The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema

Whispering winds, speeding trains, wandering balloons, and swirling snowflakes—these are the living entities that humans find themselves enmeshed with in their ecological co-flourishing in contemporary East Asian cinema. Pao-chen Tang theorizes and analyzes this animist imagination—a new mode of filmmaking that delves into both the definition of the cinematic medium and how to live with the nonhuman. Moving images are animate beings and the animism of cinema further compels an eye-opening vision to examine East Asian history and ecological anxieties of our times. The shamanic protagonists of the animist imagination transform the worldly and medial figurations onscreen into thought experiments on human-nonhuman relationality, modelling for the viewers anti-anthropocentric forms of existence and action. The book distills this form of agency through a systematic analysis of narrative structures, stylistic devices, and cultural implications in a stunning demonstration of a world viewed and enacted otherwise.

• Honourable Mention, BAFTSS Best First Monograph Award 2026
• Longlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Prize 2026 (Moving Image category)