Not so long ago a friend was asking me why animation in China was never as strong as Japan: A simple answer would be that because of Mao’s Communism from 1949 until 1976 that it was very hard for creative artists to express themselves in China, and especially even more so during the cultural revolution in the 60s. However it should be noted that there is a growing industry there today, in fact most of the hard work done to create Japanese anime is outsourced to China.

But once upon a time there was a fledgling animation industry in China before Mao. And a film that best captures this is Princess Iron Fan which made during World War II in 1941. Directed by the Wan brothers this amazing film was based on the popular Chinese folk tale Journey to the West and features a style that incorporates both a Disney and uniquely Chinese look.

While the quality of this film may seem crude by modern standards you have to keep in mind that it was made during the Japanese occupation of China — i.e. the folks drawing this were doing it while a war was being fought on their soil. Over two hundred artists spent three years making this epic film which incorporates cutting edge techniques of the day like rotoscoping.

What makes this film such a landmark is that it was the first feature length animated film to made in Asia (yes China beat Japan for that title). In fact the film was exported to Japan where it inspired the Japanese to make the 1945 film Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors and inspired a young teenaged Tezuka Osamu to become a comic book artist.

To fit this video on YouTube I had to sadly cut it up into ten minute segments, but to view the entire thing go to 56.com.

Recently I was talking about the topics of great films with a college bound liberal arts student and I made a shocking discovery: The student had never once seen Citizen Kane. It’s frankly shocking to me as an American citizen that in the United States of America that you can graduate from high school without having seen at least one viewing of this film.

There are so many reasons to teach this film — the screenplay alone is a great example of theater, a play with a rightful place in every English class alongside every other classic from Shakespeare to Arthur Miller. What’s wonderful about Citizen Kane is that it’s a film about all of the universal themes like love, greed and hope — yet it’s also a wonderful period piece about the history of the United States:

In fact I’d dare say that you can’t understand the character of our country unless you’ve seen this film: Citizen Kane should be used to teach the subject of American history — it touches on so many topics that were critical to the formation of United States after the Civil War: the gilded age, robber barons, the Spanish American War, yellow journalism, progressivism, the great depression and even the isolationism that took America into World War II. If I had to pick just one example of American culture to explain our civilization to a future historian this gem of cinema would be it.

The film is also very approachable to a younger audience — yet one can watch it on so many levels as you get older. Having students watch Kane would engage them and get them excited about learning. There is so much about this film that speaks not just to history, but about the times that we live in today. The role of celebrity, media and power are just as important in today’s world of 15-seconds-of-fame as they were when Orson Welles directed the film back in 1941. If every high school student in the United States watched this film we’d see the cultural dividends paid back over the course of a generation.

Lastly in our age when media literacy is so important the filmmaking techniques of Kane would give students the basic building blocks required for using digital video tools. We owe it to the upcoming YouTube generation to teach them the language of cinema — what better film is there for teaching the craft of pictures in motion? By the way I’m not just going on this rant because the film is a favorite of mine, but because so many critics over so many years have agreed that Citizen Kane is one of the greats:

So I’d like to ask all of my fellow film bloggers to take up this cause and spread the word. Maybe there will never be a day when Citizen Kane is shown in every high school in America, but even if just a few schools started doing this it would be a victory. Better yet this doesn’t have to be a top-down movement — even if we could get more parents to make sure that their kids watched Citizen Kane we would be a more literate society.