Episode 162 - Lotus Lantern (Chang Guangxi, 1999) (with Muyang Zhuang)

Lotus Lantern (Chang Guangxi, 1999).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Chris and Alex are delighted to be joined for Episode 162 of the podcast by Muyang Zhuang (Assistant Professor at Tongji University), who is a specialist in Chinese cinema, media, and visual culture in East Asia, with a special focus on animation and cartoons. In this instalment, the trio discuss Shanghai Animation Film Studio’s Lotus Lantern (Chang Guangxi, 1999), a film based on Chinese folklore whose animated adaptation in the late-1990s comes in a long line of reworkings of this most famous of tales. Topics include the context of state-owned animated production in socialist and post-socialist China; the (trans)national style and aesthetic choices of Chang Guangxi’s film and the politics of its Westernisation; European vs. Chinese folklore, the figure of the trickster, and links between the film’s musical sequences and character; the complex market forces that have helped position Disney animation as China’s monstrous other; and why Lotus Lantern is considered a landmark in contemporary Chinese animation.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

  • Chen, Shaopeng. 2021. The New Generation in Chinese Animation. London: Bloomsbury.

  • MacDonald, Sean. 2016. Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media. London: Routledge.

  • Yan Du, Daisy. 2019. Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s–1970s. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

  • Yan Du, Daisy, John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang, eds. Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

  • Zhuang, Muyang. 2023. “Animation of Experiment: The Science Education Film and Useful Animation in China.” Animation, 18, no. 2: 152-166.

  • Zhuang, Muyang 2025. “The Little Sun and cinema as energy in Chinese science education filmmaking, 1950–1964.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 1–18.

  • Zhou, Wenhai. 2021. Chinese Independent Animation: Renegotiating Identity in Modern China. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantREPRESENTATION, HISTORY, ANIMATION, CHINA, NATIONAL, STYLEComment