当代中国独立动画艺术的独立性: 以香港的独立动画创作为例

Independent, often socially, culturally, and/or politically alternative cultural production is a worldwide phenomenon today. Despite the cultural policies and industrial configuration of Hong Kong do not significantly encourage the growth of independent animation, there has been growth in this sector nonetheless, spurred especially by a combination of formal and informal educational initiatives, local and regional festival activities and competitions, the newly emerged digital image-making tools, and online distribution platforms.
Conventionally, independent animators understand that in exchange for the usually project-based paycheck offered by the commercial industry, they enjoy a comparatively higher level of creative freedom and autonomy. This is partly due to the usually self-financed source of funding, but mostly because they are often free from the different kinds of team-based managerial constraints that face commercial animators. Some independent animation artists seek to challenge the system by using strategies such as "cultural differentiation" and by creating formal and/or content-based alternatives to those of the mainstream animation industry in order to stake a claim for the legitimacy of their own aesthetic systems and social meanings. So, independent practitioners have the opportunity to express their "independent spirit" or vision, as they seek to have a creative space for individual expression of personal ideas or beliefs, their different social and professional identities, different aesthetic outlooks, and sometimes even the alternative voice of the marginalized groups. The existence of independent cultural production (such as films and animation) is manifested in the ways in which some artists who are not comfortable working within the mainstream entertainment industry attempt to reinvent the wheel by seeking other means to produce and platforms to disseminate their own images.
In this paper, case studies of some Hong Kong animation work will be critically examined, which help to explain the politics of independent animation in Hong Kong and the kinds of strategies these independent animation practitioners incorporate in order to create and maintain a sufficient creative space. Through mainly ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the findings of this research show that independently made animations are aesthetically and expressively heterogeneous, and that the survival strategies adopted by animators varies, ranging from taking up the role of a freelancer, actively running a studio or company, accepting artist-in-residency opportunities, and doing more personal work on the side while employed either within the commercial field or in the educational sector at the secondary and tertiary levels. And all of these operators are on a continuous search for additional funding sources. Looking for the possibility of independent creation between the gaps in systems of formal and informal regulation, these animation practitioners seek new strategies to work around and through the mainstream media in order to express relatively unfamiliar themes, ideas and audiovisual tropes.