Princess Iron Fan (), is the first full-length Chinese animated feature film. It is also considered the first Asian animated feature film. The film is based on an episode of the 16th-century novel Journey to the West. It was directed in Shanghai under difficult conditions in the thick of World War II by Wan Guchan and Wan Laiming (the Wan brothers) and was released on 19 November 1941.
The film later became influential in the development of East Asian animation, including Japanese anime, Vietnamese animation, Korean animation and Chinese animation.
The story was liberally adapted from a short sequence in the popular Chinese novel Journey to the West. Princess Iron Fan is a main character.
Specifically, the film focused on the duel between the Monkey King and a vengeful princess, whose fan is desperately needed to quench the flames that surround a peasant village.
The Wan family twins Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan with their brothers Wan Chaochen and Wan Dihuan were the first animators in China. After the release of their first "real" cartoon, Uproar in the Studio (1926), they continued to dominate China's animation industry for the next several decades. In the late 1930s, with Shanghai under Japanese occupation, they began work on China's first feature-length animated film. In 1939, the Wan brothers saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and set the standard in attempting to create a film of equal quality for the nation's honor.
Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan returned to the unoccupied International Settlement and French Concession of Shanghai (known as Orphan/Solitary Island) in April 1939 and produced Tieshan gongzhu/Princess Iron Fan (1941), the first animated feature film in Asia. It became an instant hit and traveled to many other countries. The animators worked with extremely limited resources, including a shortage of film stock, animation equipment, and financial support, as much of the country was engulfed in conflict. reflecting both the ambition and the technical limitations of China's fledgling animation industry at the time.
The film took three years, 237 artists and 350,000 yuan to make. Rotoscoping was used extensively to save money, and the eyes of the live actors are often visible in the faces of the animated characters.
By 1940, the film would render past 20,000 frames, using up more than 200 thousand pieces of paper (400 reams of 500 pieces each). They shot over of footage. And the final piece would contain of footage which can be shown in 80 minutes. The Wan brothers also invited the following actors and actresses for sound dubbing (ç½è¹),(严æÂÂç²),(å§ÂæÂÂ),(é©堰根),(æ®·ç§Âå²Â). At the time, they were at the Xinhua Film Company animation department since it was the only remaining production company left during the period of the Japanese occupation. The manager of the company who help financed the film was Zhang Shankun.
Princess Iron Fan became the first animated feature film to be made in China. The movie was made to create an Indigenous Chinese princess that is based on folklore. Upon completion the film was screened by the Chinese union film company.
The original soundtrack was composed by Lu Chong-Ren (1911-2011), a folk music composer known for his work. Scholars have praised the soundtrack for incorporating and adapting Chinese folk elements, although some modern listeners might perceive it as excessively gestural and action-driven, akin to early Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Initially, the film was a major success upon its release in December 1941 in Shanghai, running for a record-breaking one and a half months. Subsequently, it was also shown in Hong Kong, South Asia, and Japan. Despite its popularity, the Japanese military banned the film from being shown in Japan due to its wartime themes and rhetoric.
Princess Iron Fans inspired the 16-year-old Osamu Tezuka to become a comics artist and prompting the Japanese Navy to commission Japan's own first feature-length animated film, 1945's Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors (the earlier film Momotaro's Sea Eagles is three minutes shy of being feature-length).
This film also marked the emergence of animation as a medium capable of expressing national identity, adapting classical Chinese literature (Journey to the West) to convey subtle patriotic messages under the constraints of Japanese occupation. Though its production was shaped by wartime hardships, the film demonstrated the viability of animation as a serious cinematic form in China and helped initiate what would become a distinct tradition of Chinese animation.
A Chinese landscape painting method known as Ink Wash painting, which flourished throughout the Sui and Tang Dynasty from the sixth to the ninth century and is still in use today, is the inspiration for Princess Iron Fan's visual aesthetic.
In addition to traditional Chinese artistic styles, the Wans also cultivated a unique style that set their work apart. They used galloping rich imagery, and bright, colorful, and expressive techniques of bold exaggeration. This style can be considered as: pursuing personal initiative, individual inclination, thought and fantasy, and form and content.