Western vs. Eastern: A Reflective Research on the Development of Chinese Animation

Animation in China, stretching across a century, has been through many vicissitudes. In view of the current development of Chinese animation industry, animators imitate the styles of America and Japan excessively, which contain a large number of western elements from character modeling to story building. It has showed a serious lack of confidence, and entered into an erroneous zone with a general over-reliance on imitation. The literature review of this research consists of the comparison of the animated films from different cultures and eras and discuss the related research models. This research is based on animation study model with the method of attribute evaluation, the questionnaire survey and MDS, and will make a large-scale comparative study of domestically and abroad-produced animated films, with the special focus on technical level, semantic level and effectiveness level to deeply investigate the connotation based on the differences between Chinese and Western cultures. To re-produce folk and re-shape traditional art, creators show prominent Chinese unique oriental charm in value, customs, aesthetic concepts, and so on. To raise feasible countermeasures on how to enhance core competitiveness of animated films, it is urgent to grasp the opportunity to regain confidence of Chinese animation.