Toward a Posthuman Ecogothic Aesthetics: On Busifan’s The Guardian (2017)

This essay examines mainland Chinese animation feature The Guardian (大护法, 2017) directed by Busifan 不思凡, focusing on its exploration of posthuman gothic as a polyvocal, intertextual, and intermedial aesthetic form. An ecological thriller, The Guardian exposes the inter- and intraspecies violence induced by a technologically driven biochemical “evolution” under the auspices of achieving “humanness.” The animation inquires how its posthuman protagonists, as new revolutionary forces and eco-formations, could achieve social and systematic viability in a polemical, mutant, multispecies environment. Through a variety of animation techniques, The Guardian expresses intersecting experiences of internal and externalized eco-horror in composition, simulated camera angles and shots, perspectival movements, sound design, special effects, and film editing. Animation motifs, effects, and mise-en-scène could serve as productive methods to present, simulate, or produce a gothic optics about intercorporeality, posthuman affect, as well as interspecies and intraspecies interactions. As the animation display, posthuman gothic invites a reconsideration of the “margin,” the perilous frontiers of techno-scientific explorations, and the unsettling experience of encountering the posthuman others, be them the human–machine hybrids, bioengineered interbeings, or monstrous formations. Animation’s potential as a mutant media form accommodates such fables of posthuman bio-hybridity, metamorphosis, and boundary-crossings.