippery and overlapping definitions of xia narrative. In this paper, I focus on the popular yet less-studied genre of xia animation. I first clarify the definition of the genre by tracing the trajectory of the xia culture in Chinese history. I also investigate the history of xia animation in the 21^st-century mainland China and investigate the narrative forms over the past two decades. Lastly, by analyzing two films, The Legend of Hei (MTJJ, 2019) and The Song of Sword (Xue Jinsheng, 2022), I argue that, over the past twenty years, a narrative shift occurred in xia animation in mainland China. Moreover, I propose that the shift of narrative in xia animation reflects the change of Chinese animators’ cultural identity.

This paper was presented at the conference of Society for Cinema and Media Studies in March, 2024, Boston, MA, US.