Toward a Postsocialist Animated Cinema: Chinese 3D Animated Blockbusters, National Style, and Cultural Negotiation in the Digital Age

Abstract

This thesis examines the rise of Chinese 3D animated blockbusters and their negotiation of “national style” in the postsocialist cultural landscape of contemporary China. Taking the commercial success of Jiaozi’s Ne Zha series (2019 and 2025) as a starting point, it situates recent animated films within a longer historical trajectory that connects wartime propaganda animation, socialist-era aesthetic experimentation, and the market-driven film industry of the reform era. Rather than treating national style as a fixed cultural essence, the thesis questions how it has been continually reconfigured in response to changing political and technological conditions. Drawing on the notion of postsocialism, this thesis argues that contemporary Chinese animation operates within a cultural environment shaped by the simultaneous pressures of socialist ideological legacies, capitalist market imperatives, and nationalist developmental goals. Through case studies of Light Chaser Animation’s Green Snake and Jiaozi’s Ne Zha series, the thesis explores how mythological adaptations and their related online nationalist discourse reveal ongoing negotiations between global media industries and local cultural traditions. Ultimately, the thesis argues that Chinese 3D animated blockbusters reveal the contemporization of national style in the postsocialist era while demonstrating how animation functions as a cultural site where national identity and nationalist desires are negotiated among studios, the nation, and spectators.