The Translocalized McDull Series: National Identity and the Politics of Powerlessness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The animated film Me & My Mum was released in mainland China and Hong Kong in 2014 and proved to be a huge box office hit, cashing in on the existing McDull animated films that are hailed as the best animations in Hong Kong. Previous scholarship suggests that the McDull animated film series is a symbol of Hong Kong local culture; it serves as a repository of the changing landscapes of Hong Kong and demonstrates hybrid identities. However, this article argues that the McDull animated film series is more translocal than local, a fact which reveals the dynamics of the Hong Kong–mainland China relationship after Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The translocalized McDull series demonstrates an obsession with Chineseness which helps to evoke the national identity. By aestheticizing powerlessness as cuteness through anthropomorphic animals, the McDull series used to be highly political; they grappled with the wounds of society in Hong Kong. However, the articulation of a well-rounded McDull in the translocalized film Me & My Mum indicates that it is conforming to the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology of ideal children while the political power of aestheticizing powerlessness is repressed, revealing the dominant power of the Chinese film market.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".