Labor of love keeps old animation art form alive

Golden era

Chinese animation has a history of over 100 years, starting with the three Wan brothers — Laiming, Guchan, and Chaochen — who produced the country's first animated films in the 1920s.

In 1957, China established its first animation studio — Shanghai Animation Film Studio, starting the "golden era" of Chinese animation.

One of the best-known animations produced by the studio was The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven, China's first color animated feature film made from 1961 to 1964. The film, inspired by the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, helped Chinese animation get a foothold on the global stage.

A five-second animated scene can hide the complexity of hundreds of drafts behind it, Zhao said. "This 'manual labor' is exactly what produced some of the classic moments in Chinese animation," he said.

The story of Zhao's connection to cel animation began in the late 1990s, when he was a young man captivated by the magic of the animated movie, Lotus Lantern, by Shanghai Animation Film Studio, which featured vibrant colors and stunning hand-drawn frames.

Released in 1999, the animation was inspired by a Chinese folktale about a boy named Chen Xiang saving his mother, a fairy, whose forbidden love with his mortal father is frowned upon by the deities.

He had grown up watching classic animations such as The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven, Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (1979), and The Legend of Sealed Book or Tianshu Qitan (1983), and it had been 15 years since the studio had released a major production.

"It had been a very long time since the Shanghai Animation Film Studio had released a new animated movie. It felt like my childhood was coming back, which made me very excited," recalled Zhao.

What made Zhao even more excited was that the same year the studio took in its first batch of students after it launched a course on animated films.

Zhao enrolled and soon encountered the cel animation technique and his lifelong calling.

As his instructor demonstrated the painstaking process of drawing characters on transparent sheets of celluloid, Zhao was struck by the beauty of the technique.

"The colors were so vivid, the shapes so alive," he recalled, adding that his teachers were recently retired veteran animators from the studio.

"And when you added the background, the image had a natural depth, a kind of layer that digital techniques can't replicate," he said.