臺大外文系學術演講
NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium
Title: From the Stage to the Exhibit: Animating and allegorizing development in the children’s film series, Little Bell
Speaker: Dr Linda C. Zhang (Fulbright University Vietnam)
Moderator: Dr Chang-Min Yu于昌民副教授 (National Taiwan University)
Time: 3:30-5:00 pm Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Venue: Room B107, Humanities Building, NTU (臺大人文館B107室)
Abstract:
Based on work from my current book project, this talk explores children’s film and popular media produced during and after the socialist era in China with the notion of “animating” as a creative strategy, conceiving of animation as part of a strategic network that encompasses multiple forms of popular visual media. Focusing on the revolutionary optimism of the 1963 children’s film, Little Bell (小铃铛), and the reform-era enthusiasm for economic and cultural liberalization in the 1986 Little Bell sequel, this talk positions the two films as part of a lineage of popular visual media that perpetuated, rehearsed, and animated a lexicon of evolution and modern progress. Between the diegeses of the two films, the eponymous puppet character of Little Bell is demoted from his previous position as a respected model actor, narrator, and masters of ceremonies of a cultural exhibit, to a position of relative obscurity: a cultural relic overwhelmed by the late 20th century environs, and a mere spectator of advances in renewable energy, transportation, and new media such as television and computational imaging. I demonstrate that in narratives such as in Little Bell, the figure of the 20th century child allegorized generational conflict and developmental change, often outsmarting or teaching non-human characters—often popular characters adapted from literature, animation, or performance culture. And yet, as I find in this talk, characters like Little Bell ultimately made those narratives more marketable and appealing through a popular media network—even as they portrayed counterexamples of appropriate behavior and language for New China.
Bio:
Linda C. Zhang is an assistant professor of film in the Art & Media Studies program at Fulbright University Vietnam. She is currently working on her book project titled Animating the Future: Visual Culture and Popular Children’s Media in Twentieth Century China, which offers new understandings of the media history surrounding modern Chinese animation, visual culture, and popular science texts. Her work has appeared in publications including Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Rutgers University Press, Harvard Asia Center, the Association for Chinese Animation Studies, and RadiiChina.
