From the release of the project to the present, word of mouth and box office have both "Waterloo" has no suspense, a collection of Xu Anhua, Wang Anyi, Du Kefeng, Hetian Emi, Sakamoto Ryuichi and other main creators, behind-the-scenes lineup is extremely strong, art, scenes, costumes are quite textured "top literary and art blockbusters", actually came to this step of the field, it is inevitable to sigh.
The well-known director Hou Xiaoxian once said, "Zhang Ailing's novel is that it cannot be filmed, it is a trap", today, let us take stock of the film and television situation of Zhang Ailing's IP to see where the reason for this "magic spell" is?
The achievements and fame are not proportional, and "Color Ring" rides the dust
As one of the most influential writers in the history of modern literature, the film and television adaptation of Zhang Ailing's works and her enduring fame do not seem to be too proportional.
In terms of movies, in 1984, Xu Anhua put Zhang Ailing's "Love in the City" on the big screen, and she tried to adapt it for the first time, and did not make a substantial deletion and interpretation of the novel, and almost completed all the storylines step by step, but because many viewers thought that Miao Qianren was not suitable for the role of white tassel, this work finally only scored a passing score of 6.8 on Douban.
In the 1990s, Hong Kong and Taiwan set off a wave of remakes of Zhang Ailing, Guan Jinpeng's "Red Rose and White Rose", Xu Anhua's "Half Life", Hou Xiaoxian's "Sea Flower" was released successively, and the three well-known directors had their own long sections in detail restoration, character shaping, and atmosphere simulation, but overall they were all in place, and they scored Douban 7.7, 7.9 and 8.2 respectively, forming a "three-legged standing" trend.
However, word-of-mouth passing may not represent commercial success, "Red Rose and White Rose" box office is only more than 1.8 million Hong Kong dollars, ranking outside the 100th place in the Hong Kong box office list that year, "Half Life" box office 7.53 million Hong Kong dollars, ranked 26th in the year, "Sea Flower" box office is only more than 4 million Taiwan dollars.
Such achievements made the filmization of Zhang Ailing's IP have to be suspended for nearly a decade, until 2007, when Ang Lee returned gorgeously with "Color Ring", Zhang Ailing IP experienced the taste of "applause and applause" for the first time. While restoring the details of the original text as much as possible, Ang Lee also filled in his understanding of the story and characters in the film, which was unanimously recognized by "Zhang Fans" and ordinary audiences, and the mainland box office won 120 million yuan, entering the annual box office top 3, and the Douban score also reached 8.5 points, no matter from which dimension, it can be called the peak of Zhang Ailing's novel adaptation.
However, this good momentum did not continue, and after more than ten years of blankness, Xu Anhua once again adapted "The First Burning Incense" and planted a record low with a score of 5.5 points.
In terms of TV dramas, the three works of the 00s, "Half Life", "Golden Lock", and "Love in the Fallen City", the adaptation is decent, and the restoration of the main theme of Zhang Ailing's original novel is not very accurate, but the remarkable production and casting still allow these three works to be smoothly accepted by the audience, and they have received ratings of Douban 7.1, 7.7 and 8.0 respectively.
And last year's broadcast, adapted from the "Half Life", "Love Deep Origin", is almost a complete "farce", the original meaningful story is hard to "folk puppet" not to say, the casting is not a little fit with the characters, is that the drama has hardly received any positive evaluation after its advent, douban score is only 3.0 points.
Obscure, desolate and difficult to adapt, "the opposite of the north" is the norm
Judging from the above inventory, it has always been considered to be a rich mine for film and television adaptations, and Zhang Ailing's IP, who has attracted everyone's attention every time casting, wants a double harvest of popularity and word of mouth, but it is more difficult, and even less than Yan Geling, Yishu and some contemporary female writers, why is this?
First of all, Zhang Ailing's novel is known for its short and medium stories, and the expansion of tens of thousands of words of novels into a two-hour movie script needs to add a lot of plots, not to mention the expansion into dozens of episodes of TV series, which extremely tests the skills of the screenwriters, changing to "icing on the cake" less, "injecting water" is the majority, and even fundamentally "opposite to the original work".
At the same time, there are natural differences in the way of expression of literature and film and television, fascinating aesthetic rhetoric, excellent atmosphere construction, are difficult to present with pictures, the advantage of Zhang Ailing's novel is delicate, desolate writing, and rich subtext, how to restore is a huge challenge for the creator.
The perfect storyline and fierce contradictions and conflicts required by film and television content are rare in Zhang Ailing's novels, only "Half Life", "Golden Lock", and "Love of the Fallen City" are relatively better, and these three works are also the most filmed and televisionized in recent years.
Secondly, thanks to Zhang Ailing's delicate depiction, the audience's understanding of the story may be different, but the cognition of the characters in the novel is very specific, once the choice is not correct, not only "Zhang Fans", even passers-by netizens will "turn their backs".
Zhang Ailing's characters, especially female characters, have a charm that can only be understood and unspeakable, and there is a sense of fatalistic tragedy in the refinement. This complex temperament makes many directors and producers very "scratch their heads" in the casting stage, when Ang Lee was preparing for "Color Ring", after several twists and turns, boldly enabled the unknown newcomer Tang Wei, the perfect adaptation of actors and characters, and achieved a classic that has left a name in film history.
And Xu Anhua obviously does not have this luck, into the cold winter after the gradual tightening of the film and television market, has not allowed this kind of "risky" behavior, after the individual expression and commercialization repeatedly pulled, "Golden Horse Film Queen" Ma Sichun and "popular xiaosheng" Peng Yuyan's combination, looks full of compromise and balance taste, but this "balance" and Zhang Ailing's characters are far from each other, the actors have not been able to show beyond their own limitations, "acting like what" leap, can only regret to stop the audience outside the cinema.
In the era of "cool drama", do the audience still want to see Zhang Ailing?
In the final analysis, the "law" that remakes zhang Ailing's IP is easy to overturn comes from its high and low curves, and compared with other best-selling authors, Zhang Ailing, who is not popular enough, has a certain reading threshold.
It can be seen from the Oolong incident in which Ma Sichun turned the wrong "quotation" that whether it is "real" or "false", everyone knows a few of Zhang Ailing's "classic golden sentences" and "life perceptions", but how many people have really read Zhang Ailing? Probably a lot less than we thought.
Therefore, Zhang Ailing's novel is ostensibly a big IP with unlimited scenery and everyone's knowledge, but in fact it is too vertical, and the audience circle has a serious layered attribute, which is difficult to applaud and applaud. Especially after the rapid development of the Internet after 2015, short videos have gradually penetrated into the lives of the post-90s and post-00s, everyone pursues "short, flat and fast", the pursuit of "cool drama", and Zhang Ailing, who is humorous and elegant and ambiguous, seems to have become "outdated".
In this regard, the solution given by the current creators is to make a work worthy of repeated taste, try to eliminate the complexity of its era and the complexity of the characters, and do a superficial and vulgar rewrite that caters to the "taste" of the audience.
Compared with "The Origin of Love" and "Half Life", which reveals human nature and makes people sigh, it has become a "Mary Sue" Republic of China love story. "The First Incense" will be a story that occurred in the semi-colonial background of the war years, the sober degeneration of young girls under the temptation of desire, and gradually entered the abyss of fate, into a "youth wound literature" that cannot be loved, in the early stage of publicity, it is even more capable of "dog blood", hoping to use the "QQ space golden sentence" like copywriting to firmly lock the "sinking market".
Unfortunately, from the perspective of box office results, the status quo of "The First Burning Incense" is very embarrassing and screwed, the original fans and literary and artistic youth cannot accept its "magic reform", and the small town youth of the "sinking market" cannot accept Xu Anhua's author's literary and artistic narrative, and finally regretfully falls at both ends.
How should Zhang Ailing's IP be changed? It is also necessary for film and television practitioners to continue to explore, but through the above analysis, we may be able to boldly predict that instead of blindly pursuing out of the circle, it is better to deeply cultivate the vertical market, do "small and fine" content, and it is easier to balance the proportion between "business" and "literature and art", which is a direction of film and television.