The Spring Festival stall is over, and the Lantern Festival is coming. During this short window period, a movie with the blessing of super IP was released: "Tom and Jerry".
Among the foreign animations introduced in the last century, "Tom and Jerry" can be described as the most extensive radiation and the greatest influence, which can be called the memory of the whole people. Logically, such a super big IP full of emotions, adapted into a movie, as long as the quality is basically passed, it can reach the level of "Garfield", "Paddington Bear", "Detective Pikachu", and it is not difficult to achieve box office success.
But a few days after the film was released, it got bad feedback: the total box office forecast hovered around 100 million, and Douban scored 5.6 points. Not even a passing score.
Stills from the live-action version of Tom and Jerry
Why did this classic animation, which once occupied the childhood of several generations, lose the recognition of the audience decades later, when film technology has advanced by leaps and bounds? Is it that the times are changing too quickly, or is the movie itself too bad?
history
Born in 1940, Tom and Jerry has been highly known worldwide since its broadcast, winning seven Academy Awards for Animated Short Films. It mainly tells the story of the chase and competition between a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry, but also combines with the social background of the time, adding a small amount of slight irony.
In most of the anime's episodes, there is no dubbing dialogue, but purely relying on action and background soundtracks to create jokes. Many of these laughs are classic and have been imitated by a large number of later comedies, such as:
After being hit on the head, bulging and pressing the gourd floating scoop;
The physical form of Tom and Jerry's bodies changes as they are hit and devour foreign bodies;
Manufacture various flying devices, but will always fall from the air for various reasons;
Objects can also violate the laws of physics, such as Tom shoving a shotgun into a small hole to try to hit Jerry, but not noticing that the shotgun has bent and passed through it to face himself;
"Gothenburg Machinery" - a complete set of extremely complex, extremely long-distance machinery, to complete a very simple purpose, such as using a ball through many mechanisms, just to trigger an empty barrel or mouse trap.
Diagram of the Gothenburg mechanic in Tom and Jerry
In addition to the use of motion, devices, and violations of physical laws to create laughter, the use of music is also one of the reasons why the animation has endured. In the animation, classical symphonies and jazz music such as "Rhapsody of Blue", "Rhapsody of Hungary", "Overture of Bats", and "Carmen" are used in many places, and the connection between music and picture is also extremely smooth and elegant. Later, a large number of original music was used, through which emotions were expressed, switching between different actions and scenes.
At the same time, "Tom and Jerry" is not a pure farce, although the external form is seemingly absurd, but in essence, Tom and Jerry have independent personalities and virtues, can think of each other at critical moments, and will try to protect some things, such as babies. Behind the simple animation, it reflects the thinking of family, love, friendship and many other aspects.
The unique narrative style, exquisite action and music, and the pure pursuit of entertainment for audiences of all ages have enabled Tom and Jerry to break through national, cultural differences, and age limitations, and be recognized by audiences around the world. Since its introduction to China in the 1980s, Tom and Jerry has become a nostalgic classic in the minds of generations. As for many later imported animations, such as "Doraemon", "SpongeBob SquarePants", "Sesame Street", "Ultraman", etc., although they have their own advantages, they are always slightly inferior to "Tom and Jerry" in terms of purity, radiation, and crowd acceptance.
But such a classic IP, for the first time, disappointed the audience.
Weak content
In the early short drama versions, the length of a single episode of "Tom and Jerry" was generally only about 30 minutes, and the plot was generally weak, just creating jokes in various forms of chasing after me. Occasionally, other characters such as Baby Elephant, Little Canary, Gray Mouse Taffy, Bulldog Spike, Mrs. Two Shoes, Street Villain Cat, etc. are occasionally introduced to create contradictions and increase the diversity and interest of the story.
Occasionally, in addition to pure simple jokes, the story will also be sublimated, and sometimes even have some adult animation implications. For example, the famous episode of "Sad Cat": Honest Tom fell in love with a female white cat and gave everything for it, but still lost to the rich cat. After losing love and losing everything, the distraught Tom can only choose to commit suicide on the track - the episode points to multiple motifs such as love and class, and satirizes human nature and social phenomena, which can be described as one of the classic structures of world literature, obviously not only for children.
The Sad Cat
It is worth noting that whenever the story becomes complex and the moral is not expressed by simple actions, dialogue or voiceover is introduced, such as "Sad Cat", which is observed from Jerry's voice-over perspective.
By stretching a series that lasts about half an hour and becomes a movie of about 90 minutes, the content requirements will naturally be much higher. If the former attracts only fragments of the audience's attention, the latter must provide a complete story and sublimate the theme. To accomplish this, it is necessary to further highlight the "personality" parts of the two protagonists.
That said, both Tom and Jerry should at least speak.
Take the 84-minute movie version of Tom and Jerry, released in 1992, for example, in which Tom and Jerry both open their mouths and communicate with the story's character, Luo Ping, to help her get rid of the control of her vicious aunt and find her father. But overall, the film's storyline is still too simple, so a considerable part of the space in the film is filled with music and dance.
But in the recently released film, Tom and Jerry still can't speak, as in the original animated version. But the format is a 100-minute live-action movie. This arrangement means that the two main characters, Tom and Jerry, have lost their "personality" and have been completely reduced to two props serving the main line.
This kind of treatment is undoubtedly disappointing for audiences who rush into the cinema and want to experience nostalgia.
The main line of the story also does not stand up to scrutiny at all, is a country girl who has just arrived in New York, in a series of challenges, found the so-called "truth, goodness and beauty" and completed the so-called growth of the cliché story.
It is no wonder that its Douban ranking first short comment is like this:
"20% tom and jerry".
Bad form
If the inappropriate content arrangement reduces the interest of the film, then its bad form further corrupts the audience's feelings.
On social networks, there is no shortage of netizens who commented:
"Destroy the IP series."
"How much I miss my childhood, how hateful this movie is."
"It's embarrassing to die, can Warner put on a snack and make some rotten films with emotional circle money."
"It's like not finishing the post-production."
The problems that these reviews focus on are the film's presentation: the whole film is shot in real life, but wherever animals appear, they all become two-dimensional animations. Things in two dimensions are in the same space-time, producing great fragmentation and distortion. The audience even loses the basic sense of substitution for the story, let alone what aesthetic style to pursue, and gets moved from the content.
This distortion manifests itself in the influence of low dimensions on the high-dimensional world. For example, Tom and Jerry pick up three-dimensional objects; Spike, a bulldog, drags the hotel service staff and runs forward; the chase between animals destroys the hotel's facilities. The movements of the two-dimensional image affect the real world, and the perception can only be described as weird.
Director Tim Storry has said in a behind-the-scenes special that Tom and Jerry is one of his favorite animations, and that animated characters must be 2D, which is the best way to pay homage to the style of the past. But nostalgia or tribute, should always meet the basic sense of unity of aesthetics. Such a statement is more like the main creative team excusing it for its own laziness and money-making behavior.
In live-action animation, the most important thing to solve is the problem of authenticity. How to harmoniously integrate real and fictional images into the same dimension, maintain balance while avoiding the "uncanny valley effect", has always been the subject of research by teams of various Hollywood visual effects companies.
Take "Detective Pikachu", released in 2019, as an example. According to relevant media reports, in the early stage of special effects production, the "Detective Pikachu" team initially planned to directly convert the original 2D anime image into a 3D model, but because the presentation effect looked too cartoonish and lacked a sense of realism, the plan was quickly rejected.
After the cartoon style was rejected, the team turned to the realistic style, adding fluff to Pikachu on the basis of anatomy, while lengthening his arm to a certain extent so that he could independently complete the actions of drinking water, eating, and grabbing items. Although these treatments were once questioned by the audience, the final results were still satisfactory.
Pikachu and Fat Ding in Detective Pikachu
Looking back at the 1992 film version of Tom and Jerry, due to the technical limitations at that time, it was impossible to achieve the fusion of live-action and 3D modeling. So the film adopts a completely 2D form, maintaining the basic aesthetic unity, rather than hard pulling two different styles together.
In recent years, the global film industry seems to have been exhausted in creativity, and in order to maximize the probability of guaranteeing revenue, remakes or development IP sequel movies are flooded. This phenomenon peaked in 2019 when "Avengers 4" replaced "Avatar" to reach the top of the global film history box office. Some well-known independent directors even complain that there are almost no other projects to choose from except for blockbuster super British movies or remakes.
However, although the superhero IP series seems to lack imagination, at least in terms of content and form of expression, they have made solid efforts, so that the audience feels the basic sincerity. In contrast, the live-action version of "Tom and Jerry" this time has no highlights to find, and it is a complete waste of classics.
It can only be said that Hollywood looks hard to see, and there is no bottom line.