/co/ - Comics & Cartoons

>>237703
>China can produce VERY good animation

Oh certainly! They've been pioneers in some cases. It's just that Chinese animators' ducks have never entirely lined up until very recently, the local market hadn't been large enough to sustain natively-produced big budget animated features. As you said, The Secret of the Magic Gourd was a Disney co-production. Now we're getting a slew of completely home-grown Chinese animated movies that easily rival anything coming out of the US or Japan in terms of production value, and none of them need ever see the light of day outside China to make bank (though I sincerely hope they do).

Just in the next year we're getting the atmospheric urban fantasy Little Door Gods: //youtube.com/watch?v=oBY_OJbPWX0

The Miyazaki-esque traditionally-animated Big Fish: //youtube.com/watch?v=fl3BAZTJIsQ

And Master Jiang and the Six Kingdoms, which looks like someone locked Bryke and Ankama in the same building, handed them a suitcase of money and told them to go nuts: //youtube.com/watch?v=eA0JVAeSibc

And then there's Crazy Nian (<- see), which nobody seems to know what the fuck but everyone's predicting will make a bazillion yuan for some reason.

It's exciting times! I'm excited. I'm hoping other people are excited (it's really just me, isn't it?)

>>237718
The authorities are pretty hands-off when it comes to censorship, it's more about terrifying filmmakers into making changes themselves than fiddling around directly. One of the quirks of the Chinese film market is that there is no rating system - no age restrictions, no parental guidance, no nothing. The state film board ("SARFT") either clears a movie for everybody or clears it for nobody, there is no in-between. SARFT's guidelines for what is allowed and what isn't are arbitrary and known only to them, so filmmakers are left to second-guess what SARFT will greenlight and what they won't. For example, it's a-okay for wee tykes to see Japanese soldiers bayonetting babies out of pregnant stomachs, but it's probably best to leave on that one frame of two ladies in a Shanghai nightclub kissing on the mouth on the cutting room floor, that sort of thing. For a long time Chinese studios shied away from time travel because SARFT criticised how it indulged in nostalgia for despotic feudal pasts, and there was a general fatwa against ghosts because of official edicts against belief in the supernatural. Nevertheless, you will still see the occasional movie, TV show or novel that gleefully delights in ghosts and time travel...because there is no official restriction that can resist the power of bribery. 70% of the current box office smash Monster Hunt was reshot because the main star (Kai Ko) was arrested on drug charges and SARFT rules state that movies should not star actors indicted of offences. But two movies that starred Kai Ko were released after his arrest just fine with no official backlash. Why? Search me. Whether SARFT allows or bans a movie seems largely dependent on whether the censor had a cooked breakfast that morning.

One thing you may notice about all of these projects is the heavy emphasis on traditional Chinese fantasies and fairy tales and kung fu hijinks. Very little modern day concepts, very little sci fi, very little based on anything outside China's borders. You may remember some years back that the Chinese media establishment had a bit of a collective nervous breakdown over the break-out success of Kung Fu Panda (especially the sequel). Even before that, Chinese filmmakers and opinion-formers have had a bee in their bonnet about Disney's and Dreamworks' ability to package a flanderised chop suey version of their culture and somehow sell it to Chinese audiences better than Chinese companies themselves could. It prompted a lot of soul-searching, a lot of incompetent attempts at aping the Dreamworks style in a passive-aggressive way, and most importantly a concerted attempt to study what the secret to Kung Fu Panda's was and see if they could tap into something uniquely Chinese that offered the same appeal. I'm sure, once Chinese studios have found their feet and created their own homegrown success stories, they'll start to branch out into fresh areas and experiment with concepts that can strike a chord with the international market.