Wen | Zhiyong
"Grandma's New World" was once a seed contestant with an exciting performance in this year's series.
The team of this play is extremely strong. Screenwriter Li Xiang, who has written film masterpieces such as "To Youth" and "Golden Age", rarely returns to the field of dramas, and his performance is curious. Yan Ni, who picks the two roles of the beam, and the strong lineup of actresses of all ages such as Deng Enxi, Yao Chen, and Mei Ting, also seems to add insurance to the series.
But after the real broadcast, the response of the show was somewhat tepid, and the heat, discussion, and word of mouth failed to create surprises. In the comments of netizens, "too plain" has become a common perception.
Bland, it has a lot to do with the three attempts of the series in genre and theme. As a rare road drama in China, "Grandma" faces the dilemma of congenital deficiency in narrative impetus. In terms of comic adaptation, it is also difficult to put the visual and literary advantages of the original work on the screen. In terms of topic setting, although the series provides another interpretation for many hot topics from the perspective of elderly women, there are regrets in the landing point.
Regardless of the result, from the perspective of improving the richness of domestic drama categories, "Grandma"'s stone-throwing direction is still worth analyzing in detail for latecomers.
Highway: To grab the audience, you need more appeal
The main line of the original comic book of "Grandma" is that after her grandmother ran away from home for several years, her sister and aunt suddenly learned her possible whereabouts, and took her granddaughter to embark on a journey to find people together, restoring the story of her grandmother's life course in the search.
From a genre point of view, this is a typical road drama: several protagonists embark on a journey for some reason, and meet various people and things on the way, and finally achieve spiritual sublimation. Such plays are either combined with strong genre shells such as adventure, crime, and fantasy, or pay attention to the transformation of the protagonist's own emotions and concepts, and the style is biased towards literature and art, loose.
The latter category is more common in movies, but relatively few in episodes. This is because the volume of about two hours of the film is enough to maintain the audience's attention to the loose events during the journey, so that the audience naturally baptizes the experience with the protagonist. But for the series, the lack of connection of individual events makes it difficult for the series to connect enough emotional connections to attract the audience, which is the problem faced by "Grandma's New World".
In fact, the narrative of the original comic is almost scattered, often bringing out the state of grandma at a certain stage with just a few strokes. In terms of the story of a single event, the original book is even weaker than the conventional road drama, but slowly releasing moving emotional energy during a calm journey is precisely the biggest feature of the original work.
This kind of smooth narrative rhythm is indeed difficult to reproduce in the series, so "Grandma" chose a simpler and more flattering adaptation route: increase the beginning and end of each event, and then present it in 1-2 episodes, and finally come out in the form of a unit drama.
This adaptation is understandable, but it still does not solve the core problem of "how to connect events". The result of isolating and dividing episodes one event after another is the lack of strong hooks between episodes, resulting in the audience may abandon the show at any time without leaving worries.
The search for grandmother, which could have been used as the main line of series, is also lacking in the emotional motivation of the two protagonists to find people. The main perspective in the original work comes from her granddaughter, a bystander of her grandmother's experience, who reacquainted herself with her grandmother in her search, and then found the power to live herself, and the birth journey of this power is enough to make readers deeply empathize.
But the series adopts the structure of "story set story, memory set memory", the two protagonists are only the introductions that appear at the beginning and end of the event, and a large part is placed on the description of the grandmother's experience by passers-by who meet by grandma, and in each event, it is interspersed with passers-by's memories of their past.
This makes the narrative perspective of the series always switch back and forth, which seems to be somewhat inseparable, and the emotional motivation of each character has already shifted to others before it is fully established, resulting in the difficulty of the audience to substitute whether it is the main line of finding people or the branch lines of each event.
In addition, most of the drama also uses the way the characters directly read the narration to explain each person's experience, and there are often cases where the narration is half an episode. The details of the story and the possibility of expression have not been fully developed, and the rhythm of the series lacks ups and downs, and it is inevitable that it will be evaluated by netizens as "too dull". In order to present a good road genre through the series, the main story line must be more attractive to the audience.
Comic book reform: a break between literary and visual
"Grandma"'s reliance on narration may have something to do with the strong literary nature of the original comics.
Although it is created in the form of a comic, every line of the character written by the author Kuang Fushake can be said to be carefully crafted. He is good at grasping the small but meaningful details of life, so that the characters inadvertently make golden sentences about it. This kind of condensation and romance, a few words of conversation and laughter can touch the soul of the writing ability, undoubtedly gives his works a high literary character.
Many classic lines and inner confessions in the original work also appear intact in the series, which makes the series still have the emotional energy that will give people a blow from time to time. But in the entire length of the show, such moving moments are too few, and this is probably the inevitable result of the change in the plot structure after the comic was adapted into a series.
The original book focuses on the state of emotional wandering, and does not seek to build a complete story structure, so that it can naturally complete the interspersion of golden sentences. After the series has made a large-scale expansion of the story beginning and turn, it must devote a considerable amount of space to complete the setting statement, leaving little room for golden sentences.
In addition, due to the adaptation, the setting of many side characters in the original work has undergone major changes, and the context in which the golden sentences are spoken in the original work no longer exists, which makes the series have to face literary impairment, and it is difficult to fully restore the charm of the original work. Supplementing with narration may be a rescue strategy at the screenwriter level, but at the end of the day, episodes and audiobooks are two different things, and the literary nature cannot return in mechanical retelling.
In addition to the literary nature, another great beauty of Kuang's works lies in the outstanding visual storyboard. "Elopement Grandma", like many of his comics, adopts the form of live-action shooting and comic book character collage, based on realism and sublimated in fiction, which is his unique and ingenious style.
Live-action shooting also makes the storyboard method of the original work different from the common fantasies of comics, but closer to live-action film and television dramas, and even has a clear editing awareness. For adaptations, this is actually a good thing, and many scenes are enough to charm as long as they are reproduced according to the original comic.
But perhaps because it focuses primarily on text, Grandma's New World doesn't offer much surprise in terms of visualization. In addition to the obvious distinction between the tones of the stories of each unit, the visual presentation of this play is relatively conventional, and most of the famous scenes in the original work disappear with the change of plot after adaptation. After the character image changed from fiction to realism, the elderly makeup became the focus of netizens' complaints, and many views believed that the fit between the character's elderly makeup and the real elderly state in this play was almost hot.
In the process of adapting from comics to dramas, "Grandma" almost inevitably caused the loss of the two advantages of the original literary and visual nature. It can only be said that the difference between the two different forms of comics and dramas may need to be carefully considered by later creators.
Topic: elderly + female + strong social topic, but the landing point is warm
From comics to series, the biggest adaptation of "Grandma" is a complete rewrite of the core character's motivation for running away from home.
In the original work, my grandmother first left home because she eloped with someone, but then embarked on a journey of wandering, more out of her desire for a free soul and the pursuit of self-enrichment. She dares to love and hate, and people can still be in love in old age without sticking to a leaf, and they are happy to return to everything. The legend of her divine dragon without seeing the end makes her almost have a poetry or even divinity, and she is a spiritual icon-level out-of-world character.
Perhaps because of the values she carries, it is still relatively bold in the current domestic dramas, and when the series was adapted, it took several episodes to reset the background of her grandmother's departure. The grandmother in the play, who sacrificed her life for the family, was rejected by her children, and accidentally learned that her late husband had cheated on her, which became the trigger for her decision to leave.
Such an adaptation has little to do with the original, but the new feminist color on the characters is also in line with the trend of the current drama market. As an elderly person, reading thousands of sails and deciding to find more possible perspectives on life during the journey is the real breakthrough that the series intends to make.
As a match, the series cuts from the perspective of her grandmother's elderly women, touches on many social hot issues such as cat abuse, live broadcasting, and sexual harassment, and packages the stories of each unit to be more typed and epidramatic. Compared with conventional group dramas, the structure of this drama's unit drama is indeed suitable for arranging a wide range of topics, but in terms of the specific depth of discussion on each topic, the presentation of this drama is somewhat tepid.
For example, in the fifth episode of the live broadcast, the discussion of the phenomenon of the elderly being exploited by their children, can only gain their own value through live broadcasting, and once they lose their ability to make money, they are treated coldly by their children, does observe a dilemma of the elderly that is rarely mentioned. But old age is not only a sharp perspective that cuts into the social fabric, but also a protective color for the final forced reconciliation of mother and son in this episode, and this is also a common regret in the show's various topic landing points.
Each event either ends too easily, too beautiful to be true, or stays in the hopelessness of individual salvation and self-punishment like an ascetic, and both landing points are ultimately unable to further the discussion of the topic. It is undeniable that there are still some good sentences in this play in terms of topic thinking, but the warmth of the landing point makes each paragraph a breath away from the real chapter.
Highway, comic adaptation, elderly women's perspective, these "Grandma's New World" attempts for the domestic drama market, can not be described as meaningless. But from the final presentation, the results of these attempts are a bit screwed, and unfortunately they have not really blazed a way for domestic dramas. However, it is still worthy of attention by latecomers, just as the so-called past is not forgotten, the future is a teacher.