Princess Iron Fan c.1941 : The First Full Length Chinese Animated Film

The Wan brothers — Chaochen, Dihuan, Guchan, and Laiming — are the founders of Chinese animation (it’s written right there on Wan Laiming’s tombstone), and their first feature-length film began as an artistic act of resistance. Shanghai was under Japanese occupation in the midst of the Second Sino-Japanese War when, in 1939, the siblings decided to make Princess Iron Fan. They wanted to make something that could match Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had been released two years earlier, as well as represent their distressed nation.

The Wans looked to famous source material for their 1941 debut, adapting a section of the 16th-century classic Journey to the West, a novel they’d return to in the ’60s for their best-known work, Havoc in Heaven. Princess Iron Fan expands on an interlude in which the mischievous Sun Wukong and his fellow travelers tangle with a demonic couple over a fan they need to continue on their way. It’s a fight that culminates in a spectacular sequence in which the demon king transforms into a giant bull and chases the characters across the skies and through the woods until he’s defeated with the help of some local villagers.

There’s a slapstick logic to the animation that recalls the earlier Disney shorts, but the drawing style and the opera-tinged soundtrack are distinctively Chinese. Princess Iron Fan would, with a touch of irony, be exported to Japan, where it would inspire a then-teenage Osamu Tezuka to pursue animation as well as the commissioning of the country’s own first full-length animated film.

https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html