UC Berkeley

This dissertation, “Technological Futures,” examines animated media from mainland China, as it transitioned from the political regime of the Republic of China to that of the People’s Republic of China. This study emphasizes the role of animation and animated media in promulgating new modes of education, in representing national and natural histories, and in disseminating popular science. The dissertation argues that animation served as a new visual vernacular and pedagogical mode for socialist Chinese media, while also conceptualizing animation as pushing past the boundaries of genre studies and questions of medium specificity.

A broader, mass media context for a visual mode of animation emerged beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, encompassing not only animated films but also science education films, photographic slides, and popular science films and texts. This dissertation contends that such media in socialist China enabled the formation of new socialist subjectivities, national historical narratives, and spatio-temporal reality. To support these claims, this dissertation examines animated media from this period in conjunction with internal studio documents, film bureau censorship reports, educational publications, and critical essays published by animators and filmmakers. The research here finds that the use of animated media was fraught with questions of how to teach perception, and how to reconcile scientific representations of reality together with futuristic visions of the future. “Technological Futures” finds that during its earliest developmental stages, the socialist Chinese state utilized the affordances of animation—in its imaginative form, motion, and space—to envision its past, present, and future as nation.