For animation fans, these two years have really been in the New Year!
From "Little Red Lady of the Fox Demon" and "Under One Person" to "Assassin Wu Liuqi", many brilliant works can be picked out every year.
And this year, domestic animation has ushered in a wave of good works blowout, and each season has acclaimed and popular works.
In January, "My Three-Body Chapter Beihai Biography" made many people shout "This is my ideal three-body film and television drama"!
The "Dali Temple Journal" in April also made many people cute with the big white cat Li Cake and a Luoyang dialect Chen Shi.
And what I want to introduce today is that at the end of July, it turned out to be out of the circle, from the first word to the circle, becoming a new benchmark for domestic animation in the hearts of many people, "Five Elements of the Misty Mountains".
How far is this fire?
Within a few days of the first episode, the number of Douban ratings exceeded 10,000, and now the first season has been broadcast, and the rating has stabilized at more than 9 points, and now it is 9.2 points, with more than 30,000 ratings. It has more ratings than "The Legend of Zhang Beihai", which has been broadcast for half a year.
On the B station, the amount of playback of this film is also very amazing. Before the second episode started, I looked at the data, and the first week of playback was close to 14 million.
Then, before the third episode began last Sunday, the cumulative playback of the first two episodes had exceeded 34 million, and the number of single-week broadcasts exceeded 20 million.
The single-week broadcast of the popular new fan of the B station is generally around 12 million, and the misty mountain is likely to set a new record for the single weekly broadcast of the new series of the B station (the only thing that may surpass the foggy mountain is last year's hegemony "Devil's Blade").
From Zhihu to Weibo, various social media also praised The Misty Mountains, and even Wang Sicong and Peng Yuchang forwarded Amway, which can be said to be really out of the circle.
The main reason for getting such a high evaluation is that "Five Elements of the Misty Mountains" gave a stunning answer to the topic of "what is Chinese style animation".
The story of the Misty Mountains is set in the overhead era of the coexistence of demons and demons, and the five major families with the power of the five elements of gold, wood, water, fire, and earth must fight against the demon beasts to protect mankind.
The three episodes of the first season are only the prelude to the whole story, and at present, everyone's praise for The Misty Mountains is mainly concentrated on two points, one is the art style, and the other is the drama painting.
Let's start with the art style.
The film adopts the Chinese painting style of splashing color ink, and director Lin Soul said in an interview that he was inspired by Zhang Daqian's landscape paintings and liked the bold and dashing momentum of splashing color ink.
Different from everyone's previous elegant and quiet impression of ink animation, Misty Mountain deliberately chose a large number of contrasting colors to match and match, creating a very dynamic and gorgeous ink style.
The beauty of the collision of various inks flowing in the OP is really amazing:
The main film is a landscape painting in each background, so beautiful that it can be used as wallpaper:
A common problem brought about by the ink wind in the background is that it may cause the foreground animation characters to be abrupt and unable to integrate into the background.
In order to solve this problem, the production team added ink style contour lines with different thicknesses to each character, and there were obvious differences in thickness and lightness when coloring the characters, which made the characters feel like coming out of the ink painting, and the background was very well integrated.
Behind this contour is a great amount of work.
The first season of Attack on Titan also used contour lines of varying thicknesses, but later found that post-processing was too time-consuming, and the next two seasons of the animation changed back to the standard outline drawing method.
Director Lin Ling said in an interview that he is a fan of martial arts films, and his favorite movies are Jet Li's "Jingwu Hero" and Zhao Wenzhuo's "Knife", and he also collects a lot of swords and weapons.
In order to draw a good fight scene in this film, he referred to a large number of Hong Kong martial arts films, and the cold weapon wheel war between human warriors vs demon beasts in the first episode has the temperament of Hong Kong martial arts films in the last century.
A set of attacking down moves smooth attack and defense are clear, and the action details of various move changes are very delicate, which makes people feel comfortable and addictive.
Each of the three warriors guarding the village has a distinct personal style, and the old six make the double sword good at close combat:
The seventh is a long-range combat, and the abacus can be taken down and can be shot directly as a hot weapon:
The most powerful old May 1 long gun danced watertightly, fluttering red wisps, trembling tip of the gun (the gun still hides a knife), these close-ups are full of the director's aesthetic taste.
In the words of director Lin Ling's interview at Station B, cold weapons are men's romance!
And in the second episode of the fire line transforming into full firepower, the style of playing drama has changed again, from the real department of seeing the moves and dismantling the moves to the super system of heaven and earth.
My ideal "Super Saiyan" fight is almost the expressive power of the second episode of Fire Walk VS Anger Beast.
The whole process moves at a high speed into the sky and the earth
There are fierce offensive and defensive battles between you and me
There are also weapons that use nature as a weapon to fight a world
In the end, it ended with the opposing waves of the mountains and rivers swallowing each other
This is the real fairy fight!
In the second episode, this fight scene is placed in the field of animation all over the world, and it is a top-level painting and performance effect.
The first season of "Five Elements of the Misty Mountains" was filmed in the ultra-high quality of the theatrical version for 90 minutes, and then split into three episodes, which is a dimensional reduction for other new animations.
However, the shortcomings and advantages of The Misty Mountains are as obvious as the advantages, and it is said that a few people complain more.
First of all, the plot explains the problem, the five elements vs the unicorn beast at the beginning of the first episode, just watching the three-word animation basically can't figure out what the unicorn beast is doing, and why the fire behavior wants to fight the unicorn. You have to look at the text of the plot to understand.
Secondly, the heroine Su Xiaoan's Yan Yi is really a bit too strong, the beautiful girl engaged in Yan Yi everyone likes to see, but the Yan Yi of this film has been so hard that even the painting style has changed, there are several shots I almost like crossing to the "Simpsons", there is a strong sense of separation.
There are many similar performance problems, compared to the explosion of the flowing quality of action dramas, the painting and performance of literary dramas can only be said to be unsatisfactory (the second episode is better than the first).
Finally, and the biggest drawback, the first season of "Five Elements of the Misty Mountains" only has a total of 3 episodes!
And these 3 episodes director Lin Soul has been doing it for four years since 2016, although the first season ended with the trailer of the second season, but the main staff of the entire animation studio is currently 6 people, and I don't know how long it will take to grind it out.
From the production list at the end of the animation, we can see that the misty mountain is the director Lin Soul who burned the liver of life.
Director Lin Soul alone from the initial script, storyboard to the middle of the original painting, and then to the late coloring, photography all involved, and even sang the OP, to a very high sense of existence of the supporting role with a voice.
In the interview, when the staff talked about "the production is so difficult, I can't figure out what to do", the answer is "find a director".
PS. Seventeen, who also holds multiple positions in the production list, is the wife of Director Lin
There are many reasons for the lack of manpower in the studio, on the one hand, the ink style of the Misty Mountains requires the painter not only to have a high level of painting, but also to have the aesthetic ability of Chinese painting.
Coupled with the current trend of domestic animation dominated by 3D, it is even more difficult to recruit the right artist.
On the other hand, the studio was previously unknown and the location was still very remote, and in the remote suburbs of Quzhou, Zhejiang, no one wanted to come.
Director Lin Soul has reached the point of madness in order to recruit people, and the 7-minute interview of Station B has inserted 3 recruitment advertisements. Now that the Foggy Mountains are on fire, it should be relatively easy to recruit people.
Even so, I'm not optimistic about the pace of progress in the misty mountains.
After all, the strength requirements of this most core storyboarding, painting and other positions are extremely high, coupled with a distinct personal style, in the end, the director still needs to undertake most of the work himself.
What can alleviate the workload is probably the peripheral work such as coloring and scene production. In fact, the first episode of The Smokies Studio did it independently for two years, and then it was completed in 18 years.
Later, Haochuan Animation (that is, the producer of the animation "The Great Protector" and "Dali Temple Journal") joined in to assist, injected funds and was responsible for part of the post-production and publicity, so that the film could meet the audience earlier.
Compared with the production list at the end of the second and third episodes, the biggest change is the addition of a large number of "good passing co-workers".
The first season of The Misty Mountains took 4 years to shoot 3 episodes, and if the second season could spend another 4 years shooting 10 episodes, I would already be very satisfied.
"Five Elements of the Misty Mountains" shows the infinite possibilities of Chinese-style animation. Although it has various shortcomings, whether it is the narrative mentioned above or the problem of literary and opera performance, it belongs to the technical level. As long as you recruit the right person, or ask for a high finger, it is not difficult to change.
The aesthetics, heart and love shown by director Lin Ling in the film are the most difficult things to cultivate after decades of life.
To see such a wonderful work, as an animation fan, I am deeply moved, I hope that the fire of the first season of "Five Elements of the Misty Mountains" can attract more people to join the production team, bringing us a longer, fuller plot, more explosive follow-up chapters, if you can come to a movie version, it will be more perfect!