"Spiritual Journey": Life is in the sea, and the pace is non-stop

Stills from "Psychic Journey"

Anthropomorphizing inanimates has always been a great feature of Pixar animated films (hereinafter referred to as Pixar). Following the visual treatment of joy and sorrow in "Mind Task Force", the recently released "Spiritual Journey" in China once again embodies abstract things; continuing the dream-chasing motivation and life-and-death travel of the previous successful work", "Journey of the Soul" once again uses a "return of the living dead" model to explore the true meaning of life. But the difference is that this time Pixar no longer focuses on the growth of teenagers, but on the lost adults in the crowds of the city; when we cheer for the successful realization of Joey's dream obsession, we find that the film is not enough. From the "Story" series, "Brave Legends" and "Dinosaur Home" to the self-realization of ordinary people, to the success of "Psychic Journey" to praise the ordinary and disintegrate the worldly definition, it is a transmutation of Pixar's creation, and it is also the last hidden button left for the audience to unravel.

Spiritual scrutiny and the response of the real world

Joey, who dreams of playing at the best jazz club in New York, thinks his life is about to begin, but with his forgotten foot suddenly steps into the black hole of death, falls to the ground, loses his body, becomes an imposter mentor, a transcendent out-of-order, and accidentally gets a look at his own life line in this escape. He saw his unfinished life in the Temple of Souls and found that his life was meaningless: talent was unappreciated, job hunting ran into walls, and he walked in the rush of new York, like plunging into a battery, until death launched this surprise attack on him. "At least not to die today" – he carried on this powerful obsession and began his attempt to return to Earth. Although Joey has died physiologically, there is no symbolic end, and the proximity to his dream becomes the driving force for him to escape from the transcendent ritual.

The odd trip began with a bolt-nut coincidence. The film uses an easy mentor assignment to allow Joey to meet another out-of-order person and begin their peers who give and inspire each other. The recipient code name "22" is a world-weary old soul in its youthful initial form, a thousand-year-old "nail household". It is no different from other small souls in appearance, translucent, like a round light bulb waiting to be lit; but with a row of large teeth and insight into everything, it is its recognition as a stubborn protagonist, and it is also the metaphysical temperament of the millennium brand. It refuses to be "enlightened" and is interested in destructive events; it is extremely disgusted with the earth, resistant to the flesh, and satisfied with the sudoku life in the form of a soul. The first turning point of 22 came from a piece of pizza— a small cake stolen from the street that made it be extinguished by human fireworks. The existence of the flesh allows it to attain a perception that the spirit cannot: in the place of birth, "pizza" is just a concept. Therefore, when it first came into contact with the real thing, it felt "trembling": the trembling to its abstract little soul was overflowing with love and fireworks. After that, it fell in love with music, walking, lollipops, and the wind in the underground aisles, but it was in fact an unwitting protest against the earth' persistent disarming. The final completion of the ritual stimulation of "22" is a maple seed floating in the air. It becomes a 22-threaded "rose bud" or "a madeleine cake" that illuminates its lost soul in the desert: the moment Joey loses his Earth Pass and pulls out the seed, the gravel of its lost consciousness dissipates with the wind. This seed is the response given to it by the real world.

Joey, who has briefly extinguished his enthusiasm because of the dust, needs a spiritual examination to rekindle his spark, while "22" needs to borrow a body to collect his experience of the world. The spatial design of the film is very interesting, and when exploring the relationship between spirit and flesh, the dual normality of life of forgetfulness and loss is used as the gap between body and soul, so that the ferry area that comes and goes to the earth naturally appears. The Moon Wind, which specializes in fishing lost souls, acts as a psychic medium in it. When Joey returns to his body, he finds that after the dream highlight performance, it is an endless moment of emptiness. He returns home and pulls out the physical fragments of the "22" collection, only to realize that the pass was made by itself - and the film's more blunt information is from Jerry's answer: the spark is not the goal of life, but the passion for life, it is the moment of life. "22" is not in love with music that is empathized by Joey's flesh, it is ready to go to Earth and embrace life vigorously.

The story ends with a move of "mechanical séance" that ends unusually sweetly. Joy was rewarded for helping this unruly old soul, and was rightfully reborn to feel the fireworks of the world — a surprise attack that rekindled his sparks. And The abacus master Dai rui, who is obsessed with numbers and order, is successfully fooled by a joke, and she is only a diligent employee who expects to be affirmed. The director still chooses to let Joey return to the human world in the uncertain, and from the perspective of acceptance, it must also take more care of the audience's fragile feelings as an earthling "life and death only once". Robert McKee once thought that a story dominated by coincidence was simply creating cheap surprises unless it was intended to make the audience perceive the absurdity of life; and "Journey to the Heart" did, but we learned from it that life is worth living.

Pixar's Business Formula: Routines and Perspectives

Pixar has always excelled in its plot with the coexistence of routines and non-routines. Its fixed model comes from the overtly spoken growth, family affection, dream motifs and positive values, which guarantee business stability to some extent. But at the same time, "we don't underestimate children" has become an important building strategy for Pixar. Journey of the Mind requires children to understand where people go after death, and the production team did 7 screenings during the creative phase to make sure the child audience was clear enough about it. By making private feelings universal and animating through all ages, the film once again shows Pixar's grip on different groups of people with different understandings.

The most important part of the Pixar program comes from their unique way of seeing the world. In Hollywood, where producer-centric systems are prevalent, the introduction of the proposal system has made the creative and director the primary soul of the Pixar team, thus leaving a gap in the authorship of commercial animation. The key to activating the routine lies in how to find that "perspective": to express familiar things in a unique perspective, so that the elements that are visible at hand are used as they are. Toy Story moves inanimate toys, transforming them from appendages into their owners' childhood watchmen; Robot Story gives the mechanical body a fiery sense of passion, thus telling a simple love path to the extreme. These are all classic cases of Pixar's "perspective". As one of the "Five Elders" of the studio, the director of "Spiritual Journey", Peter Doggett, is known for his childlike heart. Although the film cares about the adult world, it still comes from the director's observation of his son's growth: since he was born, Doggett has been thinking about where his son's personality comes from. Because babies, soon after birth, have naturally shown a liking and dislike for certain things. "Psychic Journey" is also a body dislocation formula commonly found in comedy, but through the mystical setting of coming and going to the other shore, selflessness and godlessness, the most fresh world view is put on the routine story of life, so as to achieve the spectacle effect of defamiliarization, which is far from popular interpretation.

Purely realistic animation is extremely difficult to attract attention in the market because it is too close to live-action films, so commercial animation is often not realistic in terms of performance. Through the narration of the surreal soul world, "Psychic Journey" creates the most current and moving study of the reality of reality. Pixar, who led the three-dimensional trend by shooting the first three-dimensional feature film in the history of animation, took a step back this time, and made a lot of subtractions in the scene design, even as low as two-dimensional. At the birth of the breeze and the surface, the smallest beings have not been shaped, have no order, have not yet generated their own identifying features, and are just a minimalist circle of clusters of aerosol textures. Jerry and Daery are all made up of Picasso-like two-dimensional lines, and they are obviously more abstract as theoretical beings. However, in the presentation of real scenes, Pixar's production technology is becoming more and more refined to fit the real and create a sense. The New York crowd in the picture is no longer a model of Andy in "Toy Story" to cover all children, nor is it deliberately blocking the faces of secondary characters from forming thousands of faces; the refraction of seawater light and the moment of brass light flowing on the saxophone have become a low-key showmanship of Pixar. It is worth noting that in the appearance of the "22" soul mentors, Pixar balances successful people of different cultures and genders to stick to political correctness, but embeds them in the ridiculous situation of the failure of enlightenment. Like the recently released Universal Animation "Crazy Primitive 2", this section in "Psychic Journey" may to some extent show that the appropriation, collage, ridicule and deconstruction of contemporary animation have become an important way of adjusting commercial animation.

(The author is a phD candidate in the School of Humanities, Zhejiang University)

Author: Zhong Sihui

Source: China Art News