China’s oldest cartoon

The oldest cartoon in China is "Havoc in the Studio".

"Havoc in the Studio" is a 1926 animated film directed by Wan Gu Chan, with the Wan brothers participating in dubbing, and produced by the Great Wall Picture Company. It is China's first original animated film.

The film tells the story of a painter who was painting in the studio. Suddenly, a little man in Chinese clothes drawn by the painter jumped down from the drawing board. He was naughty and funny and caused a lot of trouble for the painter. Finally, after a chase and fight, the little man was driven back into the painting.

Although the plot of the film "Havoc in the Studio" is simple, the Wan brothers, who were engaged in animation creation for the first time, encountered many difficulties. During the actual shooting, either the places that should move did not move, or the places that should not move moved randomly; they only succeeded in shooting after many experiments and repeated groping. This film is also China's first cartoon that features live-action and animation at the same time. The painter in the film is played by Wan Guchan, and the little paper figures are drawn with animation. The film is 12 minutes long.

Creative background

As early as 1919 to 1922, when the Wan brothers came to the Shanghai Commercial Press from their hometown of Nanjing to work in art, they had the idea of ????animating Chinese landscape paintings. Get up thoughts. They watched cartoons drawn by brothers Max Fornecker, an American animation artist.

With animation technology and materials strictly blocked by European and American animation manufacturers, they converted their 7-square-meter house into a studio for drawing, printing, and screening. They used the money they saved by cutting back on clothing and food to buy an animation studio. He converted an old camera into a video camera and gained experience from hundreds of failed experiments. In 1926, he successfully developed China's first animated film "Da Nao Studio" in the pavilion where he lived in Sanfengli, Tiantong'an Road, Zhabei, Shanghai.

Since then, the Wan brothers have successively produced "A Letter Back" and "Paper Man Making Trouble". Together with "Havoc in the Studio", they have been rated as "the three earliest animations in China" .