A Jewish Girl in Shanghai

A Jewish Girl in Shanghai (2010)

犹太女孩在上海

Based upon the popular graphic novel by Wu Lin, this is the first Chinese animated film to portray the Holocaust. The film centers around the warm friendship between Rina, a wide-eyed European Jewish schoolgirl and A-Gen, a Chinese pancake seller, who teach each other about their distant worlds as Shanghai struggles beneath its own cruelly portrayed Japanese occupation.

Date of release
2010-01-01
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
Animation, War, History
Director
Wang Genfa
Collection
犹太女孩在上海

Casting

Interesting facts

A Jewish Girl in Shanghai is a 2010 Chinese animated family film written by Wu Lin and based on his graphic novel of the same name. It is directed by Wang Genfa and Zhang Zhenhui, and voiced by Cui Jie, Zhao Jing and Ma Shaohua.

Production

Wu, a former history teacher, first became interested in the history of Shanghai's Jews, obscure to both Jews and Chinese alike, in 2005. To mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, many newspapers and magazines in Shanghai published the stories of Jewish refugees, seeing parallels between the Jewish and Chinese peoples' oppression by the Germans and Japanese respectively.

The story was originally conceived for adults, but Wu decided to aim the film at children in the hope that the film could influence the future generation. Glenn Timmermans, the organiser of the Macau Jewish Film Festival, has stated that he believes the film's intended age group is between around eight and fourteen years, though he notes its wider appeal.

Wu first created a A Jewish Girl in Shanghai as a graphic novel, published in 2008 by East China Normal University Press. The graphic novel has been described as a "great success" by Wu, selling 4,000 copies in the first six months since its release, though, as it was only published in English, its Chinese market was naturally limited. Wu has stated that a Hebrew version of the graphic novel is under consideration.

In 2009, Wu began work on a film adaptation to bring the work to a broader audience in China. The film, produced using 35 mm film, is, unlike the graphic novel, in Mandarin Chinese, and was developed by the Shanghai Film Group Corporation and the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. The film score was composed by Shi Jiayang.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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