Crouching Rabbit, Hidden Dragon? Animating Gendered National Narratives and Postcolonial Subjectivity in Contemporary Chinese Animation

ABSTRACTThis article examines how great power aspirations and national identity are aesthetically constructed through political animation. We analyze how the animated series Year Hare Affair (那年那兔那些事儿, YHA) transforms geopolitical hierarchies into an anthropomorphic menagerie where China emerges as a vulnerable yet determined rabbit navigating relations with the American eagle, Russian bear, and other animal-nations in the zoopolitik. Through critical discourse analysis coupled with computational examination of audience engagement, we theorize zoopolitik as a gendered symbolic economy that renders abstract international relations emotionally intelligible and emotionally compelling. The rabbit’s oscillation between kawaii vulnerability and paternalistic authority exemplifies what Bhabha terms colonial mimicry, where the animation portrays China as showing a critical distance to power domination yet mirrors the future trajectory of China to this domination. Our analysis demonstrates how institutional support transforms YHA into an effective apparatus of civic pedagogy. The series’ transpacific visual grammar demonstrates how postcolonial states refunctionalize the allegorical aesthetic forms in representations of global order in major powers (e.g., US, Japan) to naturalize their aspirational trajectories. While gesturing toward decolonial futures, YHA transforms complex international relations into emotionally accessible patriotic narratives. What emerges, therefore, is not a clear rupture with the colonized past, but a re-enchantment of geopolitical power, repackaged for a new generation to form their political subjectivities under the aesthetic veneer of animated play.