Tang Cheng: The first female animation screenwriter and director in the People’s Republic of China

Tang Cheng (唐澄) (1919–86) was one of the most accomplished and versatile animation practitioners in the history of Chinese animation and the first female animation scriptwriter and director in the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–present). Animation in the PRC was once famous for its ‘Chinese school’ aesthetics, in which female professionals influenced all dimensions of the form, from animation techniques to aspects of narration and artistic style. Tang Cheng was best known for directing or co-directing representative Chinese school animated films. However, her early career in animation screenwriting has been largely forgotten. This article not only highlights her role as a scenarist commissioned to write the screenplays of the didactic fairy tales Old Lady’s Jujube Tree (1958) and Radish Is Back (1959) but also analyses how the spirit of collectivism and childlike simplicity revealed in her screenwriting affected her later directorial productions such as Little Tadpoles Looking for Mother (1961), Havoc in Heaven (1961, 1964) and The Deer Bell (1982).

Design on the Winter Jujubes Harvesting and Sorting Device

According to the existing problems of winter jujube harvesting, such as the intensive labor of manual picking, damage to the surface of winter jujubes, a winter jujube harvesting and sorting device was developed. This device consisted of vibration mechanism, collection mechanism, and sorting mechanism. The eccentric vibration mechanism made the winter jujubes fall, and the umbrella collecting mechanism can collect winter jujube and avoid the impact of winter jujube on the ground, and the sorting mechanism removed jujube leaves and divided the jujube into two types, and the automatic leveling mechanism made the device run smoothly in the field. Through finite element analysis and BP (Back Propagation) neural network analysis, the results show that: The vibration displacement of jujube tree is related to the trunk diameter and vibration position; the impact force of winter jujubes falling is related to the elastic modulus of umbrella material; the collecting area can be increased four times for each additional step of the collection mechanism; jujube leaves can be effectively removed when blower wind speed reaches 45.64 m/s. According to the evaluation standard grades of the jujubes harvesting and sorting, the device has good effects and the excellent rate up to 90%, which has good practicability and economy.