East Asian Film Remakes

This wide-ranging, historically grounded exploration of motion picture remakes produced in East Asia brings together original contributions from experts in Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese cinemas and puts forth new ways of thinking about the remaking process as both a critically underappreciated form of artistic expression and an economically motivated industrial practice. Exploring everything from ethnic Korean filmmaker Lee Sang-il’s Unforgiven (2013), a Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood’s Western of the same title, to Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid (2016), a Chinese slapstick reimagining of Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) and Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale, East Asian Film Remakes contributes to a better understanding of cinematic remaking across the region and offers vital alternatives to the Eurocentric and Hollywood-focused approaches that have thus far dominated the field.

David Scott Diffrient is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colorado State University

Kenneth Chan is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Northern Colorado