The world-renowned Chinese cartoon "San Mao," drawn by Zhang Leping 70 years ago, will perform a new children's play from July 13 to 22 at Tianqiao theater, telling modern Chinese children of his own bitter childhood during Chinese anti-Japanese war.

The play was based on San Mao joins the Army published in 1946. In the story, the three-haired homeless orphan San Mao tasted every possible bitterness in the war and was oppressed and deprived by the corrupt Kuomintang army.

"It is my first time directing a children's play," the play's director Lin Zhaohua told Xinhua. Lin, idolized as a pioneer of Chinese drama, said "the play employs three screens on the stage casting cartoons to coordinate with true actors' performances.

He stressed the cartoon part is not merely a replay of Zhang's book, but a three dimensional cartoon "cloning" and coordinating with live actor's movements. "This way we can produce a visual effect of the actor "San Mao" being seized and pulled into the screen by a cartoon military officer. And we can also easily show the original plot such as 'San Mao' going out for fishing and fighting against Japanese invaders in a hen roost with cartoons instead of live performance."

"However," Lin said, "making performances by actors and cartoon figures fully interactive also posed a great challenge to the director, since the movement of the cartoon figures should be calculated every second, not to say they sometimes will walk across the three screens."

"If my father were still alive, he would be happy to see that today's Chinese children enjoy and cherish a peaceful and happy childhood by learning the story of San Mao," said Zhang Rongrong, Zhang Leping's son.

Zhang's San Mao series was first published in installments starting on November 20, 1935 in the Shanghai paper Xiao Chen Bao. When the anti-Japanese war broke out in 1937, Zhang was a member of the wartime committee of the National Cartoonists' Association. In Nanjing, Wuhan, Changsha and Guilin, he produced numerous posters and cartoons, among which Chinese Children, San Mao's Sword and The Final Struggle were significant. After the war ended, Zhang returned to Shanghai in 1946 and published San Mao Joins the Army in the newspaper Shen Bao. In 1947, he produced The Story of San Mao (Three Hairs), a homeless orphan tramp. From June 1947 to the end of 1948, he published his representative work, Urchin San Mao, in 234 installments in Shanghai's Da Gong Bao. This was later reprinted in four parts and sold throughout the country.

Urchin San Mao told the story of thousands of children and was a powerful indictment of old China. The wretched existence of the poor stood in sharp contrast to the profligate lives of the rich, which evoked a strong response when it appeated in Da Gong Bao.

With the founding of the People's Republic, Zhang's work entered a new stage and a new San Mao appeared in San Mao Greets Liberation, San Mao's Past and Present, San Mao's Diary, San Mao Learns from Lei Feng, and San Mao Loves Science.
 
(Xinhua News Agency July 5, 2005)