An Encounter of the Chinese Monkey and the Japanese Robot: The Product Tenet in Cultural Transduction

When more than one source material is used for an adaptation, how do these texts work together coherently in the new production? This article applies the product tenet in the cultural transduction framework to multi-sourced film adaptations to analyze the coexistence of the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West and the iconic Japanese anime Doraemon in the Japanese animated film Doraemon: The Record of Nobita’s Parallel Visit to the West (1988). We find that to integrate these two works that take the lead in their respective cultural contexts, Japanese adapters enhance the cultural shareability by highlighting content universals, audience-created universals, and company-generated universals, and reduce the cultural discount by filling in the content lacuna, the capital lacuna, and the production lacuna.