Joseph Sunn Jue: Claymation Pioneer

Joseph Sunn Jue was truly a motion picture pioneer. Besides producing the second-ever Cantonese talkie (Romance of the Songsters, 1933), the first Cantonese color feature* (White Powder and Neon Lights, 1947), one of the first Chinese movies shown in 3-D (A Woman's Revenge, 1953), and the first Chinese movie shot in Cinemascope (New Story of Yu Tang Chun, 1954), he also created several claymation shorts for animator Ralph Wolfe's "Mud Stuff" series in 1926.

Three of these shorts are available online at the Internet Archive, as part of the Prelinger Archives. The shorts are silent, but a couple of creative and enterprising individuals have added soundtracks and posted the results on YouTube. I must say that the new scores really bring these films to life!

First up is "The Penwiper", with music by Tedd Smith and his group The Flying Monkeys.



Next is "Green Pastures", with sound effects provided by Coolympia.



Here are links to the original, uncut films, as well as a third short, "Long Live the Bull!"

• "Green Pastures"


• "The Penwiper"


• "Long Live the Bull!"

*Fei Mu's Remorse at Death (1948), starring Mei Lan-fang, is generally cited as the first Chinese color film, but Jue's White Powder and Neon Lights (1947) arguably deserves that distinction, even though it was a Cantonese-language film, shot on 16mm, and produced in the United States. Furthermore, although the film was released in Hong Kong in 1947, it was actually shot in San Francisco in 1941 (according to Cantonese Opera Film Retrospective, a catalog of the 1987 HKIFF film series).