New cartoons

Author:Ding Cong

Modern cartoon can be defined as a category of integrated art combining drawings, literature, technology and film images, which can depict an intact story by way of a string of immobile pictures. Understood in this way, Chinese cartoons are latecomers on the worldwide stage.

After the establishment of modern China in 1949 (the People's Republic of China), a new generation of famous cartoonists, like Wang Fuyang, Ye Chunyang, Miao Di, and Zhan Tong, greatly developed the cartoon industry.

However, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), China's cartoon art started to wither.

In the 1980's, China's cartoon art began to flourish again and many young artists became devoted to it.

In the 1990s, Japanese cartoons entered China and soon became quite popular, adored by domestic cartoon fans, especially young people, as the cartoons refreshed the traditional image of cartoons and created a new and fun cartoon style.

Japanese-style cartoons typically have heroes and heroines who are always depicted as especially handsome and gorgeous with big eyes and slim bodies. The subjects of the stories are entertaining and sensational, including young love, scientific or magical fictions, and some violent fights or contests.

Compared with their Japanese counterparts, US cartoons tend to concentrate on heroic themes. The heroes are often endowed with supernatural abilities in these cartoon works, such as "Spiderman" and "Batman". Many of these US cartoons are usually adapted into movies after obtaining great success as comic books.

In fact, these modern cartoons have become icons of popular culture and have successfully found a place within industrial mass production and mass markets. Faced with competition by such fantastic pictures with their innovative visual impact and simple but attractive stories, Chinese cartoons are being forced to innovate in turn in order to bring domestic cartoons into the industrial age.

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