"South China Terroir" has become the most unique and existential "character" in the whole animation. The blooming bauhinia is a cluster of pink purple clouds that cover the homes of the villagers. The real environment and real life details of the surrounding countryside of Foshan highlight the power that overrides the narrative. The picture shows the stills of "The Lion Boy"
Liu Qing
Contemporary inferiority left-behind teenagers reshape their self-perception through the Lingnan folk lion dance - the animated film "Lion Boy" makes people see that the materials of traditional culture can not be suspended and fantasized, they exist in the secular daily time and space, and their survival and contemporary issues continue to intersect.
"South China Terroir" is the most unique and existential "role"
The boiling passion and enterprising sense of lion dance, which is a folk custom, and the metaphorical color that the lion is given to this animal in modern times, make the southern lion dance not only a folk activity in the aesthetic sense, but also has the power of group identity, becoming a symbol of awakening, resistance and self-improvement. The narrative background of the dance drama "Wake Up Lion" is that when the First Opium War broke out, the young people who inherited the skills of lion dance dissolved their family rivalries in order to fight against foreign insults and became the awakened lions on the battlefield of Sanyuanli. The fictional story of the movie "Huang Feihong: The Lion King Contends for Hegemony" takes place after the end of the Second Opium War, the plot begins with the funny martial arts, and finally the national integrity, the big scene of the lion dance with heavy organs is flexible and gorgeous, and the real colorful passage is a statement when Huang Feihong walked to Li Hongzhang with a token: "We not only practice martial arts to strengthen our bodies and resist foreign enemies, the most important thing is to broaden the wisdom of the people, the unity of wisdom and martial arts, is the way to make the country rich and the people strong." "In these previous works, the background of the period drama is set at the crisis moment of the transition period of modern China, and the "lion dance" is attached to the awakening consciousness and the reconstruction of dignity, which is a complex of affection at the ethnic level, and after all, it is a look back with distance.
The lion dance is the nostalgia of overseas wanderers and an intangible cultural heritage project, but in fact, it is still a folk activity with a strong sense of place and contemporary in the southern Guangdong region, and it is not a framed heritage, but a part of the living world. The surprise of "Lion Boy" is that it not only amplifies the vivid beauty of the lion dance with the freedom of animation expression, but more importantly, it presents the Lingnan customs and customs that are closely related to the skills and culture of the lion dance. In these years, there have been ancient Tang style song rhymes and postmodern cyberpunk in the national comics, but this kind of daily life with a sense of the times and localization is rare. The lion dance passages accompanied by nostalgic golden songs in "The Lion Boy" more or less borrowed from Hong Kong action movies, and the nonsensical passages of the protagonists are also blatantly appropriating the passages of Chow Sing Chi's civilian comedy. Even with these obvious collage colors, however, the regional characteristics of the southern Cantonese countryside and the breath of life flow conveyed by it are heartwarming daily discoveries.
"South China Terroir" has become the most unique and existential "character" in the whole animation. The film opens with the Spring Festival, when the kapok trees and trees blossom like branches and fire, and the wind blows the flowers wildly, like flocks of burning meteors. The blooming bauhinia is a cluster of pink purple clouds that cover the homes of the villagers. Outside the village, plantain potatoes are crowded in the fields, and the roots of the solitary banyan trees hang around the moss-covered Buddha statues. The artist's attention to details partially conceals and offsets the limitations of the screenwriter's ability. When the characterization of the play itself fails, the real environment and real life details of the surrounding countryside of Foshan highlight the power that overrides the narrative. People with experience in the southern country may be able to feel the humid and hot air that is still hot and humid in the cold season, the sunshine that shines kapok and bauhinia in a particularly full and brilliant way, the tropical rain with plant grass and earthy air, the rich smell of seafood shops, the noisy open-air night stalls, and the delicate lion dance in the sonorous gongs and drums during the New Year. The customs of one place and the customs of one place stretch into the scrolls of life of all sentient beings and endless life.
The short counterattack of the fairy tale has reset the distance between traditional culture and realistic issues
"Lion Boy" uses the freedom of animation to enlarge the "burning" and "wild" of the lion dance, which of course points to the sense of spiritual leaping. The play has found a very contemporary point of strength: the lion dance can convey a momentary spiritual uplift, can it change the spiritual temperament and destiny of the individual more permanently and more thoroughly? The lion dance is no longer a metaphor for the soul of the nation, pointing to a small, specific personal identity - to be a sick cat or a male lion?
Unfortunately, the complete drama presented in "Lion Boy" is a seriously stereotyped inspirational text of small-town earth dog youth, and audiences who have watched the TV series "The Sky of the Wind Dog Boy" and the movie "The Sky of the Burning Wild Boy" can easily find that the screenwriter repeatedly nests the same set of narrative elements into the different time and space of Chongqing, Hainan and rural Guangdong. The film's intuitive character modeling is controversial on social networking sites, "Are ordinary boys in South China ugly squinting?" More suspicious than this kind of questioning is the ecology of the countryside around Foshan, where the painter captures the natural Lingnan grass and trees, but the screenwriter enters a small world that he does not actually understand and does not have the ability to reproduce with imagination. The play tries to cut into the pulse of realism from the phenomenal issues of left-behind teenagers, rural families impoverished by illness, and individuals being humiliated by poverty, but it simply does not have the ability to go deep into the complex situation where the differences between rich and poor in the southern countryside are entangled with clan ethics, and finally how quickly and economically uses the two-dimensional comic-style routine to create stereotypes such as "rich village tyrants" and "low-level provocateurs", and the male protagonist Ah Juan, as the "chosen son", completed a fairy tale-like short counterattack.
In addition to the intuitive Lingnan scenery on the screen and the lion dance passages that promote emotions, the aftertaste of "The Lion Boy" is outside the picture. A frail teenager with a feminine name must take off the label of "weak" in exchange for dignity, is this a subtle "Mu Qiang"? How can a traditional skill inheritor who is uniquely alive and lean out of the stage and get older, become a "salted fish" that is invisible to everyone? A girl who has won the lion dance competition and has been an ambassador for the culture of lion dance, and is considered by her family that "it is not a long-term solution for girls to do this line of work" and obediently enters the marriage mode, is this the stereotype of male writers? It should be known that the "Foshan Lijia Lion", which made lion heads for "Lion King" and "Wake Up Lion", has been passed down for six generations after 200 years, and the last two generations are women. These details, which have been brushed over, open up the speculation of "inheritance and reality" that cannot be loaded by the main line of the play.
"Lion Boy" intends to clearly quote the passage of Liang Qichao's "Young China Says", in fact, if the "small town youth rather have a kind of hu" is shelved, perhaps this movie can really open the open realm outlined by Liang Rengong's characters.
Source: Wen Wei Po
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