The influence of the Chinese social background/culture on the animation industry and the future development trend of Chinese animation

Monkey King (2015) and Nezha(2019) : Chinese animation and its cultural, social and historical backgrounds.
Tianyang Zhang
Animation
THE BOOST OF CHINESE ANIMATION IN RECENT YEARS
Rick Warren once said, “Those that innovate the future understand the history the best,” (Warren, n.d.). Animation plays a significant part in China’s cultural industry. As Chinese animation film industry has been making significant progress in the international market, what could be the crucial role of its history in the evolution of Chinese animation?
The New Monkey King
Released in July 2015, Monkey King was the most successful animated project in Chinese animation history that was created. The movie holds the current record for the highest-grossing domestic in China, after raking in $150 million at the box office (Chen, 2016). The Monkey King's foundations precede the novel trailed down to the Song dynasty. It is a story about a stone that gave birth to a monkey and suddenly, the monkey attained a supernatural power through Taoist practices. He was imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha after demonstrating his deviances by mocking heaven. Then, he attends a journey with a monk to recover the missing Buddhist sutras from the West India, where Buddha’s devotees live. The movie holds a positive attitude to the people, which proves that the movie took China's social media by storm with its excellent reviews. The movie Monkey King: Hero is back owed much of its success to key opinion leaders. On Weibo and WeChat, the key opinion leaders, such as Shijuezhi, posted unique and meticulous articles about the movie that influenced his millions of followers on his channels (You, 2019).
Based on a classical novel Journey to the West by Cheng’en Wu, the film Monkey King was directed by Xiaopeng Tian. It took the team eight years to finish the movie with a budget of about US $10million. Director Tian stressed the importance of integrating the Chinese culture with the traditional stories in making the film. Without imitating Western or Japanese characters, Chinese animators committed a lot of their time and effort in creating this animation film to express Chinese characteristics such as in emotion, expression, and aesthetics with its high visual quality. Tian also emphasized that perseverance and courage were the values expressed by the animated film. In an interview by China Daily, Director Tian admitted that he combined both Japanese anime and Hollywood cartoons into the animation. “We used our own traditional stories to resonate with our audience’s emotions, and technically we tell the story by means of the West,” said Tian, according to an interview (China.org.cn). The audience’s attention turned to the unique and purely ‘made in China’ style of animation with its quality that is nearly as good as Japanese anime and Hollywood’s animated film. According to one of the movie’s producers – Luwei Zhang – the animation transformed the classic story with the creation of the monkey’s new image. The film “directly appeals to viewer’s sense of sight with loud colors, dynamic action scenes and occasionally quiet background shots in the style of tr...