1. (2022高二下·奉贤期末) Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. obedience  B. spirit   C. approaches D. confidence E. headlines F. designs G. hits H. colonial I. central J. offenseK. influencers

I Am What I Am (also known as Lion Dance Boy), a Chinese animated feature released on Dec 17, 2021, has found itself in the eye of a social media storm— about eyes.

The film revolves around three teenagers from Guangdong province who set out to master the traditional lion dance. While ancient culture isto the plot, the setting is very much the real-world China of today. This alone sets the film apart from most recent Chinese animated : works of high fantasy related to mythology.

Pushing the realism, the filmmakers opted to give the characters relatively small eyes. The idea was to break away from the "beauty standards of onlineand filter aesthetic (审美) and to try "to explore the aesthetic in animation-from an angle of reality," writes The Global Times, paraphrasing producer Miao Zhang.

For some, though, thedon't represent Chinese people so much as racist stereotypes of them. Viewers have taken to social media to criticize the film.

"This is how Chinese people were exaggeratedly portrayed during the period. We've been discriminated against for so long that this doesn't look so strange to some people" reads one Weibo user comment. Another wrote an essay arguing that "narrowed" eyes is a greaterto a Chinese person than imagining a Black person eating watermelon and fried chicken in the United States. Large eyes are very common in Chinese cg films. For Zhang, this reflects absorption of foreign ideas, not the small eyes his film contains. The Global Times continues:

The response to "narrowed" eyes of the character shows that we lack aestheticand our aesthetic view of animation has been homogenized (统一化) given the huge influence of Japanese and American animation and the selection of such an ordinary boy perfectly describes his  of strengthen and resistance to life.

I Am What I Am is popular with those who have seen it, earning user scores of 8.3 and 9.5 respectively on film reviewing platforms Douban and Maoyan. Its Chinese box office to date is 164.6 million yuan, according to Entaroup.

The question of racism aside, this controversy shows howto character design can become deep-rooted in the industry, to the point where even a subtle difference will become .