Seventeen years after the departure of "Magical Auntie", Wang Xiaodi promoted the short film "Elephant" (Source: Rice Field Film)
After "Magical Auntie", Wang Xiaodi once again challenged animation creation after 17 years of absence. At 10:00 p.m. on May 9, Wang Xiaodi tried to combine live-action and animation to create a fantasy world of the future, depicting cities relying on sheep to generate electricity and humans living in elephant bodies. And so on, all kinds of imaginative creative plots, to let the audience see the new possibilities of animation.
Unlike the magical aunt who takes the route of warm family comedy, this time "Reading Time - Elephant" is more like a work for adults, quietly putting in some social issues in the magical and realistic plot, including nuclear power and energy crisis, etc., and also interspersed with Zheng Youjie's anti-nuclear short film "(No Longer) Ordinary Happiness", which fully demonstrates his criticism and world view of the environment.
"Reading Time - Elephant" describes a film projectionist who always hides behind the light source, because his mother's early death has left him with strong longing and heavy loneliness, so he habitually wants to rearrange the world order and the appearance of life.... According to the configuration of the original novel, the apartment where the male protagonist lives is in the body of an elephant, but how to render through the lens can bring down Wang Xiaodi and a bunch of staff. In the end, Wang Xiaodi decided to set up a dark red room on the set, and the scene was poured on the wall from time to time to show the details of the internal fluid flow of the elephant's body, and after the special effects, the audience could clearly feel the elephant's breathing, blood pulse agitation and other contexts.
Wang Xiaodi confessed that the filming of "Magical Auntie" encountered great setbacks, and he was on the verge of collapse several times, and he deeply knew the difficulty of animation production, but this time in the plan of the "Reading Time" literary adaptation series, he could not give up the fantasy novel "Elephant" by writer Wang Dengyu. In fact, the relationship between Wang Dengyu and Wang Xiaodi began in "Magic Auntie", "When the magic aunt was photographed at the moment when the mortgage house was on the verge of collapse, three ordinary animators like chivalrous regularly appeared in the studio and asked if there was any place to help", one of them was Wang Dengyu. After more than 10 years, Wang Xiaodi learned that this big boy who silently drew pictures could also write novels. Wang Xiaodi said: "Wang Dengyu's world is too vivid, there are many breathtaking ideas and imaginations", so he struggled to complete this film.
At 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 9, the Taiwan Television Channel broadcast two albums, "Reading Time - The Twelve Zodiac Signs of Birth" and "Reading Time - Elephant".
"Elephant" is Wang Xiaodi's first attempt at the combination of live-action and animation - (Source: Rice Field Film)
The plot of "Elephant" mentions the fantasy of using wool static electricity to help the city generate electricity (Image source: Rice Field Movie)
Seventeen years after the violation of "Magic Auntie", Wang Xiaodi promoted the painting of the short film "Elephant"
(Source: Paddy Film)