This thesis will investigate the cinema of attractions and its significance for digital animation created in Hong Kong at the turn of the millennium. Making use of methodologies from animation studies, film theory and transmedia studies, the present work seeks to draw links between animations across a variety of media genres and demonstrate that while the entertainment industry in Hong Kong overall suffered during this period, Hong Kong animation underwent an efflorescence. This thesis argues that the digital turn led to the emergence and consolidation of a local animation industry on a scale which had not been seen in Hong Kong previously, and that a close study of animation beyond its narrative elements is key to understanding this emergence.

Drawing on Tom Gunning's theory of the cin...[ Read more ]

This thesis will investigate the cinema of attractions and its significance for digital animation created in Hong Kong at the turn of the millennium. Making use of methodologies from animation studies, film theory and transmedia studies, the present work seeks to draw links between animations across a variety of media genres and demonstrate that while the entertainment industry in Hong Kong overall suffered during this period, Hong Kong animation underwent an efflorescence. This thesis argues that the digital turn led to the emergence and consolidation of a local animation industry on a scale which had not been seen in Hong Kong previously, and that a close study of animation beyond its narrative elements is key to understanding this emergence.

Drawing on Tom Gunning's theory of the cinema of attractions, and informed by the work of Hong Kong moving image scholars including Tan See Kam, Victor Fan and Linda Lai, this thesis will decenter animation narratives and the animated feature, focusing on other aspects of Hong Kong animation in the decade before and after the year 2000.

I will first cover the transition from practical to digital effects in the martial arts and supernatural cinema of Tsui Hark, analyzing the significance of computer-generated imagery's gradual takeover of the screen. I then turn to independent animation, demonstrating that digital effects reinvigorated the small local independent animation scene, but were sometimes met with ambivalence by older animators due to the freedom they offered from the conventions (narrative and otherwise) of the traditional animated short. The final chapter focuses on Alice Mak and Brian Tse's McDull animations. However, I depart from previous studies of Mc Dull as an animated feature series, instead highlighting the McDull's presence in other media formats, as well as My Life as McDull's subversion of the conventions of animated features.

This thesis draws together apparently disparate facets of Hong Kong's mediascape under the umbrella of animation. In so doing, it seeks to highlight aspects of animation which may be lost in conventional narrative-based analyses. It further charts key trends during this pivotal moment for Hong Kong's local animation at the turn of the millennium.