Grandpa Zheng, I am doing your reading comprehension.
Can you understand? Can't understand my rewrite.
Grandpa Zheng is about to die! (Refers to Happy Birthday)
Grandpa can't move, you guys come on, give birth to three.
Grandpa Zheng, I'm going to the toilet, can you give me a little encouragement?
Ji Xiang.
Zheng Yuanjie, the "fairy tale king" who has witty remarks and frequent golden sentences on social platforms, recently announced "the biggest regret in life":
"I realized today that I had made a major mistake in my life... That is, I did not invest in this film, otherwise I would have paid more personal income tax to the state. ”
The film that Zheng Yuanjie said is the live-action children's film "Pipilu and Lusisi's Canned Villain" released in the National Day file - this is also the first time that Zheng Yuanjie's work has been put on the big screen since Zheng Yuanjie wrote for 42 years.
The childhood memories of the post-80s and post-90s generations have finally been remade into movies. But is this the beginning of the "Zheng Yuanjie Universe", or another "Ruined Childhood" series?
Today, we're going to talk about it.
Zheng Yuanjie, the Chinese version of Stan Lee?
In 1983, Zheng Yuanjie's son Zheng Yaqi was born.
At that time, due to limited food and supplies, every household needed to buy meat with meat tickets. In order to let her son eat more meat, Zheng Yuanjie set her sights on canned meat that could be purchased without meat tickets.
Once, before opening the can, Zheng Yuanjie suddenly had an epiphany and felt that "a voice came out of the can, as if he was talking." So, instead of opening the can, he sat in place and thought for two hours, and conceived the fairy tale of "The Canned Villain".
The plot of "Can Man" is actually very simple:
Mom asks Rusisi to help open a box of canned meat, but when Lusisi opens it, she finds five little people the size of matchsticks hidden inside—a learned Ph.D., a translator-savvy Major, a singing singer, and an artist adept at micro-carving.
Lusisi decides to protect the 5 villains and takes them to school with them, and a series of thrilling adventures unfold.
Whenever Zheng Yaqi had chicken pox, Zheng Yuanjie would tell him the story of these 5 canned villains, telling it, and Zheng Yaqi also fell into the imagination of the imagination and forgot the itching on his body.
As soon as the story of "Canned Villain" was launched, it was warmly welcomed by young readers.
What child who reads the story has never fantasized about having a canned little man hiding in his hair during the exam and secretly telling himself the correct answer?
Related film and television adaptations have also come:
In 1989, director Cha Kan, who had won awards such as the Silver Bear Award at the West Berlin Film Festival for "The Clam Fight", became interested in "The Canned Man" and filmed it into an animated film "The Adventures of Lusisi", which received a high score of 8.5 points on Douban; in 2018, "The Canned Little Man" was adapted into a fairy tale drama and entered small theaters across the country.
In 2021, the live-action children's movie "Pipilu and Rusisi's Canned Villain" (hereinafter referred to as "Canned Villain") was released - during the National Day file, the film won the third place at the box office and the second highest attendance rate with 41.68 million yuan, and received 7.1 points in Douban.
As one of Zheng Yuanjie's representative works, "Canned Villain" still focuses on social topics, and thinks about the education methods of schools and families from the perspective of children.
Teachers pay too much attention to exam-oriented education, arranging all students according to their academic performance; Lusisi has doubted his own value because of the decline in grades and his treatment at home; the "poor students" let the canned villains help cheat in the exams, and the 5 villains from "teaching people to fish" to "teaching people to fish" teach children to experience the joy of learning in constant trial and error...
Topics such as chicken babies and inner volumes involved in the film are still hotly discussed social phenomena at present, and thus resonate with many audiences.
In addition to the educational theme that is still sharp at the moment, the film set also reveals a strong sense of nostalgia.
Whether it is the white rabbit milk candy, window flower stickers, hot water kettles, or the game cassettes brought out by dad, the painting tools confiscated by the teacher can remind the audience of their childhood:
"[The movie] fulfills my childhood dream, and when I was a child, I had to turn on the radio on time every night, listen to pipilu and Rusisi's story, and imagine that picture while listening, and the whole picture of the movie is constructed with that effect."
"The film's restoration of the family environment in the 1990s is no less than Xu Zheng's design of the 1980s in "Duck Prophet" ("My Father and My Father").
To the surprise of the audience, at the end of "Can Can Villain", 5 villains set off for the Rubik's Cube Building, and the passerby played by Zheng Yuanjie suddenly appeared, pointing out the direction for them.
This Easter egg can't help but be reminiscent of the various cameos of Stan Lee, the father of Marvel, in the movie -
Is the "Zheng Yuanjie Universe" going to be opened from this?
Zheng Yuanjie IP, in fact, has already started
"Zheng Yuanjie Universe" is not a new concept that the audience casually talks about.
Zheng Yuanjie's son and producer of "Can can's Villain", Zheng Yaqi, has said more than once in public that he wants to benchmark Marvel and create a comprehensive Zheng Yuanjie IP:
"Our content is actually very similar to Marvel's characteristics - Zheng Yuanjie has a total of more than 400 stories, involving more than 700 characters, the protagonist and the story are very related, and suitable for audiences of all ages to watch, with a wide audience and strong content adaptation."
In fact, at the beginning, Zheng Yuanjie did not agree to any adaptation of the work:
On the one hand, he was worried that his works would be magically modified and "ruin his childhood"; on the other hand, he believed that presenting his works in words would allow readers to play their imagination more freely, and the value of adapting them into other forms was not great, "In 1986, the Shanghai Fine Arts Film Studio made "The Adventures of Shuk Beta", which also gave 160 yuan."
It wasn't until 2004 that a reader's suggestion at a signing party prompted Zheng Yuanjie to make a change:
"I grew up watching your books, but now my children don't like pure text, and I hope to buy my own children a comic book of Pipilu and Rusisi, and how nice it would be for two generations to enjoy the same fairy tale together." 」
In 2005, the "Pipilu Album" edited by Zheng Yaqi and created by Zheng Yuanjie was published. This year, the sales of Zheng Yuanjie's works directly rose 5 times, soaring to 5 million copies.
In 2010, Zheng Yaqi founded Beijing Pipilu General Mobilization Culture Technology Co., Ltd., and Zheng Yuanjie's IP officially embarked on the development track, and related audiobooks, film and television works, and games of the same name began to enter the audience's field of vision.
This move proved to be prescient – in 2011, Tencent Vice President Cheng Wu first proposed the concept of pan-entertainment at the "China Animation Film Development Summit Forum" held in Shanghai, and IP is the core element of pan-entertainment's future. Since then, major Internet companies have also begun the development of IP resources.
"The reason why [Zheng Yuanjie] is aimed at Marvel is because Stan Lee took cartoonists to draw Iron Man and Spider-Man, which were all 50 years ago; Lao Zheng's writing has also lasted for more than 40 years, and his works still have a lot of room to dig into at present."
Indeed, from the content point of view, Zheng Yuanjie's fairy tales have always been ironic, humorous, and practical, with natural adaptation advantages and excavation space. The previous "Rubik's Cube Mansion" is a successful example -
The 1994 cartoon "Rubik's Cube Mansion" is adapted from Zheng Yuanjie's fairy tale of the same name: Sixth grade elementary school student Lake was locked up at home by his parents to study, but accidentally broke into the strangely shaped Rubik's Cube Mansion through a toy Cube, launched a series of adventures, and had a fierce collision of values with the characters who lived in it.
Although due to various factors, the original 26-episode animation ended in 10 episodes, but the various stories in "Rubik's Cube Mansion", the avant-garde magic pictures, and the metaphors with dystopian characteristics won the Outstanding Film Award of the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television, and became the childhood memories of a generation.
Over the years, Zheng Yuanjie's IP has also carried out a variety of degrees of development, and explored different styles of film and television forms such as animation, special dramas, and movies, and finally achieved results in 2018:
In 2018, the live-action short film "Taming the Rabbit", based on Zheng Yuanjie's fairy tale of the same name, was broadcast , a 24-minute work that received 8.3 points from Douban and was shortlisted for the Golden Jubilee Award for International Short Film at the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival.
The Taming of the Rabbit tells an extremely absurd story:
Pippilu, who has just entered the primary school, has aroused the dissatisfaction of the class teacher, Teacher Xu, because of his lively and active behavior and love to question authority.
In this school, obedient students will turn into rabbits and receive school recognition. In the face of the "all rabbit class" that continues to emerge throughout the grade, Pipilu, who maintains his nature, becomes the "eye nail" of his teachers and classmates, and finally succumbs to reality and wears a rabbit mask that symbolizes obedience.
The subtlety of this story is that the author is not only full of imagination, but also cleverly combines the characteristics of the rabbit with the object of criticism:
In Pipilu's eyes, the classmates who become rabbits also inherit the innate goodness and cowardice of rabbits, they will erect long rabbit ears to inquire about other people's affairs, and use the advantage of having more lips than humans to report to the teacher, "If others surpass themselves, they will also suffer from pink eye."
As one of Zheng Yuanjie's masterpieces, "The Taming of the Rabbit", written in 1987, is undoubtedly extremely ironic and critical. Because the original work is solid and profound enough, the film and television works adapted from it are not inferior even in today's market environment.
Want to create "Zheng Yuanjie Universe",
Not so easy
However, to create the "Zheng Yuanjie Universe", is it enough to restore the original work?
It's not that simple.
Take the "Canned Villain" released this time, although the plot of the script is interesting, it also reflects many problems:
The film restores the campus set of the 1980s, trying to use elements such as hot water kettles, white rabbit milk candy, and game cartridges to outline nostalgic filters for the audience, but the protagonist wears a new college-style uniform, which is incompatible with the original era setting and makes people play;
There are students in the movie who like to paint in their spare time, and are regarded by teachers as "not doing their jobs", but today's parents have long changed their concepts and reported a variety of interest classes to their children; and the question of "meritocracy" is also presented through slogan-style lines, and the audience at the young age may be able to resonate, but it is too naïve for adults.
When filming "Canned Villain", many partners also suggested to director Yu Fei to put the story in the current environment to shoot - "Doctor" can help Pipilu play in the game, and Lu xixi can also use WeChat when looking for villains, which will make the audience more resonant.
In order to take care of the fans of the original work, the crew finally followed the setting of the 80s of the last century, although the old settings such as "progressive students and backward students" were eliminated and a certain degree of changes were made, but many of the above defects were also exposed:
Choosing to play the sentiment card, today's children may not be able to resonate, and they are doomed to lose a large part of the audience; blindly copying the original work is easy to produce a sense of dislocation that is separated from the current society, and it may not be suitable for the rhythm of film and television works.
In the past few decades, Zheng Yuanjie has not licensed his own works for film and television, and it can also be said that there are environmental factors that cannot be ignored:
Compared with the IP industry chain such as Marvel and DC, which has emerged in the 1990s and is now in full operation, the domestic IP market was still blank at that time, whether it is operational experience or production level, there is still a big gap:
"The same script, the setting of the scene, the characters, the same sub-shots, replaced by a foreign company with a little production experience, you can immediately see the huge difference between the two."
However, with the gradual maturity of the domestic IP industry chain, the creative team's film and television development of literary works has also ushered in unlimited possibilities.
The rise of guoman is a good example: "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending" has triggered a frenzy of national comic viewing in 2019 through a subversive adaptation of literary works, and the "Fengshen Universe" extended by linkage with "Jiang Ziya" is also highly anticipated.
In China, the development of children's literature IP is in the sunrise period, with market potential that cannot be underestimated:
The White Paper on China's Children's Digital Content Industry has pointed out that the core scale of China's children's digital content industry has reached 237.8 billion yuan in 2018, an increase of 21% year-on-year. In the future, children's IP will usher in explosive growth, along with the increase in national income, the upgrading of household consumption has also brought expansion opportunities to the children's market.
"Zheng Yuanjie Universe" has just begun: Zheng Yaqi announced that in the future, hundreds of stories in Zheng Yuanjie's fairy tales that are connected to each other will be developed in synergy, and horizontal interspersed between each work, and finally complete a large-scale epic fairy tale masterpiece.
The works of the fairy tale king are to be adapted, and the audience is of course happy to hear it - but future film and television works, if they want to win the recognition of audiences of all ages, are bound to accept more stringent scrutiny from the audience, and must also make adaptations that meet the current market. The content alone has to dig out more connotations, rather than stopping at "restoring the original work".
As Marvel artist Walter Simonson put it, "Fans' identification with IP is not only derived from the thrill of the story or the short-lived fanaticism after consumption, but also relies on an extended emotional bond." Therefore, we must constantly improve and expand the content of the story and the world view, so that readers can always feel new. ”
To create a "Zheng Yuanjie universe", just playing the sentiment card is not a long-term solution.
Zheng Yuanjie universe, the task is heavy and the road is long. /Beijing Pipilu Mobilization Culture Technology Co., Ltd. official website
Resources
[1] The future still belongs to "Zheng Yuanjie"? - East-West Entertainment
[2] How did Zheng Yuanjie's fairy tale become a live-action movie? The chief producer and director said so - the first director
[3] Zheng Yaqi, the prototype of "Pipilu": Bringing his father to create a fairy tale new kingdom - healthy life
[4] Research on IP Operation of Children in China in the Era of Pan-Entertainment -- Shen Lin