ABSTRACT
Socialist China under the leadership of Chairman Mao was often regarded as a period of closure, isolated from the rest of the world due to Cold War ideologies. As Michael Berry observes, the West (mainly America) almost acted like an absence in socialist live-action cinema after the outbreak of the Korean War. When live-action films failed to represent the significant Other, animation seized the opportunity, represented the unrepresentable, and even dramatized it on screen. Prior, there had never been so many Chinese animated films portraying the capitalist West (especially America), which led to the rise of the international motif film genre (guoji ticai pian) in the history of Chinese animation. The international motif film has long been neglected in Chinese animation studies, which are preoccupied with National Style films, such as those done in ink-painting and papercutting animation that articulated a distinct Chinese aesthetics and identity. Foregrounding the genre of international motif film and the frequent caricature of Western leaders represented in these films, this chapter argues that the coldness of the Cold War ironically triggered a heated imagination of the West that melted the Iron Curtain, generating a Cold War Occidentalism, or the over-presence of the West in socialist animation.
