The state, animation spectatorship, and cultural dislocation in the Reform Era

This chapter identifies and describes the intersection of the state discourse and animation spectatorship through an analysis of animated film and television programs produced in Mainland China between 1976 and 1989. The fragmentation of "classical" aesthetics and the cultural dislocation of animation spectatorship in China has constituted a struggle between an emerging consumer society and the visual power of animation narratives. The chapter offers a historical review of the immediate pre-digital era of Chinese animation by positioning it in relation to its own political/economic ambivalence. Twenty years into the Reform Era, the Chinese School found itself at the crossroads of visual history, reminding us of what the study of animation was missing. The chapter argues that the cultural identity defined in relation to the Chinese School of meishu film constitutes a narrative paradigm and an institutionalized form of spectatorship that in subsequent chapters will be contrasted with the major signifiers of sociocultural transformation.