RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series - Animating the Atmosphere: Science Education Films of the People’s Republic of China and the Politics of Visualization in the Global Cold War (1962-1965)

This talk focuses on science education films using animation produced prior to the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China. These science education films used animation to represent and teach the general public about topics in meteorology, physics, biology, and even applied industry and mechanical production. One of the central conflicts in the use of animation for science education films, however, lay in the question of realism and representation. Focusing on films such as The Knowledgeable Elder (Zhishi Laoren, 1962) and About a Pencil (Yi Zhi Qianbi, 1965), my presentation of this paper demonstrates that animation became a controversial technology for visualizing and disseminating science in China. The use of animation in these films afforded greater creative license to convey scientific, technological, and sometimes futuristic processes, but such imaginative visual strategies simultaneously triggered political and cultural boundaries of representation. The question at stake during the pre-Cultural Revolution era was whether animation was the right tool to represent—and by extension— determine scientific knowledge. In this paper, I also demonstrate that film studio leaders, animators, and government censors debated, and were sometimes politically penalized, over these questions. My paper seeks to bridge discursive boundaries between the study of media and the history of science in the PRC, bringing into conversation archival materials from the Shanghai and Beijing science education film and animation studios, publications from the work of studio leaders and animators, and government censorship documents regarding the animation used in early socialist science education films.