Global View

When it comes to cinematic influence US Films have a huge reach. Guan et al. attribute this to the English language’s prominence across the world, due to British imperialism, America’s unparalleled attraction of investment, technology and craftspeople, due to its status as the global hegemon and cultural policies that ensure the pushing of Hollywood films into the global market. This huge presence yields great financial rewards and cultural influence. As can be seen with the top grossers at the global box office often being American productions.

Conversely, Chinese films (specifically mainland China’s films) have less global reach despite being a major film market. Largely this is due to Chinese culture and languages not being as widely known across the world as well as the demonisation of China’s politics in Western spaces. Chinese films have instead focused on domestic audiences over global reach. In 2024, 3 Chinese productions made the worldwide box office top 20 based mostly on domestic takings. However, that may soon change. Currently, 2025’s highest-grossing film is the Chinese fantasy Ne Zha 2. Which performed well domestically and grossed over $19 million in America. Putting it in the top 20 highest-grossing films in America.

USA on Film

US films foreground the idea that American values (freedom and democracy, the strength of the individual and humanism) are universal and thereby everyone, regardless of background or identity, can fit into American social and political life. Especially through film. Additionally, because of its technological capabilities, its films place America as the centre of innovation. Even films that critique these values strengthen America’s image as being a place that values freedom of speech.

A good example of this is Mickey 17. The film, made by an international cast and crew, shows concern for the well-being of the majority of lifeforms and values the ability of individuals to affect change. It also uses extensive special effects to realise futuristic technology, alien creatures and new worlds. Even the film’s critiques of capitalism and colonialism, the system that America embodies, and focus on collective action demonstrate America’s willingness to criticise itself. Thereby maintaining its image. 

China on Film

Regarding cultural image Chinese films are often concerned with showing the capabilities of the Chinese film industry with dramatic spectacle aiming to rival Hollywood. China’s films also showcase Chinese history, traditions and cultural attitudes (the importance of family, community and reserved sexuality) to encourage identification with China’s culture, people and political project. Both nationally and worldwide.

You can see these traits exemplified in films like Ne Zha 2. The film is rooted in Chinese mythological stories (Investiture of the Gods), uses designs inspired by traditional Chinese art and focuses on themes such as collective responsibility to stop oppression and is a high-budget visual spectacle aimed at showing that blockbusters aren’t solely the USA’s domain.

New Cold War

With the US continually vilifying China as China increases in prominence tensions are rising between the two nations. Their films in effect function as arms of influence. The US uses films to position itself as a global leader that cares about democracy and people’s welfare worldwide. Thereby positioning anyone the US doesn’t like as an enemy and justifying US aggression. But US governments have carried out many horrifically anti-democratic and violent policies. Including enabling genocide in Palestine and the deportation of migrants without due process.

Meanwhile, China’s government seems to use films to maintain political cohesion by encouraging patriotism in domestic audiences. Internationally, they act as a way of showcasing who the Chinese people are and what their system is capable of. However, this also has harmful pitfalls, as government censorship means that topics such as governmental human rights abuses aren’t touched on.

Ultimately both industries are used by governments for promotional purposes, but China’s filmic soft power is more based on showcasing itself to the world. Whereas America uses film to demonstrate dominance on the world stage.

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This year, the beauty and craftsmanship of ‘Black Dog’ led it to win the Un Certain Regard award at the 77th Cannes Festival ceremony, 18 years after the first Chinese-language film to do so, ‘Luxury Car’ (2006). The film, directed by Guan Hu, tells the sad and endearing story of Lang (Eddie Peng) and the dark dog that is alluded to in the title.
Lang is a former motorcycle stunt rider who performed in a circus in his small city in the Gobi Desert, Northwest China. After being released from jail, he joins the dog patrol that is clearing the stray dogs before the Olympic Games. Lang is an outsider and forms a bond with a thin, distrustful black stray who is not part of the pack of dogs that roam the city and its surroundings.

The protagonist is not only a former stunt rider but also a musician. He is still a man of few words, and most of the noise emitted from his mouth is directed to the dog. As the film passes, Lang communicates more with other humans, including those who care for him, but he is always laconic.

Part of the communication in the relations involves violence be it between the patrol and the dogs: in the way the black dog reacts in the first encounters with Lang or how the protagonist interacts with other males from the area. However, the fighting is never glamorized, nor is the camera focused on it. The story tells more about the psychology behind aggression, be it physical or verbal. Lang seems disillusioned with humanity and his condition as a former inmate who is scoped by suspicious eyes from strangers and hatred by people looking for vengeance on his supposed crimes. This condition of loneliness, and the hardship with dealing with emotions combined with Peng’s skill, explains his fondness for stray dogs and the wild animals from the city’s zoo.

The acting by lead dog Xiao Xin is well conducted. The Jack Russell-Greyhound, with its skin-to-bone frame, impacting brown eyes, and defensive behaviour, shows how harsh the life of a street and unloved animal can be. It doesn’t fall into the emotional trap of dogs looking affable to the camera, sharing with competence one of the picture’s messages that stray animals deserve love as much as house mascots.

The impoverished zoo signalizes the cruelty of such attractions with its skeletal and deteriorated structures, as well as the condition of abandonment experienced by humans in the picture who are mentally ill, aged, or just discarded in their meagre lives. Among the zoo animals are a simian, a tiger, a grey wolf, and rare birds, which can be interpreted as an allegory of entertainers at the end of their careers.

The poverty portrayed in ‘Black Dog’ is also a form of violence in the way scarce conditions condense human lives and limit their dreams to the point that those characters don’t have much from the lives that they lead. They aren’t supposed to expect much from it, what these people deal with is what they have in front of them, and it can be seen in the character of Grape (Tong Liya), the circus performer woman, whose life is going nowhere; Liya makes Grape feels like a former school prom queen yearning for love, the sort of emotion that can’t be fulfilled with audience cheers or material gifts.

The cinematography by Weizhe Gao deepens the experience as it denotes the isolation and bleakness of a city in the desert area; the amplified camera shots put buildings and bodies apart from each other; however, in ‘Black Dog,’ the canines have their bodies closer to each other more than the humans, which points out fractured human relations and the echo of lonely hearts.

British progressive rock stalwart Pink Floyd brings the surrounding feeling of melancholy. Lang is a huge fan of the band to the point its name is marked on his bike, which helps compose the loner character and adds to the human component, helping the film to become a story with foreign appeal.

‘Black Dog’ has a special place in world cinema and is a great representation of Chinese culture; a China different from the technological advances seen on the news or the antagonistic role it used to play in past Hollywood. The structural city poverty that affects the inhabitants in the end enhances the film’s ability to show the strength of the human spirit and the beautiful relations between humans and other animals.

Rating: (5 / 5)

BLACK DOG is brought to the UK and Ireland by Europe-wide distributor Trinity CineAsia and will open in UK and Irish cinemas from Friday 30th August 2024

Also Read: Man’s Best Friend: Dogs On Film

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“Sônia Braga’s filmography reveals by itself the place of the actress in the world cinema. She has been living and working in the US for more than 30 years and had important roles in the movies produced in Hollywood” evaluates Brazilian film scholar Daniela Gillone, from the University of São Paulo (USP), in an exclusive interview with Big Picture Film Club.

In the Brazilian silver screens, many of her entries are in the top ten of all-time box office hits but like many of her compatriots she had to cut her teeth and make her name in the popular telenovelas.

“Her career peaked during the 70’s and the 80’s coincidently with a period of intense communication from Brazilian productions with the local public. Pictures like ‘Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands’ (1976) and ‘Lady on the Bus’ (1978) represent this very positive moment regarding her popularity and taking over of the domestic market. It is important to remember that parallel to her cinema career, Sônia became one of our major TV stars. For the mainstream audiences, it seems to me that she is more known for her TV work over the movies, however both activities converge to make her one of the most popular Brazilian actresses by the tail end of the 20th Century,” contemplates Sérgio Rizzo, critic from ‘O Globo’ newspaper in an interview with Big Picture Film Club.
In our conversation, Rizzo reminds me that like many foreign talents the fact that her mother tongue is not English, but Portuguese, presents an obstacle and the pigeonholing of foreigners. Braga, like others, had to endure and overcome that to achieve her legendary status.

Gillone observes that “Braga projected herself as a beauty icon and proposed alternatives for the female desire in a traditionalist and conservative culture. I highlight ‘Gabriela’ (1983) by Bruno Barreto where she acted alongside Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. In this movie, the actress progresses with her resistant posture to the norms imposed on female representations. In national and international movies, we have her singular politics of women’s desire and fantasy building. She brings the figure of a libertarian woman that predominates in her roles and dialogues with her own posture as an actress in world cinema.”

Still, for the current moviegoer crop, Braga is remembered for her later works with Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça in the pictures ‘Aquarius’ and ‘Bacurau’ playing older authority figures as an elder stateswoman fighting for the legacy of her building and city in the former or as the doctor in a forgotten city which serves as a human hunting game for foreigners in the horror western that is the latter. Both performances are acclaimed by critics and overlooked during the award seasons.

And in her mid-career entries, Braga showed how ranged she could be even then by playing three different characters in ‘Kiss of the Spider-Woman’ a seminal picture dialoguing about sexual identity and the horrors imposed by dictatorial states on bodies and minds of those deemed enemies.

Another side of her biography is the political activism in defence of human rights and the environmental agenda. Braga “is not aligned with the official conservative speeches” ponders Gillone pointing out her long-standing democratic values, protesting the state of Brazilian politics at the 2016 Cannes festival, and her solidarity towards the minorities.
The scholar believes that Braga’s legacy will be the acknowledgement of the historical struggle by Brazilian actresses for more visibility, equal payment to their male counterparts, and valuing of older female characters as also the resistance of female characters to be seen not only as objects of desire or second-string players.

Rizzo believes that Braga’s legacy is related to another name that is highly associated with Brazil and became a staple in Hollywood and entertainment. “I believe that her place is very special, besides Carmen Miranda, the Portuguese that for us became a Brazilian, as our greatest movie stars.”

Also Read: Global Cinema Spotlight: Iranian New Wave

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What is Claymation?

Claymation is a form of stop-motion animation. This is where a still frame of either model characters (in claymation these models are clay formed around a metal skeletal frame) or background elements is photographed before being moved slightly and photographed again. When the frames are played together it gives the illusion of motion. The main difference is that it focuses on creating animations using various forms of clay e.g. plasticine. This results in the animation and characters feeling more tactile. It also allows for smoother and more detailed facial animation than traditional stop-motion materials.

Like regular stop-motion, claymation animators must have an eye for detail. To ensure that movements of various details captured within each frame follows on adequately from prior frames. They also need a great level of patience. Because of all the details that need to be captured and how gradually changes need to be made to each frame to make the animation feel natural animating a single scene in claymation can take days. But the results are definitely worth it.

The History of Claymation

Several early short films featured some form of clay animation. The oldest surviving film emphasizing the technique is The Sculptor’s Nightmare (1908). Which showed lumps of clay transforming into the busts of US politicians. Traditional 2D animation and other forms of stop-motion soon began dominating the industry. Clay animation was rarely the focus of a production, but shorts like Little Baker (1925) and Long Live The Bull (1926) centralized the technique. 

Around the 1950s clay animation became a fixture of children’s shows (Gumby). Then in the 1970s well-regarded clay animations like Italy’s Mio Mao and the UK’s Morph, created by Aardman Animations, were released. And animator Will Vinton’s work began gaining attention. Vinton won the medium’s first oscar with Closed Mondays (1974). He also coined and later trademarked the word Claymation.

The 80s saw the medium reach new heights. Many respected Eastern European animators helmed claymation projects such as Aleksandr Tatarskiy, Jan Svankmajer and Garri Bardin. The Adventures of Mark Twain became the first feature-length claymation film. And Aardman debuted their beloved award-winning claymation duo Wallace and Gromit in A Grand Day Out.

Claymation made its way to video games in the 90s. With the animations of clay figures featuring in the gameplay of ClayFighter, The Neverhood and its sequel Skullmonkeys. And in the 2000s adult-oriented claymation like Mary and Max showed that claymation could tell stories for older audiences. The medium also produced the two highest-grossing stop-motion movies ever in this time: Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Top 5 Claymation Films

So what are the quintessential claymation films to see?

1. Dimensions of Dialogue (1982)

Jan Svankmajer’s acclaimed short is a surreal meditation on the nature of communication. A great showcase for claymation’s creative possibilities.

2. The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985)

An important milestone for claymation features. It’s a triumph of effort and the mostly clay production is a visual treat.

3. The Wallace and Gromit Series (1989-)

Whether you’re watching the shorts or the Curse of the Were-Rabbit film Wallace and Gromit is utterly charming. And their claymation aesthetic makes the characters feel like they were directly birthed from your childhood imagination.

4. Chicken Run (2000)

A funny take on The Great Escape full of loveable quirky characters that are so well written and animated that you quickly forget they are just plasticine.

5. Mary and Max (2009)

Tackling heavy subjects like alcoholism, identity and self-harm, Mary and Max showed that claymation can mould itself to tell stories about adult themes.

With that our look into the world and history of claymation is over. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and are now ready to experience more from the world of plasticine perfection.

Also Read: Cartoons For Adults: The Rise of Adult Animation

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