From "Fox Fake Tiger Wei" to "Gu Fei Luo" | Zhao Xia

If I hadn't witnessed it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have imagined that the name of Gu Fei Luo would be so loud in the English-speaking world. It's not unusual for it to appear on the reading list of his son's school. It has a variety of popular versions, hard sealed, soft sealed, three-dimensional, game, which is not surprising. But approaching Christmas and New Year's Day, walking around the children's section of the mall, you always see coats, sweaters, and plush toys made according to its appearance, which is a bit special.

In my opinion, Gu Fei Luo is not a particularly attractive story character. The picture book The Gruffalo was published in the UK in 1999 and the Chinese Simplified edition was introduced and published in 2005 by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, translated as Gollum Cow. In 2006, the Chinese Traditional edition of "Monsters Ancient Fat Monkey" was also published. This story is actually a fairy tale derived from the famous fable "Fox False Tiger Wei" in the "Warring States Policy". The little mouse walked in the dark forest, and when it encountered foxes, owls, and snakes who did not have ill intentions, it made up the name of the monster Gu Fei luo and scared them away. Unexpectedly, Cao Cao Cao arrived, and Gu Fei Luo really appeared in front of it and wanted to eat it. The little mouse thought about it and told Gu Feiluo that although he grew small, he was "the most terrible animal in the forest", and if he didn't believe it, he could follow it to see what was going on. Curiosity overcame appetite, and Gu Feiluo followed the little mouse all the way. The animals saw Gu Feiluo's terrible appearance and hurriedly hid, but Gu Feiluo thought that they were all afraid of the little mice, and finally they were scared to escape. Correspondingly, Gu Fei Luo is the tiger in "Fox Fake Tiger Wei", and it is not the protagonist of the story.

Perhaps it is to blame axel Schaeffler's illustrations, so that the original hero Little Mouse lost the aura of the protagonist and completed the reputation of Gu Feiluo. Gu Feiluo's appearance, according to the description in the text, was a sharp tooth and claw, which was terrifying and frightening. By the time of Scheffler's pen, the monster's fangs, claws, backstabs, and tumors were also complete, but the painter had slightly blunted the sharp points of those spikes and added a rounded arc to the contour line. On the screen, Gu Fei Luo bends his thick and thick back, holds up his fat and round belly, and raises his hands and feet to hide the thickness, which is really a bit unbearable. This image is easily reminiscent of the images of beasts created by Maurice Sandak in his famous picture book Beast Country, which sounds terrible but is actually cute, and its humor of confrontation and irony between images and words is also the same as that of Beast Country. There is obviously an intertextual affinity between Gu Fei Luo and Beast Kingdom.

Of course, it's not just the picture that goes to work. Julia Donaldson's rhymes, with cheerful rhythms, bright and lively, neat correspondence between upper and lower steps and enthusiastic echoes, make it impossible for it to be a terrible story. "A mouse was walking in the dark and deep jungle, and a fox saw this delicious food." The rhythm and rhythm of the drum beat unconsciously dissolve the suspense of "black" and "deep". Even if the fox, with a voracious cunning, blocks the little mouse's way, when it says, "Where is the little mouse going?" Go to my house for lunch", we already had a hunch that the adventure must end in some way of comedy. So Gu Fei Luo is not terrible, but it is a bit funny- not the stupid funny of the tiger in "Fox Fake Tiger Wei", but a little silly funny.

On New Year's Eve, the children's library area of cambridge city library specially arranged a reading activity on the theme of "Gu Fei Luo". Sitting in the center of the exhibition, the reciter is a bald man who reads the story of Gu Fei Luo quickly and smoothly, and the rhythm of the language is made more distinct. On the yellow sofa bench on his left-hand side, the chubby Gu Fei Luo held his stomach, sat upright, and listened to his own story, and from time to time raised his paws to match the plot - of course, it was a dressed doll. When the recitation was over, Gu Fei Luo stood up and walked around shakily, and the audience participating in the event rushed to take a picture with him. He became the protagonist without a doubt.

At the Cambridge Library's reading event, Gu Fei Luo was on the spot

In January 2020, Michael Burke, professor of rhetoric at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, gave a lecture at the Cambridge Children's Literature Research Centre to introduce the latest trends in the stylistic criticism of children's literature. The lectures are small-scale, mainly attended by scholars from the research center and some doctoral students. Professor Karen Coates, director of the Research Center, sat around a desk with us and listened to Michel give a detailed lecture on stylistic criticism. From a stylistic point of view, he analyzed the linguistic forms of Dickens's novels, separating the original prose language from line by line, which was immediately eye-catching. Subsequently, he passed on to everyone a material for speech exchange, which was coincidentally "Gu Fei Luo". Michel read Donaldson's rhymes with great interest, delving into the subtle lexicals. In the face of the fox's invitation, the little mouse replied, "Fox, you are really too good to be true", both politely responding to the "good" meaning of the invitation in a literal sense, and resisting and dissolving the "bad intentions" in it with subtle puns. The terrible and ridiculous transformation of each other has long been ambushed between the sentences. During the break between lectures, I chatted with Michel and talked about the origin of Gu Feiluo's story and "Fox Fake Tiger Wei". He nodded and said yes. Interestingly, from fables to fairy tales, the allegory of irony fades and the fun of humor rises. When did a villain who should have been ridiculed and ridiculed unconsciously become the protagonist in the spotlight? When it came to the place of drunkenness, he simply sat down at the table and discussed with us the discursive characteristics of this text.

Related to the popularity of "Gu Fei Luo", during Christmas 2009, the BBC launched its animated short film of the same name. The film is less than thirty minutes long and is basically based on the original work, including the language. The animated version apparently worked hard to recreate Mouse's status as the protagonist in the story, and was largely successful. However, when the original cheerful and dense rhyme foot is interrupted by the character's hesitation, support, and thinking from time to time, the fun related to Gu Feiluo also fades the original brilliance in such interruptions. Finally, the monster Gu Fei Luo escaped, and the witty little mouse was rewarded with a delicious hazelnut. It sat alone on the stone to enjoy the taste of hazelnuts, and the afterglow of the setting sun shone into the woods, shining on the little mouse in the center of the stone, surrounded by a peaceful silence. If the little mouse in the story is really in any corner, it will be happy for the moment when the hero returns. Curiously, in the cartoon, the original meaning of the story may have been extended, but the taste has become flat. In the final scene, the adventures related to Gu Fei Luo naturally return to the ancient tradition of the story of wisdom fighting, which is very stable, but it is also a little more ordinary.

Also in the same year, Donaldson and Scheffler published a sequel to the picture book Guferro. Contrary to the design of the animated short film, this picture book titled "The Children of Gu Fei Luo" switches the perspective and sound of the narrative from the little mouse to the side of Gu Fei Luo. In the opening scene of the story, Gu Fei Luo sits on a tree stump and earnestly admonishes the little Gu Fei Luo in front of him: Never go to the forest, so as not to encounter the "big bad rat". His daughter, of course, could not have obeyed this prohibition, and curiosity drove her to the woods in search of the fabled "Big Bad Rat." The name "Big Bad Mouse" takes the story from the ancient plot and conceptual model of the weak over the strong, and directly continues into the new tradition of postmodern picture books. The former "big bad wolf" has become a "big bad rat" here, the big has become a small, the positive has become the opposite, and the power relations, formal inertia, etc. are all snickering at us in the reshuffle.

Perhaps, the protagonist of the "Gu Fei Luo" series is neither a mouse nor a monster, but a fear of survival that each of us has in our hearts. Gu Fei Luo to foxes, owls, snakes and small mice, and the "big bad rat" to Gu Fei Luo and his daughter are both the source of this fear and its product. There is always something in this world that scares us so much. So we try to resist this fear with words, with imagination, with laughter, with impatience. However, knowing that it was a dark and deep forest, the little mouse still walked in, knowing that there was a terrible "big bad rat" in the woods, and Xiao Gu Fei Luo still walked in. Come to think of it, what are we really afraid of?

I admire Donaldson's insight. When Little Gu Fei Luo escaped from the shadow of the "big bad rat" back to the cave, he "may not be so courageous" in life, but it is also "less monotonous and boring" because of this. After experiencing the fear, the little mouse enjoys its hazelnuts, and the little gu fei luo enjoys its purring. Everyone has fears, but you don't have to be afraid of your own fears. Through it, the most ordinary things in life will emit a lovely light to us.

Author: Zhao Xia

Editor: Xie Juan

Editor-in-Charge: Shu Ming

*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.