In China this year's summer archives are slightly different from the past, and a large number of films specifically aimed at primary and secondary school students are released in July-August. This gives the summer archives a real "summer program" look. Among them, a large number of live-action performance stunts "plus super teenagers" are aliens.
Jointly produced by Shanghai Media Group, Shanghai News Cartoon Television and Mudanjiang Media Group's movie "Energy Saving" (hereinafter referred to as "Super Junior"), it will be released on August 18. The film tells the story of a group of children who bravely fight against the energy treasure aliens on Earth and ultimately defend Greenpeace. In the summer, "Super Junior" actually represents "McDougal", including films such as "Ma Lanhua", and they spent a holiday creating a new summer model for the commercial success of all students of "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf". Apparently a box office schedule aimed at younger audiences, it also fits the original definition of the summer archive — students are on vacation and more movies are being released.
Many movies are suitable for students, how to solve the problem of homogenization? The first true 3D animated "children's film", Super Boy, tried in all aspects, so that his other works had the same schedule, whether it was an animated film or a children's film, there were more obvious differences. It is worth noting that the film not only targets young audiences, but also tries to attract adult audiences by adding suspense components and a large number of special effects. In comics such as "Maran" and "Naughty Pony", in the box office competition, the jump is very close, and the "super teenager" is just outside their market.
Difficult to clone "Pleasant Goat"
There are many reasons why there are many films for primary and secondary school students of 7-8 months to be released in a bunch, but due to the holiday of time, an important reason is that many of the box office miracles created "Pleasant Goat and gray wolf" after the project began to produce movies, in this half year, so during this time formed the bomb movie phenomenon. Try to see what makes this summer's archive unique, and see the ending of Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf. The impact of low-cost, mediocre animation production on Chinese animation and the film industry as a whole is likely to continue.
It is difficult to clearly say, for animation practitioners, the box office cost of nearly 100 million yuan in exchange for a miracle of nearly 6 million, what does it mean? The story of "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf" or both of them not possessing superb quality seems to easily generate the illusion that cartoons/children's films are a scarce commodity and can be sold whatever they want. Copying Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf has been the target of many similar films.
When summarizing the success of "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf", the first thing to do is to show the timeline. At the suggestion of Wu Hehu, deputy general manager of Shanghai United Cinemas, the film will be changed to January 16 on New Year's Day, the first day of winter vacation for primary and secondary schools in Shanghai. The move brought gains and even triggered a new theory of "more emphasis on propaganda in the timetable". In this year's unique summer archive, homogenized film parties have long ruled out the possibility of such a "miraculous schedule." In addition, "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf" is not easy to copy, but it is also reflected in two aspects, one is the huge accumulation of potential audiences for TV series, and the other is easy to ignore the publicity. According to the market price, "Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf" only sell 10 times the cost of TV.
In addition to the fact that the timeline cannot be copied, Super Boy is the closest example of a summer movie to Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf. This movie can be seen as an upgraded version of the TV series "Little Thunderbolt Boy". "Bullet Boys" was the national children's channel ratings champion last year. Although the film version completely abandons the story of the TV series, but retains the Monday Fire and Israel's little friends against the Arabs, for tv viewers, it is the "Exploding Boys" movie version. But the producers were clearly not satisfied, simply pulling tv viewers to the theater (all that came in was spectacular), but through various measures to attract adult audiences who knew nothing about "Pill Boy". This is something that the Pleasant Goat and the Gray Wolf can't do.
From "Boy" to "Teenager"
Super Boy is an adventure story. Several main actors on Monday Fire lead a team belonging to the Polar Ice Alliance, whose goal is to save the planet. With the experience of the TV series, heroes, weapons, monsters and villains are the four elements that firmly grasp the young audience, and the film version has made major adjustments to this basis. The reason why he was able to make such a huge change on the basis of the successful "Exploding Boys" was that in addition to summarizing the rules of the success of the TV series, it was more important to attract adult audiences. From "boy" to "teenager", the theme of the story, the setting of the characters and the visual effects have changed a lot. This was also a decision made after a successful study of foreign children's films. Yu Cheng, producer of Super Junior and director of show cartoon products, said: "Many movies are children's movies, but the plot is complex, the character settings, and the depth of performance are far beyond the scope that children can understand. For example, the recent "Harry Porter and the Half-Blood Prince", the tone, the appalling rendering of the triangle, obviously refers to the adult group; another example, "McDougall is loud", feeling life, children can experience? Do adults feel better?
The overall tone of Super Boy is brutal, partly in gripping suspense outside of ordinary children's films. In the film, the Polar Ice Alliance arrives at a summer camp on the brink of bankruptcy, and anyone can see that the summer camp has nothing to do with the sun and the meadows. Monsters, appendages, and multiple personalities are rare in similar movies.
From the perspective of the film itself, "Super Boy" has been quite popular in the multi-line narrative of domestic small-cost movies in recent years. Although the three threads into the story are not complicated, but children do not understand, it will be easy. Three clues, an alien Gareth, with the mad scientist Vick, two grave robbers, pangolins and rats stealing earth's treasures, and three are the children of middle-class parents' dreams. The latter two threads are primarily aimed at adult audiences.
Since "Crazy Stone", robbers (speaking dialects) have almost become another big label small cost movie. In pangolins and rats, accidentally involved in children's adventures, always offer a spoof comedy movie plot, dedicated. When they meet the Ice Alliance, their children are defeated by wisdom. This episode is reminiscent of a small family series and a great example of an adult children's movie. There are emotional cues between parents and children.
In fact, a large portion of the box office of children's films comes from parents. Few parents can rest assured that elementary school students can go out and watch movies on their own. At the beginning of Pleasant Goat and Gray Wolf, there are parents chatting outside the theater, strange scenes of children, and empty seats in the hall. The design of "Super Teen" allows the whole adult to retain some parents and set some themes for them to reflect on.
Finally, for those adults who like to watch Joy, this movie might as well give it a try. There were a lot of triogenic D fight scenes in the film's influences, adding special effects that accounted for nearly 1/3 of the clip length, and two monsters Levita and Garris also used motion capture technology. This may be seen as a satire on the effects of adult movies – in any case, more and more "Superman/Monsters" are only heavy and hot, without heavy stories, thoughts and feelings, and then how different is watching a Superman movie and watching a children's movie?