Hong Sanyu
Editor's note: This is a nostalgic theater.
When it comes to director Feng Xiaoning, people will think of his masterpieces, the "War and Peace Trilogy" - "Red River Valley" (1996), "Yellow River Love" (1999), "Purple Sun" (2001). However, when he first entered the film industry, he was not only a "small character" in the industry, but also engaged in "pediatrics", the director of a Chinese children's film studio.
But he doesn't seem to be "duty-bound." In the "debut" of Feng Xiaoning's film released in 1990, the science fiction film "The Atmosphere Disappears" can be regarded as a "strange film". It has made a bold exploration of the art form, combining fairy tales, documentaries, and political theories, so that it is difficult to determine whether this film produced by the Chinese children's film studio can be regarded as a "children's film" purely for teenage audiences.
"The Atmosphere Disappears"
The film is about a fictional environmental pollution disaster. Three bank robbers succeeded in hijacking a train, forcing three cans of chlorinated hydrocarbons to dock on an abandoned railway. Greedy oil thieves mistakenly opened the knuckle door, put large quantities of chlorinated hydrocarbons into the sky, and burned through the ozone layer, putting all the life in the world that depended on the ozone layer seriously threatened. Scientists at the monitoring center are almost helpless.
Chlorinated hydrocarbon leakage
If the film's "atmosphere disappears" setting seems to be an inherent gimmick in "disaster films" today, the next idea is wonderful: a nine-year-old boy accidentally acquires the power to understand animal language and can talk to various animals without obstacles (only 24 hours). He could hear the alarms of the contamination of the earth and the destruction of life from animals before ordinary people. However, a child in the district called on adults to urgently eliminate the source of pollution, save lives, and save human beings themselves. All kinds of adults don't listen, don't care - adults who are having fun don't listen, adults who make profits don't listen, and even scientists who find ozone layer abnormalities take the little boy's words as the wind in their ears, and look for the source of pollution in the laboratory of the testing center in vain... In the end, it was the little boy who worked with a group of animals to destroy the most dangerous source of pollution – the chlorinated hydrocarbons were ignited, the ozone layer problem was solved, and the world was temporarily rescued.
The dog ignited the chlorinated hydrocarbons. This scene has seen countless viewers cry.
From the perspective of film structure, the main narrative line of "Atmospheric Disappearance" is the occurrence, pursuit and extinguishing of air pollution. The three sub-lines are the occurrence of pollution, the response of monitoring stations, and the search and removal of pollution sources by boys and animals. Elements such as environmental pollution, bank robbery, train hijacking, sunspot explosions, and dialogue between humans and animals form an organic whole. Both the events and the characters, the director managed to keep the suspense to the end. If you compare this film to a police film, then the gas canister is the criminal, the monitoring center is the police station, and the children and animals are the private detectives.
At the same time, this dramatic "police bandit" story is built on the basis of a "scientific fairy tale". The story told in "The Atmosphere Disappears" seems to take place at some point in the future. But the documentary scenes at the beginning and end of the film pull the audience back to the harsh reality that seems to happen all around us at any moment — except, of course, for the "non-scientific imagination of people and animals being able to talk."
The most "strange" part of "The Atmosphere Disappears" is the dialogue between humans and animals. For example, the deer in the film says to people: "You are too greedy, you will definitely get retribution!" "This is actually the director giving humans a warning and thinking through the mouth of animals. Feng Xiaoning wants to let the audience (first of all, children) understand that all creatures in man and nature are riding in an ark, and once the ark is destroyed, all passengers will be destroyed without exception.
The appearance of animals in the film also happens to be the background of children's films. In the late 1980s, China aired a 10-episode children's TV series called "Animal Kingdom Theft." The "main actors" in the play are many "real animal actors" from more than 20 animal performance troupes, including the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. In the domestic films of that time, the function of non-human characters such as animals was only "instrumental". Few people have mobilized so many animals in "Atmosphere Disappearing" like Feng Xiaoning, not only cats, dogs, fish, horses, deer, but also ferocious black bears and tigers. In fact, there are three kinds of characters in this film: a variety of adults, a little boy and a group of animals. It is said that during filming, the black bear was only two meters away from the small actor, and Feng Xiaoning crawled between the bear and the child, in order to embolden the child and prevent...
The tiger that appears in the film
Although there are these animal shots that make young and child audiences "happy to hear", considering that this science fiction film thirty years ago has won the Golden Rooster Award for Director Special Award, the Best Film Award of the Child Cow Award, and the Silver Pine Award of the World Environmental Protection Film Festival, the sense of social responsibility and environmental crisis shown in the film is probably even more than a children's film can bear.
In the superficial structure of the story of "The Disappearance of the Atmosphere", it calls on us to pay attention to the environmental protection of the atmosphere, pointing out sharply that if pollution is allowed to develop and spread, human beings will eventually destroy themselves. In a deep sense, the film points the spearhead at the human spirit, painfully pointing out that human greed, selfishness, insensitivity and ignorance not only directly cause the pollution of the global environment, but also an important reason for the further deterioration of environmental problems. For example, there are many scenes in the movie where the protagonist is filmed. When he and the white cat first embarked on the road to find the source of pollution, the boy stood on the busy street and asked for help, but no one paid attention to him, and no car stopped, and the overhead shot here made the boy look particularly weak and helpless...
Scientists in the lab who work in vain to find the source of pollution
At the end of "The Atmosphere Disappears", the child's voice is loud: "I love our sky!" I love our earth! I love our river! "The film also leaves the audience with a huge space to think, is the destruction of nature stopped with the burning of chlorinated hydrocarbons? Whether the real crisis is resolved, even at the end of the film, is still a suspense.
Today, in 2020, if you look back at this film thirty years later, the director's bold imagination, suspenseful storyline and special character design have made "The Atmosphere Disappear" have their place in the history of Chinese science fiction films.
Editor of this issue Chang Chen