Shame, I was kinda hoping they would be more into trying to cultivate newer forms of animation and letting those animators develop their own personal style or approach to telling more contemporary stories and themes.

“As THE state owned animation studio, they’re also required to produce features and series on a regular timeframe. As a result some of these are rushed and not of the best quality. Things are changing there. They’re currently making “The Magic Gourd”, an animated co-pro with Disney.”

Funny, I thought the movie came out already, or is this something else?

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Most of those older films that found festival success were pre-cultural revolution. The role of the studio changed a lot over the years with the changing political climate: from promoting cultural pride, to propaganda films, to outsource studio. They went through some years where they didn’t do so well financially and in their present form now, do a lot of outsource work.

As THE state owned animation studio, they’re also required to produce features and series on a regular timeframe. As a result some of these are rushed and not of the best quality. Things are changing there. They’re currently making “The Magic Gourd”, an animated co-pro with Disney.

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@Adrienne Jenkins who wrote “I can’t help wishing “Mulan” had looked more like “The Cowherd’s Flute.” –

As I remember it early on in the production Hans Bacher was pushing for the line style on Mulan to be similar to the inked brush work seen in films like The Cowherd’s Flute. (at least I recall it was Hans’ idea … if he sees this he can confirm whether the idea was directly inspired by Te Wei’s work.) I spent my first weeks on Mulan (while still located in Burbank, at the “hat building”) attempting to clean-up an early test scene of Mushu by Tom Bancroft with a brush marker. (it was slow-going; a radical shift from the usual Disney feature clean-up approach. At the time it was a struggle, but I think I could have eventually got it to work.) Then I had to move to Florida and in the month-and-a-half long interval of getting my family moved across the country and myself getting settled into a new work routine at the Florida studio I discovered that the idea had been abandoned as “impractical” for the Disney system of clean-up (which it may very well have been in those days , given the production system in place) , so I never finished my brush marker clean-up test. For the final film we did try to maintain a look of “thick and thin” strokes in the line work based off of the style set for us by lead character designer Chen Yi Chang. And a brief segment during the song “A Girl Worth Fighting For” does have some animation done with a full Chinese brush look . (animated by Broose Johnson)

If Mulan were being made in today’s world of paperless animation I believe that if would be practical to use an application like TVPaint Animation which has a very fine set of “Chinese Brush” tools to achieve that brush inked look even in the hierarchical assembly line clean-up system used for feature animation at Disney.

I am still astounded at the subtle control and beauty of the hand-inked line work in the films of Te Wei.

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