CULTURE: Tom and Jerry, The Chinese Version

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Li Hui and Lin Jia

BEIJING, Dec 24 1996 (IPS) - China’s kids, like their counterparts in many other countries, switch on the TV-set every day to watch their favourite cartoon shows and relax after school.

But officials here, worried about the influence the imported cartoons would have on their children and ultimately on society at large, are doing efforts to increase the amount of locally- produced cartoons. As President Jiang Zemin wrote to the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, “fine works with healthy ideological content, high artistic quality and appeal” should be made.

Programmers should “train Chinese youth into a new generation with lofty ideals, moral integrity and a good sense of discipline,” he added.

In response to Jiang’s comments, a campaign to rival imported cartoons is underway at China Central Television (CCTV), the country’s national broadcaster. The Beijing-based station is preparing to build its own animated cartoon workshop and recruit cartoon professionals.

The workshop, to be built early in 1997 and to operate as a production company, will enable CCTV to produce independently its own animation programmes. Currently, the station’s so-called “own” programmes are commissioned with CCTV funding from outside animation companies.

CCTV’s spending on cartoon production has doubled every year since 1994, from five million yuan (some 600,000 US dollars) to 20 million yuan in 1996. The cash has funded the birth and building of the Panda Jinjin and Happy Street, both projecting the theme of heroism against evil.

The amount of CCTV’s cartoon investment is very small compared to its other programming expenditure. But bearing in mind that the production of cartoons for TV is still a loss-making business, the funding is “a courageous effort”, claims Liang Xiaotao, head of CCTV’s animation department.

“It is a lot cheaper to buy a foreign programme than to produce one,” Liang says. “To produce one part of animation for TV usually costs 400,000 yuan (50,000 US dollars), while to import one needs only around USD 1,500. So it is only natural that TV stations are unwilling to make animation programmes and prefer to buy foreign ones,” he says.

None of CCTV’s home-made cartoons have made money yet, and the chances of that happening are slight, Liang says. A short cartoon episode sells for just 200 yuan on the domestic market, which hardly covers the cost of the tape.

This ridiculous price reduced China to a sort of “dumping ground” of old foreign cartoon tapes. Williams Lindsay, a Briton now working as an expert with a national news service in Beijing, observes that a lot of cartoons he picks up on CCTV “were the ones I used to see in my primary and high school years.”

The efforts to lessen the influence of foreign cultures on an estimated 360 million Chinese children can be traced back to 1991 when CCTV’s animation department was set up. Soon afterwards ‘Red, Yellow, Blue’ painted the home-spun message on children’s hour. It was the first TV slot completely devoted to home-made animation programmes.

Prior to that, during the 1980s, kids TV was packed with imported animation, mostly from the United States, Japan and Eastern Europe.

For the first two years, the animation department was able to fill the time slot with animation programmes, either self-made or bought from other domestic animation studios. But the kids gave the offerings thumbs down. “Boring!” complained the kids of the time, recalls Liang.

That urged the programmers to go to the kids and ask them what they wanted. The schoolyard survey found that domestically produced animation programmes were too short to hold kids’ imagination and attention.

So starting from 1993, CCTV worked on the new strategy: the cartoon series. Each episode should end on the required knife edge, ensuring that kids would be just dying to tune into the next episode. And CCTV, in co-production with TVB of Hong Kong, decided to opt for the old favourite cat-and-mouse production.

The 30-part series ‘Blue Mouse and Big-face Cat’, proved more popular than Tom and Jerry. Children loved the 360-minute long series, at the time the longest cartoon series ever made in China.

More long series have followed. Last year, CCTV aired 50 domestically produced animation series in 400 parts, running for more than 5,000 minutes. But still it is a far cry from satisfying the needs for domestic products by Chinese children, Liang says.

“When children are hungry, they can eat anything offered to them. Kids now tell me that they like both imported and domestic animation – actually they have no particular preference – at first it sounds good, but on reflection maybe it’s a hint that they are starved,” Liang says.

Critics have tended to give low marks to home-made animations, citing them as being slow-paced and unimaginative. “If we are to seize the huge domestic market in the long run, we will have to put more effort into creating interesting stories and impressive, heroic characters,” Liang says.

In an effort to do this, the company is trying to get the target audience more involved. For the next year, a new series called ‘Monkey King’ is planned, partly produced by children.