The Difficulties And Solution Of Chinese Animation Industrialization--From Culture Industry Perspective

As a sub-category of modern popular culture, animation is imposing more and more impacts on the children, teenagers and even adults in China. Though Chinese traditional animation artists had contributed a lot to the world animation history for their innovation of unique paint-ink style animation and fabulous masterpieces from fifties to sixties, the Chinese animation industry was deeply hurt during the wreck of 10-year culture-revolution. After a short renaissance after the culture revolution, the industry suffered a huge brain drain lost when the outsourcing animation companies entered China and offered much higher salaries for the artists in the middle of 1980'. Chinese animation industry had been dropped into an awkward situation during almost 20 years since then. On one side, the huge domestic market is mostly occupied by foreign animations, while on the other side, the domestic animation companies could only survive by working for the outsourcing projects of foreign animation company. Though a lot of people tried to make their original animation projects during these years, they always ended up with failure, not only commercially, but also artistically. The study attempts to shed light on the facts behind the current situation of domestic animation industry, and also try to give some proposals on how to "industrialize" the domestic animation based on the experiences of American and Japanese animation industry, which is considered to be the only way to rescue the domestic animation industry.