Author: Teng Xiaojuan
Last year, the live-action movie "Mulan" was released with mixed reviews. Recently, the news that the animated version of "Tom and Jerry" will be adapted into a live-action movie has made the live-action creation of animated films attract attention again. The live-action of animated films belongs to a kind of IP development, disney holds multiple IP trump cards and naturally expects to expand its cultural territory, but live-action is not simply to apply a character, a story or even a name to another medium, but to be cautious about its essential content and inner spirit.
First of all, the live-action creation of animated films should pay attention to the accommodation and exclusion between different media. Accommodation means that the story can maintain its basic form in the process of circulation and telling, so as not to be unrecognizable; exclusion, and clearly tell that in the specific details of the processing, a little carelessness is easy to lose everything. The childish innocence of "Mary and Marx", the humor and humor of "The Story of Avanti", the ethereal and flexible movement of "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace", the fresh healing of "Totoro"... These works can remain in the hearts of the audience for a long time and are not unrelated to their unique artistic expressions.
Taking "Mary and Marx" as an example, the boring daily life between Mary and Marx shows a slightly strange friendship and interaction, which presents a very unified texture under the expression of clay. The apparent roughness of the medium makes it impossible for the audience not to care about the "strangeness" of people and objects— it is not the everyday world we are familiar with, but it has everything similar to ours. "Defamiliarization" is one of the important means for media differences to bring people a new artistic feeling, in the view of formalists, art should "violate" people's habits of common sense, common sense, common sense, and transcend the norms in form and content. "Mary and Marx" uses clay stop-motion animation to tell the story, and its expression intention is obviously not the novelty "strangeness" of narrative skills or the novelty and chicness of the story, but the highly personalized medium of clay. Because the world recreated with clay, its characters and objects have been the result of complete artistic treatment, and its form has become a direct embodiment of the creator's artistic proposition and content spirit to some extent. Similarly, "Avanti", "Sun Wukong", "Totoro"... The differences in their forms have become an important source of artistic charm in their own right.
Disney's presence in the world's film and television landscape with animated films is closely related to its unique animation style. The reason why mulan's story can shine in a foreign country is not unrelated to the art form of animation. There is no doubt that the form of animation not only gives the audience a new artistic feeling in terms of visual perception, but also deepens the discomfort and friction in different cultural differences through this form. In general, the audience is more inclusive of the image in the animated film, because the lines or color blocks explicitly presented by the animation will let the audience know that this is an imaginary world, and an imaginary world is bound to be more understood than a world starring a real person.
Secondly, the live-action animation film should pay attention to the change of narrative mode and the adjustment of content. Of course, different media themselves have their own special charm, under this premise, it is still necessary to coordinate the incompatibilities between each other in the conversion process. Among them, the shaping of characters is particularly important in the process of live-action animation films, because in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds, characters are created by people, while in live-action movies, characters are played by people. In the face of a virtual character, the audience will agree with or disagree with its image or personality setting, but the role played by the real person, the audience will not only discuss the role itself, but also pay attention to the actor, then the character is not only a story role, but becomes a more complex cultural carrier. The live-action version of "Mulan" chose Chinese actor Liu Yifei to star instead of a female star in American culture, which is obviously the result of a multi-party power game.
Returning to the movie itself, the live-action and animated versions of "Mulan" obviously have differences in narrative methods. The live-action version of "Mulan" spends more energy on action scenes and visual effects, but ignores the beginning and end of the story structure. What's more serious is that the live-action version of Mulan is automatically set up as a heroine with "qi" by Hollywood Industry, which is accustomed to creating superheroes, which is very different from the animated version of Mulan from an ordinary girl to a tough female warrior. The character setting and narrative mode of the live-action version of "Mulan" shows Disney's ambition to integrate different cultural resources and the fatigue of the template narrative routine.
In 2010, Disney's first live-action animated film adaptation film "Alice in Wonderland" was a global hit, and since then there have been "Cinderella", "Beauty and the Beast", "Aladdin", "Sleeping Curse", "Dumbo" and so on. In a nutshell, disney animated films are generally live-action in two ways: one is to reproduce animated scenes almost frame by frame, such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, and the other is to use the original story background to re-extend or add a new story, such as "Sleeping Curse", "The Nutcracker and the Four Kingdoms". These two ideas are also basically the two main forms in the IP development process: copy-as-is - the strangeness of the media itself alone, the old bottle of new wine - the old story and new statement, and the new content to attract the audience. The live-action version of "Mulan" obviously does not want to simply reproduce, so in addition to retaining the basic clues of women dressing as men to enter the military camp and bravely make military achievements, new story threads and side characters have been added. But these new content can not support the main character, and the main idea is also offset, a superhero "Mulan" is not the Chinese believe in the "Mulan", or even the animated version of the self-seeking "Mulan", even if the addition of anthropomorphic animal characters, it does not help deepen the theme of the film. Therefore, the live-action animation film should not only pay attention to the difference between the media, that is, the uniqueness of the art form, but also pay attention to the difference in the beauty of the media in expressing or expressing the content, that is, the uniqueness of the content spirit.
In fact, the live-action of animated films is not new, because it is still essentially a borrowing, appropriation or transformation of a character, plot or story of a certain archetype. Different art forms can be transformed into each other, and new aesthetics or contradictions will arise in the process of transformation. The live-action of animation films is not only an inevitable demand for the continuous upgrading of the film and television industry and the expansion of the market, but also the result of self-adjustment, digestion and integration within the art. The prototype, or the use of IP, will inevitably help to save the familiar time between the work and the audience, and help the work to enter the audience's familiar thinking field at the fastest speed, but it also puts forward new requirements for the work, how to reasonably deal with the new image and new content of "old characters" and "old stories", which is what creators need to think deeply about. All in all, there is nothing wrong with the live-action of animated films, but it is necessary to carefully deal with the differences in the process of artistic transformation, only in this way can we maintain the characteristics of the original work and exude the charm of the new work.
(The author is a lecturer at the College of Literature, Nanjing Normal University)
Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel