The rich cultural heritage formed by the 5,000-year-long history of civilization has created different styles of animation directors, among which the Wan brothers represented by Wan Liming are the most dazzling.
Wan Liming, formerly known as Jia Zong, a native of Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, is the founder of The Chinese animation industry and the former director of the Shanghai Fine Arts Film Studio. Wan Liming is a Chinese director artist who deserves our respect, and his appearance makes our animation comparable to Disney.
One of the pioneers of Chinese animation: Wan Liming
In the 1920s, Disney's "Steamboat Willie" was released in China, which aroused the curiosity of Wan Liming, and in addition to enjoying it, he and his younger brothers Wangu Toad, Wan Chaochen and Wan Dihuan jointly explored the mystery of making cartoons. After countless failures, Wan Liming and Wangu Toad produced an animation advertisement "Shu Zhendong Chinese Typewriter" for the Commercial Press, which is the prototype and precursor of Chinese animation.
The world's first sound animation
Subsequently, they created China's first silent animation film "Big Trouble Studio", and in 1930, they produced "Paper Man Messed Up", both of which used live-action and animation co-production, creating a precedent for Chinese animation. In the film, Wan Liming attaches great importance to nationality, and the two works lay the foundation for Wan Liming's artistic style.
On the eve of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Wan brothers successively produced "Compatriots Wake Up", "Sincere Unity", and fable films "Turtle Free Race" to publicize the anti-Japanese war, expressing their patriotic enthusiasm.
The Iron Fan Princess
During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Wan brothers jointly produced China's first large-scale audio animation film "Iron Fan Princess", which was more than 8,000 feet long. The artistic image and shooting methods of the film have reached an unprecedented artistic height, and the works have influenced a number of famous Japanese animation masters such as Osamu Tezuka and Hayao Miyazaki.
After the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Wan Liming began to create new Chinese art films, and when he was the animation director of Shanghai Fine Arts Film Studio, he directed color animation short films such as "Encounter in the Wild" and "Big Red Flower", becoming a celebrity in the film industry at that time.
After 1961, Wan Liming threw himself into the creation of "The Great Haunting of the Heavenly Palace". The birth of "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace" shocked the world.
"The Haunting of Heavenly Palace" perfectly combines Chinese classical literature and opera art into an animation with strong oriental connotations, rich in decoration and humor, exaggerated and vivid image, full of interest, which has been praised by the majority of audiences at home and abroad, and has frequently won awards in the world, and Wan Liming has also reached the highest peak of art.
The pursuit of freehand style, pay attention to the momentum of the mood and national meaning, the formation of Wan Liming's unique artistic style.
In the difficult years when the Chinese nation has gone through dark changes and reappeared at dawn, Chinese animation has sprouted and grown in the cracks, and the Wan brothers are like a beacon in the night, illuminating the way forward for Chinese animation and ushering in a brilliant era of a hundred flowers in New China.
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