Author: Wang Xiaoben
Around 1999, every time James Cameron and his good friend Del Toro met, they had to recommend good things they had seen to each other.
Del Toro was the director of last year's Oscar for Best Picture, The Shape of Water, and one day Del Toro mysteriously told Cameron that you had to look at this. Del Toro presents Cameron with a manga called "Dreams" by Japanese manga artist Yukito Kishiro.
At that time, Cameron had just finished filming Terminator 2-3d: Battle of The Chrono, and was fascinated by the half-human, half-machine setting. Cameron read the comic and immediately fell in love with the characters in it. He discussed with Del Toro that he wanted to make the comic, and symbolically asked Del Toro, "Are you not shooting?" ”
Del Toro knew that Cameron was the best candidate, and replied, "No, you have to shoot." ”
Soon Cameron found Yukito Kimura, got the rights to adapt the manga, and began the difficult process of adaptation. It took 5 years for Cameron to put the script together to the length of a movie.
In 2000, Cameron even filmed a 20-episode American drama "The Black Angel of the End of the World", and some critics felt that Cameron was just rehearsing for the filming of "Dream".
Unfortunately, Cameron had a new idea, and he thought of a planet called Pandora, so he put "Dream" aside for a while. But he never forgot "Dream", he gave the project to his good friend Robert Rodriguez, and he became the executive producer himself, which led to the just-released "Alita: Battle Angel".
Even after nearly 20 years, Cameron still brought "Dream" to the big screen, and it is no wonder that some people say, "After spending $180 million, using 30,000 computers, and thousands of special effects artists, Cameron just wants to introduce his favorite comics to the world." ”
Now anime is undoubtedly one of the most influential soft power business cards in Japan, but when it comes to the birth of Japanese manga, it actually has a lot to do with the United States.
After the end of World War II, the US military officially entered Japan, but the Japanese people who had just been defeated felt very angry and sad about this incident, and there was also a great resistance to the United States.
At this time, the United States thought of a way, and they began to serialize a comic called "Blonde Brown" in the Asahi Shimbun.
The content of this comic is actually very simple, that is, the American family is now living a rich life, upstairs and downstairs, electric lights and telephones, housewives can even spend a lot of money to buy a good-looking hat.
The psychological impact of "Blonde" on the Japanese people was huge, and it was serialized in the "Asahi Shimbun" for 5 years, and many Japanese people cried and said, "This is life."
On the one hand, under the stimulation of American comics such as "Blonde", on the other hand, Japanese manga creators have also begun to accept Disney animation, and Japanese local manga has come into being in this environment.
However, because of the defeat of World War II, the mainstream Japanese manga in that period was related to the matter of strength, and the reality was really unsatisfactory, and the Japanese people urgently needed to find psychological projections in entertainment life.
Their favorite is "Astro Boy" by Osamu Tezuka, the "god of manga". Astro Boy experienced setbacks in the human world, but eventually found himself in the Metropolis, much like everything Japan experienced before and after World War II.
Astro Boy Animation was introduced to the United States by NBC Television just eight months after it began airing in Japan. However, at that time, the American audience did not care about the yearning for power, but regarded it as a magical boy in the far East.
Of course, what makes Japanese anime really go up in the United States is "Dragon Ball". Dragon Ball was the first Truly World-Influential Japanese manga, and the CD-ROMs sold more than 25 million copies in the United States after being adapted into an anime.
Especially among the black community, in the words of Kita Jackson, editor of the American gaming site kotaku, "most of the young black Men in the United States love Dragon Ball."
The American professional lyrics website genius once made a statistic that since 1990, at least 50 hip-hop music lyrics have been related to the content of "Dragon Ball", far more than other anime.
Rza, the soul of the wu-tang clan, said in his 2009 autobiography The Tao of Wu, "Dragon Ball represents the journey of black Americans." ”
Rza means that Goku originally had superpowers, but he lost his memory due to injury, and one day he surpassed the limit to find himself and transformed into a Super Saiyan, Rza even felt that the Super Saiyan after Goku's transformation was actually a black man with long hair.
You see, before Black Panther completely inspired black self-confidence, they were all looking for themselves in Japanese anime.
When bloody manga such as "Dragon Ball" was killing people in the world, a new trend was created in the Japanese manga industry: science fiction manga.
In the 1980s, Japan put forward the policy of building a country through science and education, and the country's science and technology developed rapidly, and now you can still find posts such as "Japan's black technology in the 80s and 90s leads the world for 20 years" on the Internet in Chinese.
The science fiction comics of that era, on the one hand, inherited the mecha style that began in the 1970s (when Transformers had achieved a reverse cultural export to Hasbro in the United States), and on the other hand, they also began to think about who I was and where I was going, in order to echo the repressed social reality in Japan after the bursting of the economic bubble.
Because of the improvement of computer production technology, the production level of Japanese anime has taken a qualitative leap, and when the F-14 prototype morphing mecha screen was transmitted to the United States, Americans were shocked.
It wasn't just American audiences who were startled, but also a group of Hollywood creators.
In 1995, Oshii Shoshiro's authentic manga Ghost in the Shell was adapted into a theatrical version, which directly elevated the anime to a philosophical level. Ghost in the Shell also became the first Japanese anime to top the U.S. charts in the first week of its screening.
It has changed the long-standing perception of Japanese comics in The Relatively Low American critics, and big directors such as Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron have publicly expressed their love for Ghost in the Shell.
At that time, two young people who started a carpentry company in their hometown of Chicago and drew comics in their spare time also liked "Ghost in the Shell" very much.
They first drew horror comics for a few years at Marvel Comics and then moved to Hollywood to write screenplays. They wrote a script based on Ghost in the Shell, sold it to josievert, a well-known producer at the time, and earned $1 million.
Later, they simply won the opportunity to be a director from Josieff, and when they bragged to Josieff about how explosive the film would be, they directly broadcast Oshii's "Ghost in the Shell" on the spot, saying, "We're going to make it a live-action version."
The series called The Matrix sold $1.7 billion at the global box office, and the two young men were the (and still) Wachowski brothers.
Japanese science fiction anime has nourished a generation of Hollywood creators in this way. After the release of Nolan's mythical film "Inception", he also said that Imatoshi's animation "Red Hot Chili Peppers" was one of his important sources of inspiration, and a setting that allowed outsiders to enter and affect dreams laid the foundation for "Inception".
A comic like "Dreams" that has only produced 9 single books already offers a world of immense detail, with Cameron saying that half of his annotations to director Robert Rodriguez alone are more than 600 pages.
He's well aware, "In a world where comics are constructed, you have to feel real to go to any corner." ”
But before long, just finding inspiration in Japanese comics could no longer satisfy Hollywood, and they began to directly attack The Japanese comics themselves. Hollywood has always been a global creative model, but the cultural barrier between Japanese anime adaptations is almost inevitable, and Hollywood has also shown that side of cultural hegemony.
The first to suffer is naturally the most famous Dragon Ball. In 2009, 20th Century Fox made a Sino-US co-production version of "Dragon Ball", and the supporting roles found a group of Actors from Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, but the protagonist Sun Wukong was replaced by an American.
In the end, the result of this movie was overwhelmingly bad reviews, with an imdb score of 2.7, a Rotten Tomatoes freshness rating of only 13%, and even the original author of the angry "Dragon Ball" Akira Toriyama came out to speak out, "The live-action version of "Dragon Ball" did not capture the true connotation of the manga, boring and boring."
Akira Toriyama also blackened a wave of creators, after all, he gave a lot of suggestions for revision at the time, and as a result, "they always insisted on self-confidence that did not know where they came from", and as a result, the sign of "Dragon Ball" was completely smashed.
In fact, this "confidence that comes from nowhere" runs through the entire process of Hollywood's adaptation of Japanese anime. The live-action version of "Dragon Ball" released a year later, the live-action version of "The King of Fighters", directly became a big bad movie where the characters touched each other.
These adapted Japanese comics, like Hollywood kung fu films, are borrowed from a shell of exotic cultures to complete the output of Hollywood values, so that the things that come out under the opposite concept are naturally not different.
However, what is more fatal than the adaptation is not a random compilation, that is, the creative idea of "white centrism". The 2017 live-action version of Ghost in the Shell brought this controversy to a climax, with the heroine Suiko Kusanagi being an authentic Japanese, but the filmmakers insisted on choosing scarlett Johansson, who has more global influence, to play.
After the selection of the main character was announced, indie comic book writer Jon Choi publicly questioned, "Ghost in the Shell is a story unique to Japan, and it will not happen anywhere else in the world."
For this reason, the two Asian directors Jes Tom and Chewy May also made a short film about an Asian girl living in the United States, who went to the comic book store to pick up comics, flipped through the protagonists who were white, and laughed until she saw "Ghost in the Shell".
But when she grew up, she found that Suko Kusanagi, whom she had loved, had become white, and the short film ended with a line that read, "The movie is fake, but it affects real people."
Even if the opposition is so strong, it has not shaken the determination of the filmmakers. Producer Steven Paul, in response to the whitening of the protagonist, confidently said, "When the audience sees our work, they will be very happy." But the final box office of "Ghost in the Shell" of $170 million is really a slap in the face.
However, the matter of white centrism is not a few failed anime adaptations can be flipped, even Netflix, which has a relatively open creative concept, in the adaptation of "Death Note", replaced the night god moon with a white brother, not to say, and directly turned l into a black man, no wonder some people commented that "the night god jumped out of the coffin and wrote the names of all the main creators on the small book."
Japanese animation has solidly influenced a generation of Hollywood creators, it has provided inspiration for many classic works, but when Hollywood really picked up Japanese animation to create, it has been producing those works that are not different, and such a strange circle will be afraid that it will not come out for a while and a half.
Even James Cameron, who loves "Dream" so much, finally turned the yellow-skinned boy Yug with a bit of stupidity in "Dream" into the dashing white handsome guy in "Alita: Battle Angel".
No way, I want to sell tickets in the United States.