The author | Wei Xiaolin
Dodged boulders and vipers, but Mad Hominid 2 was lucky enough to escape from DreamWorks Animation's waist slash.
Two weeks ago, on November 27, DreamWorks Animation's new work "Crazy Primitive Man 2" was released worldwide. This sequel film, which tells the story of the laughter and haunting journey between the primitive family and another "civilized" family, has become a stimulant for the deserted film market under the epidemic. The film grossed 125 million in its first week in China, and is expected to gross about 311 million in the end.
Previously, the first "Crazy Primitive Man" (2013) grossed $587 million at the global box office with a production cost of $135 million, and was nominated for the 86th Academy Awards and the 71st Golden Globe Awards, which also made "Crazy Primitive Man 2" highly anticipated before it was released.
However, this seed player with great potential to become a box office hit has unfortunately suffered a slash due to the internal and external difficulties of DreamWorks Animation in recent years - this animation studio that has competed with Pixar and Disney with high-quality works such as "Monster Shrek" and "Kung Fu Panda" has suffered setbacks since 2012:
"Guardian League" failed at the box office, followed by "Speed Snail" and "Genius Glasses Dog" also failed miserably, and the sequel films "How to Train Your Dragon 2" and "Penguins of Madagascar" launched in 2014 were not satisfactory at the North American box office despite their decent overseas results. "Crazy Primitive Man" (2013) was a big success, but negative news such as layoffs and salary cuts and top-level changes followed.
In 2016, DreamWorks Animation, which failed to win the battle with Kung Fu Panda 3, was eventually acquired by Universal for $3.8 billion, and soon after the news that the "Crazy Primitive 2" project, which had been developed for three and a half years, was cut off, and the person in charge disbanded and transferred to other projects. This primitive family that once made the world shine seems to have reached its limit.
Although after 2016, DreamWorks Animation's successive "Magic Genie", "Baby Boss", "Captain Underpants" and other films have also done well at the box office, but compared with the previous sensational "Kung Fu Panda" and "Shrek", it is slightly inferior after all.
In the end, DreamWorks Animation decided to "resurrect" "Crazy Primitive Man 2", and in 2020, the primitive family finally returned. However, Rao is quite well received, but is "Crazy Primitive Man 2" that the project has been suspended many times enough to become the new "Hua Dan" of DreamWorks Animation after "Kung Fu Panda"?
In contrast, Disney and Pixar, as old rivals, are in full swing: the former returned to the animated movie Big Brother throne with "Zootopia" and "Frozen", and this year with a "Frozen 2" became the focus of the topic; the latter consolidated its position as the king of the animation industry with a "Dream Quest", and the new film "Psychic Journey" is also about to be launched at the end of the year, and twenty thousand people have not yet been released on Douban marked "want to see".
The U.S. animation industry landscape is quietly shuffling. In the race against Disney and Pixar, does DreamWorks Animation still have a chance to catch up?
Who is the savior of DreamWorks?
Mad Hominid 2 escapes death.
In 2013, "Crazy Primitive Man" grossed $587 million worldwide for $135 million in production costs and was nominated for the 86th Academy Awards and the 71st Golden Globe Awards. DreamWorks Animation took advantage of the victory to pursue, and in 2014, it set up a sequel "Crazy Primitive Man 2", which is scheduled to be released in December 2017.
But the project is going roughly. In 2015, DreamWorks Animation frequently reported news of layoffs and salary cuts, and since then, the departure of senior Katzenberg and personnel changes within the company have led to the project being unmotivated. Subsequently, due to script problems, the project was shelved again. In April 2016, NBCUniversal acquired DreamWorks. In November, Universal Pictures President Donna Langley came to DreamWorks Animation headquarters to confirm that the Mad Hominid 2 project was about to be shut down. This project, which was not going well, almost died halfway through.
Iris wrote that this may be because the "Crazy Primitive Man" IP is not so "god" in foreign countries. The first IMDb score of 7.2, Metascore of 55, plus 180 million north American box office, can only be at the upper middle level of DreamWorks. However, with the end of several super IPs of "Kung Fu Panda" and "How to Train Your Dragon", DreamWorks Animation had to change its strategy, on the one hand, it cooperated with Netflix to produce animated series "Troll Hunter" and "God of War King Kong", on the other hand, it began to squeeze the surplus value of second-line IP.
In 2017, DreamWorks Animation decided to "resurrect" the primitive family, with Joel Crawford, the story director of Trolls, as the director, and Mark Swift, who has worked at DreamWorks for more than 20 years, as the executive producer.
It's hard not to leave a trace of such frequent changes in the mad hominid 2 text.
The core theme embodied in Mad Hominid 2 is not clear. "We only see ten thousand arrows firing at the same time," commented Ge Jing, an associate professor at the Beijing Film Academy.
"The clash of ideas between tradition and the modern family, the mutual perception of children and adults, the ills of modern society and the return of traditional values ... The sense of individual independence, the transformation of family meaning, feminism, the decline of men, a cartoon to support a new view of the family. A Douban netizen wrote in the evaluation.
However, too many themes make the film more like a "messy stew" of "political correctness" issues in Hollywood in recent years:
The "Thunder Wild Flower" group "Beauty Saves Heroes" of all women is a response to the recent vigorous "Me Too" movement; "Banana Base" is a look at the LGBT community. Hollywood and the Oscars have been denounced as "white straight male cancer", but the black LGBT movie "Moonlight Boy" won the top award, marking that the LGBT theme is becoming a new political correctness; in addition, there are audiences from the perspective of the European refugee tide, analyzing the tall stone walls that appear in the film...
With so many grand issues presented in the 95-minute animation, the core of what the creators are really trying to express is obscured. Ge Jing believes that this may lead to "difficulties for the audience to judge what are the values that the film most wants to convey." ”
In addition, if it is only to absorb popular cultural issues but lack of innovation, it is also difficult to become a classic.
Foreign media "IndieWire" commented on the film, which is named "New Age": "Not a new era, but a remnant of the classic era." "Variety" is unceremonious: "For those who want the production team to tell the story steadily, "Crazy Primitive Man 2" is like a blow to the head, using updated technology to make a noisy and disgusting 21st century version of 'Modern Primitive', but there is no progress in the script." ”
"Standing still" seems to have become a curse of DreamWorks animation.
Previously, DreamWorks animation hits such as "Monster Shrek" (2001), "Kung Fu Panda" (2008) and "How to Train Your Dragon" (2010) appeared in a rebellious and subversive posture.
At the same time, audiences also began to get bored with the "traditional routine" in Disney animation. Jack Zipps, a German-American professor who is one of the most important scholars in the field of contemporary Western children's literature and fairy tale studies, believes that in traditional Disney animation, "although the characters are somewhat simplistic, most of the heroes are witty, lucky, adventurous, handsome and brave, while the heroines are mostly beautiful, passive, submissive, industrious and self-sacrificing." ”
At the end of the 20th century, a trend of "anti-heroism" emerged in Hollywood, and the noble qualities of heroes were awe-inspiring, but their shortcomings and weaknesses made them feel more intimate. As Reading magazine wrote in 1998: "When the industrialized sky is plated with bronze and the momentum of subculture breaks into the living room of the house with the VCD machine of the light tank, the hero is undoubtedly back, only worthy of being expelled from the human vision and reduced to a wandering soul beyond the horizon." ”
In the field of animation, DreamWorks Animation has taken the lead in following this trend. In "Shrek" released in 2001, the male protagonist Shrek cut his hair from time to time, blew his nose in public, behaved rudely, and people called him "the ugliest hero in history". Unexpectedly, the film was a great success. Subsequently, DreamWorks Animation has launched sequels in succession, and the current 4 "Monster Shrek" and the sequel "Cat in Boots" have exceeded $3.5 billion at the global box office, making it one of the most popular animated characters.
In Kung Fu Panda (2008), DreamWorks Animation continues the setting of "civilian hero": the protagonist Ah Bao is gluttonous, timid, inferior, clumsy, and a typical small citizen of the city. However, his dedication to ideals allowed him to finally overcome these human weaknesses and eventually grow from a mediocre little person to a different kind of hero.
Not only that, but the film also uses a large number of Chinese elements to build an unprecedented animal martial arts world. Ma Hua, a professor at the Animation School of the Beijing Film Academy, believes that dreamworks animation has a strong ability to imitate and innovate: "On the basis of huatuo five birds, a more understandable and more animated tiger, praying mantis, snake, crane and monkey is selected, and audiences familiar with kung fu movies can find the corresponding kung fu provenance in each animal." ”
Overnight, the generous giant panda Ah Bao became a superstar, laughing in different streets around the world.
In 2010, How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek 4 also performed very well, earning $480 million and $603 million for DreamWorks Animation, respectively. "For Hollywood CG Animation Studios, this year will be the best harvest year." Jeffrey Katzenberg, then CEO of DreamWorks Animation, said.
Under this momentum, no one can predict the ensuing Waterloo. In 2012, "Guardian League" lost at the box office, beating disney's new film "Invincible Destruction King" released at the same time. In 2014, DreamWorks Animation's "Genius Glasses Dog" brought an unprecedented crisis: the film invested $145 million, and finally only grossed $261 million at the global box office, directly causing DreamWorks to suffer an asset impairment loss of $57 million. "How to Train Your Dragon 2" and "Penguins of Madagascar" as highly anticipated sequel films, the North American box office did not meet expectations.
In an interview, Katzenberg said the decline of DreamWorks Animation "may be because we chose the wrong story, or chose the wrong way to tell the story."
2014, an eventful autumn. Katzenberg twice wanted to sell DreamWorks Animation, but two acquisition plans with Hasbro and SoftBank ultimately failed. At the beginning of 2015, DreamWorks Animation adjusted its annual filming plan from three to two films a year, and laid off 500 employees, replacing a number of senior executives, including vice presidents, CMOs, and COOs.
"Kung Fu Panda 3" is the remaining trump card at DreamWorks Animation, and it is also the last "bet". In media reports at the time, employees said that the whole company believed that with the box office success of "Kung Fu Panda 3", the crisis of DreamWorks Animation would be solved, and some people even exaggerated to "shout out the goal of 6 billion".
CEO Katzenberg is very focused on the fast-growing Chinese market, "If I had a crystal ball, it can't predict what will happen to a specific movie." "But I believe That Kung Fu Panda 3 will be the number one in the world at the box office in the Chinese market." To this end, DreamWorks Animation not only set up the Oriental DreamWorks in Shanghai for the film, but also added 1/3 of the Chinese staff to the Sichuan Giant Panda Base and Qingcheng Mountain to collect materials, and also specially produced two versions in English and Chinese in terms of lip design.
But those efforts failed to push Kung Fu Panda 3 higher. After the release, some people used the line in the film "If you don't do things that surpass yourself, you will never progress", which in turn questioned the storyline as "too routine" and not novel enough. In the end, the film's global box office stopped at $500 million, which was comparable to the most inconspicuous "Ocean's Edge" box office of Disney's animated films that year. That year, Disney's Zootopia was the most popular film.
Panda Ah Bao fights all over the world invincible, but is powerless to save dreamworks. In 2016, Comcast finally completed the acquisition of DreamWorks Animation for $3.8 billion, which has since been part of NBC Universal's Universal Film Entertainment Group.
Katzenberg left and DreamWorks Animation was officially delisted from NASDAQ, ending its 12-year history as an independent company.
It has been almost 10 years since it last launched a non-sequel to the global blockbuster original work "How to Train Your Dragon".
Step by step Disney and Pixar
The most beautiful years of DreamWorks Animation were also disney's most gloomy years.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Disney launched five traditional 2D animated feature films, including "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" and "The Little Mermaid 2" within 4 years, maintaining the consistent style and standard of Disney animation. Unexpectedly, the "Lost Empire", which took 7 years to build, lost both word of mouth and box office to the fledgling "Shrek", and the industry was quite shocked for a while.
Jack Zipps argues that there is a conservative tendency in traditional Disney animated texts: "There are many rules in the world, and you'd better learn and be wary of those rules." Don't be too imaginative, don't be too curious, don't be too willful, or you'll be in trouble, although there will always be a time for you to learn a lesson before you can do it right. ”
In the face of the offensive, radical and innovative CG animation rival of DreamWorks, which has successively launched "Shrek" and "Madagascar", Disney, which originally focused on traditional 2D animation, did not sit still, and the appointment of new CEO Bob Eagle has brought a new atmosphere.
Disney first chose to work with Pixar Studios, known for its CG animation, to test new frontiers. In the 15-year-long cooperation between the two, not only did they launch popular films such as "Monsters inc.", "The Incredibles", "Cars", etc., but the success of "Finding Nemo" broke the box office record of Disney's classic two-dimensional animation peak "The Lion King" in one fell swoop, becoming a major milestone in the history of Cooperation between Disney and Pixar.
Not only that, Disney jumped out of its comfort zone and opened up the field of CG animation that was originally unfamiliar. In 2010, Disney's first original CG animated film ,"Trolls", which took five years to prepare, was released. The film not only uses the latest CG technology, the script also jumps out of the old Disney routine, the original noble "princess prince" image has been rewritten into a more grounded contemporary youth, getting rid of the traditional fairy tale common royalty, nobility and castle routine, showing a pair of ordinary young people chasing love and freedom story.
Since then, Disney has rushed all the way, successively launching "Super Marines", "Frozen", "Zootopia" and other films, word of mouth and box office have been a great success. Li Jianping, a professor at the Animation School of the Beijing Film Academy, said in an interview with CCTV that whether it is "Frozen" or "Zootopia", every Disney animated film can reach an innovative point.
Director Byrne Howard once mentioned an anecdote. In 2010, when he first proposed the story idea for Zootopia to Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter, he was so excited that he hugged Byrne and made only one request: "This animal movie must be unprecedented." ”
The old look of Disney Princess movies has also been renewed. Chen Bo, a lecturer at the School of Foreign Chinese at Xihua University, believes that Disney's popular princess film "Frozen" (2013) presents an unprecedented innovation, that is, an "anti-love" tendency:
The "kiss of true love" that saves everything in the traditional Disney story has not arrived, and the main thing that runs through the film is family affection, especially the sisterhood between Elsa and Anna, and Prince Hans and Christopher are completely reduced to foils, which reflects Disney's willingness to show a courage to dare to innovate to face the irrationality of the "Prince and Princess" model.
In 2016's Zootopia, it was found that the film broke through the "harmony" of Disney's previous family fairy tales and began to involve sensitive topics such as racial discrimination, gender differences, and hierarchies that were rarely touched in previous commercial animation films. Under the arrangement of director Byrne, "Zootopia" is not only not a harmonious utopia, but a dark city. To protect the safety of the city's herbivores, predators must wear "tame collars" and risk being stunned by electric shock warnings at any time.
The profound story broadened the audience of the animated film in one fell swoop, triggering a lot of discussion, such as the question "What are the metaphors in Zootopia?" "Is Zootopia over-interpreted?" "What are some of the details of the movie 'Zootopia'?" The highest number of likes under the answer can be tens of thousands. As film critic Tao Tao Linlin said: "Not only is it a comedy animation for children to play and play, adults can also enjoy this story." ”
Pixar's "Dream Quest" (2017), a "top student" in animation production companies, also captured a large number of adult audiences because of its philosophical thinking about death and family. The line "Death is not really vanishing, forgetting is eternal annihilation" set off a discussion of "tearful smiles" in the audience.
Pixar has maintained a steady output over the past 25 years. In 2006, Disney acquired the company for $7.4 billion, transforming the two from a 15-year partnership to a subordinate relationship. Since then, Pixar has continued to launch "Dream Quest", "Flying House Tour", "Monsters University", "Mind Agent Team", "1/2 Magic" and other box office double harvest masterpieces.
Different from the fairy tales/mythological stories produced by Disney, Sun Weichuan, a professor at Nanjing Normal University, believes that Pixar Animation abandons the practice of discovering stories and character archetypes from ancient myths, legends, fairy tales and other classical literary works, and intentionally places the story in modern cities and even the future space world, providing the audience with a more modern animation world.
At the same time, the characters in Pixar animation are all characters or objects that can be seen everywhere in the audience's real life: toys in "Toy Story", clownfish in "Finding Nemo", and even the male protagonist of "The Incredibles" - a man who is experiencing a "midlife crisis". Sun Weichuan believes: "This is obviously a psychological problem faced by people in modern cities, so it can evoke strong psychological resonance among today's audiences (especially middle-aged and elderly audiences). ”
Compared to Disney and Pixar, dreamworks animation's films in recent years have been less than satisfactory. "Baby Boss" (2017) has a mediocre reputation, with only 53% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes, and "Captain Underpants" (2017) and "Snowman" (2019) have high reputations, but the box office performance has just exceeded 100 million, failing to reproduce the glory of DreamWorks. On Rotten Tomatoes, in the media evaluation of these films, "stereotyped" and "juvenile" are more frequent labels.
Ten years east of the river, ten years of west of the river.
In 2001, the fledgling DreamWorks slammed into a new era of animation with a fierce momentum, shining in the first decade of the 21st century, standing at the top of the crowd; also in the next decade, the belly was attacked and secretly breathed; now, the next decade is about to begin, and DreamWorks will still have the day to regain its former glory?
bibliography:
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[2] Jack Zipps,Fang Yun,Zhang Juwen. Walt Disney's Mission of Civilization: From Innovation to Revival[J], Folklore Studies, 2020(04)
Sun Weichuan,Ding Lei. On the Modern Narrative Strategy of American Pixar Animated Films[J].Journal of Beijing Film Academy, 2009(03)
MCA. The "Change" and "Invariance" of "Chinese Style" in Animation Creation: The Inspiration of "Mulan" and "Kung Fu Panda" to Chinese Animation Creation[J].Journal of Beijing Film Academy, 2009(03)