Animating Mass Science: Signaletic Being and Collective Animism in Maoist Anti-Schistosomiasis Films

This article reconsiders Mao-era anti-schistosomiasis films – long treated either as triumphs of health propaganda or as failed instruments of mass education – by shifting attention from their didactic content to their animated sequences. Rather than judging these works with binary terms of success and failure, the essay approaches animation as a technosocial mode of existence whose perceptual operations organize bodies, environments, and pathogens into shared fields of action. These operations work through moments of rupture – interruptions of representational continuity that reorient sensation and action. Drawing on Thomas Lamarre’s concepts of signaletic being and worlding, together with Deleuze and Guattari’s three syntheses, I examine how arrows, lines, dots, and flickering rhythms in films such as We Must Eradicate Schistosomiasis (1956 ) , The Life Cycle of Schistosoma japonicum (1958 ) , Twin Flowers on One Stem (1968 ) , and Farewell to the God of Plague (1970 ) generate diagrammatic circuits that move beyond cinematic realism and Maoist iconography, functioning as forms of media care within an ideologically and sensationally saturated mediascape. These animations rechannel the quasi-religious fervor of Mao-era media into a more dispersed, relational, and rhythmic practice of “mass science,” producing a sensory field in which human and nonhuman agencies co-emerge. I term the configuration that emerges from these ruptures “mass animation”: not simply animation for the masses but a form of collective animism that remakes perception, labour, and sociality. By situating Maoist science education films within this framework, the essay offers a new lens on socialist propaganda and its infrastructural aesthetics of mobilisation.