Image Of Utopia

The animation "Uproar in Heaven"(1964),which is the first animation color movie in China,was adapted from the first seven chapters of the novel "Journey to The West"written in the Ming dynasty.This thesis focuses on two issues.One is what kind of a new image of Sun Wukong,known as the "Monkey King" was created in this animation;the other is what ideologies in Mao's era this image reflected.This research aims to trace the transformation of the Monkey King in literary and visual texts in Chinese history and reveals the relationship between this transformation and the shifts of cultural ideas and cultural polices in China in the 1940s to 1960s.This study discovers that the 1964 animation movie creates a Monkey King that represents the proletarian class and a heavenly Palace that represents the exploiting class.All of the images and plots are designed in accordance to the theory of class struggle,interpreting the class status and the reasons,forms and results of class struggle by means of visual images.The movie constructs its plots from the proletarian viewpoint and tells the story with relevance to the history of class struggle in modern China.A further implication of this animation is the increasing political struggles within the Communist Party from 1957 to the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.In the movie,the Monkey King led his little monkeys to destroy the heavenly palace that symbolized the old world and the old order,and replaced with a completely new,just and peaceful Mountain of Flowers and Fruit.In this way,the movie realizes the communist Utopian ideal in the image-world.