Caption / Lion Boy
This article is original by ACGx, please indicate the source when reprinting.
For a good movie, content and publicity are equally important.
On December 17, "The Lion Boy" was officially released, and the box office in the first weekend was only 65 million, which was a huge gap with the expected result of the highest total box office of 2.5 billion yuan when the film was released.
A week ago, after three rounds of on-demand screenings, "The Lion Boy" posted 17.519 million at the box office, setting a record for an animated film in the Lunar New Year. In Douban, this unaired animated film scored as high as 8.3 points, and the audience who watched the on-demand screening also incarnated as "tap water" and spontaneously promoted the film on social platforms. Some voices on the Internet call it the "dark horse of the year", and the box office data predicted by the media is also going to more than 2.5 billion.
However, after the official release of the film rate, both the scheduling rate, the attendance rate, have not obtained more ideal data, even last week 6 in the 23.3% of the scheduling rate, the attendance rate is only 6%, the average number of people per game of 7 people is a big surprise, Maoyan Professional Edition is expected to eventually box office of 224 million.
Obviously, the "tap water" effect has not been fulfilled in "The Lion Boy". High reputation, low box office, what is the reason why this animated film failed to "go out of the circle"?
Flawless "three no products"
Myths and legends have always been the adaptation themes that the Chinese film industry is keen on, and the success of "The Return of the Great Sage of Journey to the West" and "The Demon Boy of Nezha" has led to the establishment and production of a large number of domestic mythological story animation films, and the "mythological universe" is about to rise from the ground. After the release of "Jiang Ziya" and "White Snake 2", there was a controversy in the reputation, and the audience also had aesthetic fatigue of Chinese mythology and legend animation films, and similar discussions such as "whether you can stop doing mythological theme animation movies" emerged.
The "Lion Boy" that appeared at this time is exactly the differentiated route taken. During the screening, the filmmakers laughed at themselves that "Lion Boy" is a "three no products", no card division, no IP, no traffic. However, this movie has a unique advantage, relying on the theme, intention, performance, music highlights, as well as the story of the salted fish boy counterattack, which has won praise from many anime fans.
The lion dance project with strong regional culture in the film is a presentation of traditional Chinese culture. Its story is based on the realistic theme of small people such as left-behind children, which is a theme rarely involved in the domestic animation film market.
The whimsical and romantic imagination of the animation form gives "The Lion Boy" a beautiful picture and a stunning action performance. Lingnan's comfortable rural life and the busy steel forest of the city, several wonderful lion dances and Ah Juan's solo dance on the rooftop, the film reflects the charm of animation vividly through the excellent cooperation of lenses, photography, soundtrack and other aspects. ACGx believes that "Lion Boy" is a work that uses the language expression of the lens to the extreme in the domestic animation films released in recent years.
In addition, the music of "Lion Boy" is also impressive, "Mo Cheating Young Poor", "Daoshan Liangzai", "Nameless Man" these lyrics full of life atmosphere, are the portrayal of the protagonist's different situations, so that the plot appeal of the film reaches its peak.
Of course, the shortcomings of this movie are also very obvious. In the 90 minutes of the whole film, there are obvious deficiencies in the first 60 minutes of character personality mining, except for the protagonist Ah Juan and the character shaping of the master and the master's mother, the other characters are almost equal to "tool people". Coupled with a large number of straightforward chicken soup dialogue, even in the tribute to Stephen Chow's films and Hong Kong films, it will still make the audience feel unconvincing.
However, all these deficiencies were compensated for in the final 30 minutes of the climactic scene. In particular, the plot of the last act allows the audience to get the most satisfying and meaningful experience, from the fantasy given by the animation to the real and serious real world - the fate of the vast majority of ordinary people has long been arranged by reality, but everyone should always maintain courage and enthusiasm in their hearts. The Easter egg at the end of the film is accompanied by Mao's difficult song "Nameless Man, I toast you a glass of wine", which completely releases the emotional tension contained in the film and allows the audience to get emotional touch in addition to the blood burning.
This domestic animation film that is easy to impress the audience has not been able to enjoy the dividends of the "tap water" of the domestic animation film market, and many viewers believe that this is the pot of original IP. ACGx believes that the main reason for the box office failure of "The Lion Boy" in the first weekend is because word of mouth has not been smoothly fermented to the public.
"Squinting" is controversial
The failure of the box office data of the first weekend of "The Lion Boy" has actually foreshadowed. When a number of publicity PVs were released at the beginning of the movie screening, some netizens pointed out that the character's "squinting eyes" setting did not match the real appearance of the Chinese, and it was even more different from the appearance of Lingnan people with deep eye sockets and double eyelids.
In the public interview with the creator, the film producer said that the aesthetics of today's national comic characters are too popular and European, and many people take the white European-style big eyes and double eyelids as the standard of beauty. The film director also said that this is an exploration of different aesthetics, "Why everyone has such a big reaction to 'squinting', it just shows that our aesthetic expression of animation has been homogenized, and there is no aesthetic confidence." However, these answers have not been recognized by netizens, but are regarded by many netizens as the proud performance of content creators.
The Hollywood animation aesthetic has indeed had a subtle influence on Chinese audiences and the creation of Chinese animation films. However, the character modeling settings in domestic animation movies do not completely copy the hollywood-style animation character modeling characteristics, but are adjusted on the basis of them to create a high degree of recognition of Chinese animated characters.
Even in the two animated films of "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending" and "New God List: Nezha Reborn" repeated by the protagonist, the character's face modeling not only fits the style of the film itself, but also meets the aesthetic needs of most domestic film audiences. In the eyes that attract the most attention of the audience, the adult Nezha and Ao Bing are all picked up from the corners of the eyes, and the eyes are thin and long, which have the characteristics of the Asian Dan Phoenix's eyes and retain the characteristics of the cartoon characters' large eyes. In another animated film, White Snake: Origins, the white snake's eyes are also upturned, and the eyes are large and bright. These highly recognizable characters can not only become the key materials in the film publicity period, but also have great advantages in post-derivative development.
"Lion Boy" chose to design the most important eyes of the character's face to deviate from the aesthetic model of the audience, still to improve the recognition of the character. However, the film's explanation was overconfident, which eventually triggered a large number of negative emotions of netizens who paid attention to the film.
The plot of Amway and human controversy, it is difficult to detonate the fermentation of word of mouth
Today, under the various online promotional materials of the film, a strange scene has been formed: the audience who is impressed by the story is in the social platform Amway Movie Plot, and another wave of netizens expresses their anger at the "squinting" persona. Two groups of netizens said their own things about the same movie, as if two huge parallel lines that could never cross, drowned out other shining points of the movie. This may be the result of the filmmakers who want to achieve word-of-mouth fermentation with "tap water" and then let the movie "out of the circle".
In the process of film word-of-mouth fermentation, the leading role is not actually official marketing, but topics extended by the content of the film, such as story highlights, shooting tidbits, actors and so on. For animated films, it is through the entertainment of the character image and the touching clip editing that makes the audience initially interested. These topics spread to each other in the audience-based Internet social network to form a many-to-many communication network, coupled with the one-to-many divergent communication of high-impact users, to achieve mutual intersection, and finally complete the fermentation of word-of-mouth and out of the circle.
For example, "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", at the beginning is the "smoky makeup" bad boy set by the young Nezha, followed by the "Lotus Cake" CP, Trump's Taiyi Zhenren, the deeply righteous Li Jing couple, etc., audiences with different preferences gather through their favorite roles, and finally achieve emotional identity in the mutual communication of social platforms, and obtain emotional satisfaction through watching movies.
The "tap water" topic point on "Lion Boy" could have been disseminated around various aspects such as picture quality, action drama, music, traditional culture, and regional culture to audiences with different aesthetic needs. Even after a screening, a clip of a lion dance student audience spontaneously taking to the stage to dance the lion was uploaded to the social platform by the audience, and the positive influence of this spontaneous secondary content by the audience was no weaker than the official announcement. It is a pity that the public opinion direction of this movie has been taken away by the topic of "squinting", and has not been able to form an effective communication network, and it is naturally difficult to "go out of the circle".
In addition to the problems in publicity, the entire operation of this film during the screening period actually exposed the filmmakers' eagerness to succeed. Considering the environment of the cinema market affected by the epidemic, and the period of film release is actually not the peak season, the data forecast of 2.5 billion box office released by third-party media during the screening period actually requires a certain "imagination". The performance of "Lion Boy" and the 2.5 billion box office forecast have caused the stock price of the main controller Hualu Baina to rise by 47% in just one week, once again realizing the function of domestic animation films as "financial tools" in the capital market, but also hitting the confidence of terminal theater scheduling.
Before the official release of the film, it opened three rounds of 121,000 on-demand screenings, with 456,000 viewers, but only 3.7 people per game. In the first weekend after the official release of the film, the schedule was completely suppressed by "Manslaughter 2", and about 22% of the schedule could still only contribute to the attendance of 7 people per game. Wanting to recreate the box office counterattack created by word of mouth in 2019's "White Snake: Origins" is not an easy task for "Lion Boy".
"Lion Boy" may not be able to become the "dark horse of the year", but its exploration of theme, production and story is a rare innovation in the Chinese animation film market. The various problems it encountered in the publicity also sounded the alarm bell for the future domestic animation film projects. Movie Weibo did not rush to open the #Lion Boy Amway Contest until December 20th, trying to make the movie reach more young audiences through the fans' two creations, and also invited the star @ Wu Jing Weibo to promote the movie on the same day, these publicity is too late, or can make the box office show a long stream, everything can only be handed over to time.