Educational Media Reviews Online

While the Walt Disney Studios prospered following its founding in 1923 and has long enjoyed international renown, the history of its Chinese counterpart, the Shanghai Art Studios, is a very different story, indeed.

Wang Laiming, who pioneered China’s first animated cartoon in 1922 and directed its first animated feature film in 1941, was a defining force in the studio, originally known as the Northeast Animation Cinema Group. Sent to Shanghai in 1949 by the new communist regime, he and others formed the Shanghai Art Studios, which flourished from 1950 to 1965. During the Great Leap Forward, 1958 through the early 1960s, the studio’s work was well known throughout China. By 1966, however, Chinese society was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution. The Buffalo Boy and the Flute, an animation classic beloved for its painted landscapes, was banned for failing to portray workers and communes; a just-completed animated feature, The Monkey King, considered one of the studios’ masterworks, was denounced as a “poisonous weed.” Wang and other studio artists were abruptly arrested and imprisoned. Production all but ceased for more than a decade, except for several propaganda films ordered by Chairman Mao.

The Lost Magic of the Shanghai Art Studios documents through interviews, clips and stills a remarkably creative group of artists and their fascinating body of work. A former studio artist who worked with Wang Laiming on The Monkey King describes spending nights at the Shanghai zoo sketching the animals’ antics; another recalls lessons by master artists in brush painting – a uniquely Chinese aesthetic very much in evidence in the films. Their stories are also filled with sadness over the events that eclipsed their lives and work.

Following Mao’s death in 1976, film production eventually resumed, but despite a number of releases, the studio struggled unsuccessfully to regain its lost momentum.

An interesting glimpse into an aspect of film history little known in the West, The Lost Magic of the Shanghai Art Studios is recommended – with the caveat that the rather poor quality of the VHS copy does not do justice at all to these artists’ beautiful work.