Shanghai Disney Taps Local Culture For 10th-Anniversary Duffy Month

Shanghai Disney Resort is bringing Chinese animation, Jingdezhen porcelain and Huju Opera into its annual Duffy Month in September as part of its 10th-anniversary celebrations.

The resort has partnered with Shanghai Animation Film Studio, porcelain artisans from Jingdezhen and Shanghai Huju Opera Theatre on new films, products and performances featuring Duffy and Friends.

Andrew Bolstein, president and general manager of Shanghai Disney Resort, said the collaborations reflected the resort's longstanding approach of being "authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese."

A major part of the program is Duffy and Friends' Little Voyage, the resort's first promotional animated short starring the characters. Produced with Shanghai Animation Film Studio, it will be released on August 31.

The short combines watercolor, ink-wash, gouache and paper-cutting techniques. Peaches, gourds, goldfish and other imagery reference Chinese animated classics including The Monkey King: Havoc in Heaven, Calabash Brothers, Where Is Mama? and Monkeys Fish the Moon.

The collaboration comes ahead of the animation studio's 70th anniversary in 2027.

Guan Minbo, the studio's production director, said working with the resort offered a way to introduce its artistic traditions to younger audiences.

The resort has also worked with artisans in Jingdezhen on a Duffy and Friends porcelain cup. The project follows the inscription of the Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July.

Reproducing the characters' colors in famille rose porcelain presented a technical challenge, said Ouyang Min, a professor at Jingdezhen University who participated in the project.

"This small cup uses as many as 20 different colors, and each color develops at a different firing temperature," Ouyang said.

Development took several months and nearly 10 rounds of sampling, with almost 60 test pieces discarded.

"When I finally saw the finished piece in front of me, I felt that all the hard work had been worth it," Ouyang said.

Chinese musical elements will also appear in A Voyage with Duffy and Friends, a new production on the Enchanted Storybook Castle stage.

Its four original songs draw on Xianhua Diao, a traditional Chinese melody, and feature instruments including the yangqin, erhu and xiao, a vertical Chinese flute.

Special Huju Opera performances will be staged on weekends in September. It is the third consecutive year that Shanghai Disney Resort has worked with Shanghai Huju Opera Theatre.

Xu Rong, director of the theater's development department, said the collaboration was intended to introduce the Shanghai opera form to younger audiences and overseas visitors.