Ghost Animation: How Manying Rebuilt Empire in Postwar East Asia

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This is the first book in any language to examine the animated works of the Manchukuo Film Association, known as Manying in Chinese, a studio established by Japanese authorities during the occupation of Manchuria. Long thought lost to the war, Manying’s films were rediscovered in 1989—yet, in contrast to the studio’s newsreels, documentaries, and live-action feature films, its animated works have largely gone ignored. In this book, Daisy Yan Du draws on research in multiple languages and rarely accessed archives to reveal that Manying made animation central to its mission, even harboring ambitions of building an animation empire across China and beyond. This unrealized dream did not simply vanish with the end of the war, however: its specter lingered, playing a previously untold role in the development of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean animation industries. Filling a critical gap in our understanding of the development of East Asian and world animation, this groundbreaking work tells the story of the surprising lives, deaths, and afterlives of Manying animation.