Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the trans-Asian aspects of the 1958 Toei Douga-produced animated film Hakujaden (The Legend of the White Snake) and intends to recontextualise it from a milestone in the national history of Japanese animation to a local node of Asia-wide dissemination of the white snake motif.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the 1958 Toei Douga-produced animated film Hakujaden (The Legend of the White Snake) from trans-Asian perspectives. Released by the predecessor company of Toei Animation (one of the major Japanese animation production studios) as Japan’s first coloured feature-length animated film, Hakujaden has often been contextualised by existing studies as forming the genesis of today’s global prosperity of Japanese animation. Apart from such a nationalistic account, the film’s trans-Asian aspects have nonetheless been relatively understudied. They include the following: the white snake motif itself has its origin in the Tang period Chinese folk tale with more than a 1000-year-long history of adaptations into multiple forms of continental popular culture (e.g. Beijing opera); Japan has its own history of ‘importing’ the motif from China (e.g. into the Tales of Moonlight and Rain in the 18th century); Hakujaden was first planned as a co-production with a Hong Kong film company; and, not only were the film’s artworks (e.g. location/characters/prop designs) Chinese but also some of the crewmembers had connections with Japan’s wartime occupation of China (e.g. some of them were repatriates from Manchuria and ex-employees of the Manchuria Film Association). Highlighting such trans-Asian aspects of the film, this paper intends to recontextualise Hakujaden from one of the milestones in the national history of Japanese animation to one of the local nodes of Asia-wide dissemination of the motif of the white snake.