PRINCESS IRON FAN
(鐵扇公主)
dir. Wan Guchan & Wan Laiming, 1941
China. 73 min.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, JULY 1 – 3PM
THURSDAY JULY 6 - 10PM
TUESDAY JULY 18 - 7:30PM
SATURDAY JULY 29 - 3PM

Chinese first fully-animated feature film was an enormously influential work that broke new ground for Chinese and Japanese animation. Based on a short passage from Wu Cheng’en’s 16th century epic, Journey to the West, the film brings to life the tale of the Monkey King’s duel with a vengeful princess, whose fabled fan is needed to quench the flames surrounding a peasant village.

The Wan twins, along with their brothers, Wan Chaochen and Wan Dihuan, were some of China’s earliest established animators. In 1939, after viewing Walt Disney’s SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS for the first time, the brothers began their attempt to make a film of equal length and quality for a national audience. Despite suffering the same difficulties that other productions around were facing at the time, the brothers endured, and after three years, 237 artists, and over 20,000 frames, released their masterpiece to rapturous praise.

PRINCESS IRON FAN became another wildly popular success during wartime China. Though less explicitly political than HUA MULAN, the film contains a similar blend of traditional stories and contemporary themes, including a protagonist that embodies female strength and power, serving as a symbol of resistance in her own right. The film also represented a major leap forward in the country’s use of cinematic technology, the Wan brothers being some of the earliest adopters of the rotoscoping and compositing techniques developed by their American contemporaries, the Fleischer brothers. The film's popularity also extended beyond China's borders, becoming a sensation in Japan in spite of the ongoing war, and inspiring a young Osamu Tezuka— later dubbed the "Father of Manga"— to study illustration.