6 Feb/100
It can hardly be called a tragedy when a 94 year old man dies, especially one whose life was as accomplished as Te Wei’s.
Who, you say?
Te Wei, the greatest of the great Chinese art animators of the Shanghai animation studio. One of the incontrovertible artistic masters of animation.
I had the good fortune of learning about Te Wei from a man who knew him, David Ehrlich. In my final term at Dartmouth, I fulfilled a National Cinemas requirement within my Film Studies major with a class inauspiciously titled ‘Asian Animation.’ Wary of Japanese cartoons about robots and the entire culture of anime fandom in the United States, I had low expectations for the class, despite Ehrlich’s reputation as a terrific teacher and his own masterful talent as an animator. We touched, briefly, on Japanese animation, though in those classes we spoke of craftsmen like Osamu Tezuka and his experimental animation in the 1980s and Kihachiro Kawamoto, whose incredibly intricate puppet animations of Japanese folk narratives are haunting and uncanny.
Half the class though was dedicated to Chinese animation, and to a few particularly key figures: A Da, Hu Jinqing, and the greatest of them all, Te Wei.
Te Wei only directed four films in his life. Each is an important work. I’m going to post two of them here and talk briefly about them, but it’s better to let the films speak for themselves.
His second film is among the most popular and enduring works in Chinese animation, Where is Mama?, which was his first experiment in integrating traditional Chinese visual culture into animation. It’s cute, it’s fun, and it portends greatly of the work to come. Since this video is untranslated, you should simply know that the film is about a group of tadpoles searching around their pond trying to determine which adult is their mother. As the figurature is rather abstract, it helps to know this in advance.
The second is Feeling from Mountain and Water (1988), on which Te worked for decades. It’s available for viewing in two parts here:
As in his third film, The Cowherd’s Flute (1963), Te draws upon the visual economy and poetry of Chinese shan shui, brush-and-ink landscape paintings designed to reflect Chinese elemental theory. The Cowherd’s Flute is good. This one is better. Here the narrative is slowed down. It’s ethereal. Te is addressing mortality and the life cycle. Feeling from Mountain and Water is a monster of a film, a work that’s so magnificent in its artistry it’s hard to find other points to compare it to. Within animation, I can only think of another short work which represents such an epochal statement within the craft, Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales (1979).
I have David Ehrlich, who recently retired from teaching this past semester, to thank for introducing me to this moving work. David’s love for art and personal expression in all forms has been an inspiration to every single student who ever took a class with him, and I wish him the best.
I hope that you take the time to watch these films. They’re slow, at first glance boring, but if you pay attention to it, the art of Te Wei – the attention to line, shape, fluidity of motion, and the manipulation of time and negative space as formal elements within animation are masterful.
So as I said above: the death of Te Wei is no tragedy. It is simply a loss. A tremendous loss.
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