Of the first two seasons of Love Death, my personal favorite was Zima Blue.
In the series of dark, psychedelic, violent, and bloody short films, "Zima Blue" is like a clear stream.
Peeling out the opening credits, its main film is only about 8 minutes, but there is too much information in it, and the things discussed have gone far beyond art, but have risen to the level of philosophy.
In this issue of Classic Analysis, we will devote 5500 words to this animated short film.
First, let's introduce the background.
This film is adapted from the short science fiction novel of Alastair Reynolds, in the original book, Zima is one of the most popular painters in the universe, when he was about to finish the painting, he accidentally painted a touch of blue on it, this blue suddenly awakened his instinctive pursuit of art, life, in order to explore the mystery of blue, he transformed and upgraded his whole body, so that he could swim through the magma, step on the glacier, and go to the universe to find answers.
Later, he found that the transformation had kept him farther and farther away from the answer, and the blue that made him shudder inside was the color of the first tile he had seen when he first took the form of a pool cleaning robot.
Alastair himself is very good at creating new space operas.
This type of science fiction has a characteristic, the story often takes place in a very large universe, with romantic tendencies.
The animation is limited by the length, the background setting and plot are simplified, the future planet where the story background is located is not too much depicted, the setting that all humans are cyborgs is removed, the plot, the female reporter and her memory assistant am's branch line has also been deleted, and the origin of the blue appearance has also been changed.
But the ultimate problem expressed in the short film has not changed, in a sense, the animated short film makes Zima's story more pure and leaves more room for discussion.
After all, words and images are two very different systems of expression, which we will leave to the end to discuss.
There is also a story behind the creation of "ZimaLan".
At first, the author just wanted to complete a "meta" proposition in the science fiction world: what happens when a robot, under the generational transformation of humans, becomes more and more intelligent and more complex?
And the story has been told badly, and he himself is self-deprecating, if that's all, Isn't Asimov better than he is? After that, he kept trying to find a satisfactory shell to wrap this kernel, but he did not find it, and the story of Zimalan was also shelved for several years.
Much later, while swimming, the author was suddenly enlightened and found a new angle, so he completed the short story "ZimaLan".
After the background introduction, let's get to the point.
At the beginning of the film, a cool water car comes from the left side of the screen, which is equivalent to introducing the background - the highly developed world of human civilization.
There was a female reporter in the car, and the purpose of her trip was to admire the retreat works of the great painter Zima.
She also set up a suspense, Zima has not been interviewed for many years, why did he take the initiative to invite her over this time?
In the first few seconds, in the long-range shot, the water car slowly turns into a tiny black dot, like a fish swimming in the boundless sea.
The director deliberately submerges the car into the sea, suggesting that this creature of high-tech civilization has returned to the creatures of primitive nature.
The creation of the car, is the contemporary technology, it also created the goal of this trip - the robot Zima, the answer to the female reporter's trip, in fact, has been unveiled, it and the end of the picture highly corresponds, in order to better understand, we put it to the end.
The female reporter began to tell the story of Zima's mysterious past.
Zima's career as a painter began with the creation of portraits, an art form that does not pay attention to the acquired artistic "creation", but focuses on faithfully reproducing the objects of painting. At first, Zima hoped to find the primordial impulses in his heart through careful observation of human beings.
But the more Zima painted, the more he felt that this was not the fire that ignited himself, after all, portrait painting was too limited to the form of the human body, and then he gave up portrait painting and began to paint murals.
The scope of the mural painting is large, the majestic scenery, the bustling city, the magnificent universe, Qima has tried various themes, from the earth city to the cosmic territory, more and more complex and difficult, just corresponding to the progress of human civilization from the earth century to the universe century, is the result of continuous "progress" after superimposing various elements.
The shift from painting people to painting the universe, from small to large, hints at the pursuit and ambition of human beings in "integral civilization".
Taking a step back, the very existence of the universe is a symbol of depth. The mural created by Zima is actually a demonstration of his gradually complex and in-depth process of "human beings", indicating that at this time, Zima tried to find out the truth about "living beings" in the depths.
Unfortunately, neither the portraits nor the murals allowed him to get the impulse he felt in his heart for the first time.
Then, a turning point appeared, and a blue square appeared in his fresco.
From the later film, we know that this blue square is what Zima came into contact with when cleaning the robot form, it is a very ordinary pool tile, and it is also the original form of the cosmic blue and the urban blue in his paintings, and it is it that makes Zima lead to the initial "heart throbbing", which becomes the key to induce him to awaken the human heart and explore its essence.
Blue, which represents the source of truth, is simple and primitive, and when it appears in various murals symbolizing the "complex great civilization", it seems very abrupt, contradictory, and incompatible with other things around it.
In the later period, the range of blue in Zima's paintings continued to expand, occupying more and more space, intending to reflect that at this time, Zima's pursuit of truth became more and more eager.
However, even if he made a huge mural with a single color from blue, and even created a blue band of gravel in the actual cosmic space, blue could not occupy all the space.
In the first half of the animation, the director always maintains contrast and enrichment when using color, emphasizing this inaccuracy with non-blues around the blue—such as the black of the universe, the white of the stone, and the red of the blood when Zima transforms his body.
Surrounded by an all-blue mural, there are urban scenes of various colors, and around the blue rubble band, there is a universe with a black tone and gray stone that has not yet been dyed, forming a strong sense of conflict.
Zima began to realize that it was wrong to search in a complex, deep direction, not to bring him a real throbbing heart, not the right answer.
When it comes to the memories of the female reporter and Zima, here is a very interesting point: the two people's accounts of Zima's experience are different.
In the memory of the female reporter, Zima is a robot transformed from human flesh, and in Zima's own account, his original form was only a "cleaning robot".
This point, the director uses audiovisual language to hint, when the female reporter comes to Zima's residence, her car automatically leaves, and the next second, Zima comes out of this position, and the compositional language of the same substitution here hints at the attributes of Zima's "technological creation robot".
After the mechanization, the tall And incomparable Qima, and the female reporter as an ordinary human, played the most cute height difference, and the strange handshake close-up of the two further deepened the difference between the two.
Why is there a discrepancy in the cognition of the two people? In fact, the individual experience of Zima is emphasized here.
In the process of pursuing human beings, he removed his most primitive robot form, first becoming a human being with "flesh and blood", and after not finding a satisfactory answer, he became a robot based on the human body.
The acquired power that belongs to science and technology, superimposed on his body, makes him more and more complex, advanced, and more and more loses his original appearance.
Of course, the result of everything was negative, and in order to feel the throbbing of the past, he superimposed so many things, but fell into the confusion and confusion of self-knowledge, as he himself said:
"Sometimes, even I have a hard time understanding what I've become."
Fortunately, he found the ultimate answer.
Although in the mouth of female journalists, many people may only think that this is an excessive sacrifice for the sake of art.
At the end of the film, Zima disintegrates himself, returning everything to its original form, and he erases all the complex "civilizations" from his performance hall and returns to the simplest cleaning robot.
With the audiovisual language of this part, it is possible to more clearly understand what the short film is trying to express.
In the darkness, the high-tech pool, after being completely opened, occupies most of the area of the picture, and it squeezes the modern venue with a sense of "scientific and technological civilization" - boxes, seats, lights, stages - to the corners of the four sides.
Surrounded by spectators in the shadows, the director highlights the pool and Zima in a red robe.
In the end, everything faded away, the lights on the scene turned off, the surrounding technology disappeared, the universe in the background disappeared, leaving only the central pool, and finally, it expanded into the ocean, and everything returned to its simple appearance, falling from the universe back to the earth, from technology back to nature.
The film's use of blue is also very clever.
In the first half, blue only occupies a part, dominated by gray and dark dark colors. In the second half, as Zima gradually returned to his true nature and found the fire in his heart, everything changed back to a pure blue hue.
At the beginning, the female reporter introduced that after Zima accepted the transformation, he "can see all the spectrums", and at the end, Zima dismantled himself, especially gave a close-up of "removing the eyeball parts", showing his determination to return to the basics.
The color perception in its field of vision has changed from rich to single, and the blue object itself has also left the background of the complex and deep environment such as the universe and returned to the state of "tiles on the edge of the pool".
Finally, under the total darkness, the pool lost its border and became a "sea" of primitive nature, overwhelming the civilization elements in the same field.
It can be seen that a simple, initial heart is the key to being a living being and an emotional stirring.
In Zima himself, we can see the concept of "regression".
Step by step, he removed the complex parts that had been installed the day after tomorrow and finally returned to the form of a cleaning robot.
In this way, he swam in the "sea" and became a "fish".
The scene at the end undoubtedly corresponds to the opening shot, forming a compound expression effect, so I said that at the beginning of the short film, the answer to the female reporter's trip was explained.
Only by stripping away all the complex elements and developing the acquired civilization can we touch the purity of human beings and return to the original state.
Emotions are exclusive to living beings, and this subtle reflection of subjectivity distinguishes humans from robots, making the former a being with agency and indeterminacy, and the latter merely a tool for carrying out commands.
The civilization that human beings think of as "developed" is constantly complex and superimposed with various "additions", but it actually makes human beings become "machines" and lose their lives, the simplest and most direct emotional response.
In terms of content, this ending makes the "pool" equal to the "sea" and emphasizes the "return of science and technology to nature";
Structurally, it also allows the film to roll back to the opening, giving a return to the form under the "picture reproduction", which can be said to be very careful.
Science and technology and art are important components of human civilization.
In this film, Zima, himself is a technological creation, engaged in artistic work, taking into account both, compared with the human beings around him who strive to arm themselves with various things, he finally completed a complete subtraction, disintegrated back into the form of the least technological enhancement, and seems to have become a sea with "no trace of creative processing".
The artificially developed civilization has gradually complicated the attributes of human beings, and those values, knowledge, and group consciousness have also been removed one by one in the process of being stripped of civilization, and human beings have returned to their original appearance.
In Zima's experience, "the brain that adds complex autonomous thoughts" is the highlighted part of the modification, which has thoughts but is farther away from the answer.
And at the end, it unloads everything, without any external ties, constraints, restrictions, or even so-called "thoughts", some are only the most basic "functions", the instinctive tremor of the heart, the intuitive touch of some simple, complete blue beauty, and the answer to "human beings" only appears.
This is also the source of the philosophical meaning of this film.
In ancient Greek mythology, the Athenian prince Theseus was very popular with the people, and the 30 oared boat he took when he returned from Crete was left as a monument by the Athenian people.
But wood, unlike solid things such as stone carvings, can be preserved for a long time, and every time it decays, the Athenians will replace it with a new piece of wood. In the end, every piece of wood of the ship was replaced.
So the question is, a ship, if I change all its parts, is it still the original ship?
This is the famous Theseus paradox in the history of philosophy.
Here, the question can be replaced by: Zima has undergone so many physical transformations, is he still the original Zima?
Here, the answer given by the director is: Yes.
Zima added human muscles to make his body more human-like, but he was further away from the answer he was after.
On the contrary, when he returned to the simplest form of the robot, he got the feeling that he had touched instantly.
To a certain extent, this film even negates the "human body" to the "essence of human life".
Physical change does not mean anything, the original heart brings pure emotions, is the key to why "life" is "spirit", not "machine".
A ship, even if I change all its parts, it is still the original ship, life is also, it is only about the heart, not affected by external forms such as the shell.
Inner presence or absence defines "whether your essence is a living being or not," even if your appearance is just a robot.
Let's talk about why I think the animated version of the adaptation is excellent.
In the original work, the author asked the female reporter to tell this story from the first perspective of "I", and she, like Zima, is also the product of machine transformation, has lived for five hundred years, and needs to rely on memory robots to manage her life.
There is a detail in the novel, Zima invites her to drink, asks her whether she drinks red or white, in the absence of a memory assistant, she hesitates and cannot choose, indicating that after she constantly uses the machine to transform herself, the intuitive choice of inner emotions gives way to rational and objective logical judgment.
Such a design, of course, has advantages.
On the one hand, she has the same emotional conditions as Zima, which can make readers more substitutionary;
On the other hand, the experience of the female journalist echoes the experience of Zima, and the two together express the theme of the novel.
At the end, when she exists as a hybrid of a robot and a human, rather than a pure human in the movie version, after seeing Zimana's ultimate performance, her inner feelings as a human are revived again.
In contrast, the female journalist is no longer a spectator in the film, but has become an equal existence to Zima: while Zima disintegrates and returns to the original, she also finds her former self, and finally, she also dismisses her memory assistant.
However, although the text can reach the inner world of the characters, or lay the foreshadowing to echo each other, the novel's two-line expression, combined with the first-person perspective of the female reporter, also makes the expression of the theme become a bit wordy.
The author explains too much key information in words, and says it too bluntly and slightly bulky, and the characteristics of the image are intuitive and rich.
The novel ends with the female author's memories of Zima, and at the end of the animation, the pool becomes the sea, and Zima becomes a small fish in the sea, echoing from beginning to end, and the afterglow is longer.
In the 10-minute space, the director chose to take Zima as the starting point, betting all his resources on a clue, not fully reproducing all the plots of the story, but allowing the core story to be presented more completely, achieving an excellent film and television adaptation.
Understandably, Love Death Machine has come out to the third season, but there are still many people who are obsessed with the story of the first season, and propose that we publish a column to analyze it.
Personally, I feel that in addition to the above reasons, it is also the most relevant work.
The three words in "Love, Death and Robot" are Precisely Zima's question: "Robot" is The external form of Zima, the trigger point that makes him have the impulse to "become life", "death" is the end of life, and "what is life" is his question, and "love", which is the product of the highest peak of the throbbing of the heart, is the answer obtained by Zima.
Zima lived for hundreds of years, experienced the development of civilization, explored the depth of the universe, and the answer he found was to return to the original origin.
From the return of the universe to the earth, from the return of technology to nature, from the return of various forms of blue objects to the pure pool tiles, from the complex robot body to the original robot form, from the panchromatic spectrum to a single blue, the "return" from multiple angles leads us to the most authentic mind, and Zima uses the most intuitive and emotional throbbing emotions he feels to tell the secret of "living beings".
Everything that is given to the outside, even the body, is a weakening superposition of pure essence, making it complicated, but diluting the attributes of "living beings".
In the final analysis, "what is a living being" is related to many things, it is closely related to the existence of consciousness, and it seems a bit illusory under the still limited level of development of science today.
The emotional answer given by this film may be somewhat flattering, and it seems to avoid the important and light, but it is also the solution that everyone can understand and accept the most.