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China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
Year Hare Affair is a three-season animated adaptation of a webcomic series, aired on the Internet from 2015 to 2017. Cute animal characters are used as allegory for various nations to represent modern political and military history and conflict. The storylines center on the protagonist Hare (China) and his relationships with other animals (other nations). Unlike the original comic series, the animated adaptation has a stronger Chinese nationalist flavor and aims at cultivating nationalistic pride among the youth. This paper first examines how animators employ transnational animation signifiers and Japan’s kawaii (cute) aesthetic in Year Hare Affair, which deliberately render an entertaining Chinese nationalist history that is a constructed reality embedded in a particular perspective. Second, this paper looks into the juxtaposition of photographic propaganda and animated signifiers that are composed of parody, satires, and self-reflection, complicating the discursive formation of Chinese nationalism and how it is promoted, fabricated, and consumed through Year Hare Affair. Finally, acknowledging that transnational animation signifiers effectively enable viewers’ immediate engagement while distancing them from their own sociopolitical consciousness and political ideology, this paper concludes that Year Hare Affair simultaneously promotes Chinese nationalism and engenders an evasive pleasure by destabilizing the regulatory discourse on Chinese history for its audience.
Lien Fan Shen
University of Utah