Children’s films produced during the Cultural Revolution have long remained in a blind spot in the historiography of Chinese children’s cinema. They have either been dismissed for their perceived artistic impoverishment or passed over on the grounds of historical rupture. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema, this article shifts the analytical focus from the political attributes of film to the internal mechanisms of the image. It argues that the disappearance of children during this period is not merely a matter of diminished themes or representations, but rather the result of the interval between perception and action being filled in. Children on screen cease to function as “centers of indetermination” and instead become determinate centers that neither hesitate nor err.Paradoxically, the disappearance of the child is accomplished not through the repression of children, but through their empowerment. Deleuze identifies children as privileged figures of the time-image precisely because of their “functional incapacity” within the adult world: their inability to act effectively constitutes the passage through which they gain access to the time-image. Children’s films of the Cultural Revolution, however, repeatedly fill this interval by assigning children actions far beyond their actual capacities. On this basis, “child-centeredness” can be given a precise definition at the level of the image: whether a film allows children to retain their incapacity.Building on this critique, the historiographical reconstruction proposed by this article does not seek merely to restore the Cultural Revolution period to its conventional position within an established historical sequence. Rather, it calls for a transformation of the temporal model through which the history of Chinese children’s cinema is written. The internal measure should be the “stock” or accumulated presence of the time-image, with the coexistence of multiple temporal strata replacing the linear progression of chronology. As a temporal stratum in which this stock approaches zero, the decade of the Cultural Revolution need not first demonstrate its causal influence on the periods before and after it in order to warrant historical significance; it remains perpetually present. Only when rupture is allowed to appear precisely as rupture can the child who has been made to disappear truly return to the writing of history.