Marvel was on the road we went back then, and we're walking.
On the first day of release, it set a single-day box office record for animated films in the history of Chinese films, surpassed the total box office of "The Return of the Great Sage", and 1 billion yuan in 5 days... "The Devil Boy of Nezha" not only quickly became a hit itself, but also under the joint efforts of many factors, it was "knocked down" as the rescue hero of the summer file.
Poster for this year's "Nezha Magic Pill Incarnation"
The outside world feels lively, but this is not "natural", all this is too fast to cover the ears - because even "The Wandering Earth" does not have such treatment, "The Wandering Earth" at that time in order to be able to rise strongly in the Spring Festival stalls, but how much effort. The so-called "abnormal things must have demons", what happened in "Nezha's Demon Boy Descending"?
Who is more faithful to the original? Let's all hold back the excitement first
The legend of Nezha Noisy Sea and Fulong originally came from the "Fengshen Yanyi" (which explains why there is a Shen Gongbao in "Nezha's Demon Boy Descending"), and later through further jokes in "Journey to the West", it became well-known and well-known from everyone at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and was continuously classicized by the movie "Nezha Noisy Sea" and the TV series "Journey to the West" in later generations - this linear expression is of course true, but it covers up the complex clues in specific historical situations and the multiple wrestling that has disappeared in the folds of history.
Whether it is "Fengshen Yanyi" or "Journey to the West", in its birth years, in fact, it is a semi-open, complex, and diverse collection of texts, with a rich historical dimension, which is based on the orthodox classics such as "History" and "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty", but also continuously evolved through predecessors such as "Wu Wang Fa Shu Ping Dialect" and "Tang Sanzang Sutra Poetry", and absorbed multi-level popular literary and artistic resources such as miscellaneous dramas, scripts, zhiwei, legends, etc., which were widely circulated in the folk, and various versions of various regions emerged in an endless stream. Not what is imagined today, but at least a relatively stable version of the novel. For example, there are six kinds of Ming Dynasty periodicals, seven Qing Dynasty periodicals and manuscripts, and as many as 13 lost versions clearly recorded in the classics. Therefore, in the early days of the founding of New China, the "salvage" and "purification" of the "List of Fengshen Gods" and "Journey to the West" by various art disciplines were not facing fixed closed texts.
Therefore, the debates often heard nowadays about whether to be loyal to the original work and which is closer to the original work are of little significance. A key reason is that not only may there be more than one original work, but it may also not be a printed book, or even a hum of folk artists by word of mouth - too true, is it a bit absurd?
"Journey to the West" universe? That's all forced
Comparing "Nezha's Devil Boy" with Hollywood films of the same type is certainly not the first time. It's just that the "first time" in history is really quite early - as early as the 1920s, that is, the stage when the world film pattern has only begun to take shape.
In February 1925, the American film Baghdad (also known as "Moon Palace Treasure Box", the name is familiar) because of the leading production technology and visual effects at that time, caused a shocking experience for Chinese film audiences of that era far better than the Hollywood blockbusters of the mid-to-late 1990s, so that Chinese films at that stage had to respond to the challenge from Hollywood in the logic of commercial films.
At that time, in order to respond positively to the genre of gods and monsters, the "Journey to the West" theme became the most realistic art resource grasp. The earliest surviving work on the theme of "Journey to the West", "Pansi Cave" in 1927, is the product of this vein. The first "westward fever" in the history of Chinese cinema is also a direct result of the "anxiety of influence" from Hollywood. Under the discursive logic after "May Fourth", the modern value of the "Journey to the West" theme was also officially launched since then.
Before that, the original figures such as Nezha and Sun Wukong, especially Sun Wukong, although they also had various kung fu skills in the original sense, were far from the overwhelming status of today in the value sequence - not much stronger than Nezha. In other words, the Nezha and Sun Wukong we see today are not purely natural. The pure natural Nezha and Sun Wukong are far from the "true fragrance" of imagination.
Why does Nezha have a place in our emotional structure?
It's just that at the moment, the most direct dialogue object of "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending" is not a hollywood film of the same type, but "Nezha Noisy Sea".
Dragon cramps, foot stepping on the Dragon Palace... These classic moments in "Nezha Noisy Sea" that have been imprinted in the emotional memories of one or two generations are mainly from "Journey to the West". In "Nezha Noisy Sea", the scene of Nezha wielding his sword in the heavy rain was also repeatedly mentioned after the hit "Nezha's Demon Boy Descending". That scene is indeed a classic that can be engraved in the history of Chinese cinema.
On the one hand, that scene deeply reproduced the Chinese tragic spirit that had been widely sung and praised in the operas and miscellaneous dramas of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties such as "The Orphan of Zhao" and "Dou E'e Grievance"; on the other hand, the complete "disappointment" of the father's generation also implied the mood of the times in the late 1970s, so that many previous things suddenly had a sense of substitution (don't underestimate this scene, this spiritual temperament has always affected "The Golden Armor in the City" and "Night Feast"). These Chinese-style costume blockbusters from the first decade of the new century). It is precisely because of the combined force of the above two factors that the position of "Nezha Noisy Sea" in the contemporary emotional structure has been established in one fell swoop.
The national style formed in the "Cold War"
"Nezha Noisy Sea" also has a more direct label - national style.
In 1937, the world's first animated feature film Disney's "Snow White" came out; in 1941, China's first animated feature film "Iron Fan Princess" launched by the Wan brothers was also born, laying the groundwork for the exploration of the national style of Chinese animated films. By 1955, when Mr. Te Wei proposed to "explore the road of national forms and knock on the door of comedy style", it had naturally become the consensus and conscious pursuit of the whole industry at that time.
Therefore, although "The Haunting of heavenly palace" has become famous in the history of world animation films and even the history of world cinema, its appearance in 1961 is actually thick and thin, and its acceptance and radiation range are far beyond today's imagination. Japanese animation giant Osamu Tezuka has repeatedly been inspired by the artistic exploration of the national style of Chinese animation film masters such as the Wan brothers from "Princess of the Iron Fan" to "The Great Haunting of the Heavenly Palace", which is a great irony for the Chinese animation industry that has little ability to fight back today.
In this sense, especially to the ink animation represented by "Little Tadpole Finds Mother", "Mudi", "Deer Bell", and "Landscape and Water", Chinese animation films have indeed found their own, modern, stable national style, and realized the multi-genre presentation of national style aesthetics.
Without understanding the above context, it is impossible to understand where "Nezha's Demon Boy Descending" came from and what changes have been made because of this era.
Why did Marvel harvest the box office? Look at the experience of American popular culture in the "Cold War" era
When it comes to the Cold War, we can't help but mention the United States, while we use the "Journey to the West" universe to fight against Hollywood and Disney, another vein in the field of American popular literature and art is also quietly developing - that is, American comics represented by Marvel and DC.
An indisputable fact is that Hollywood's Marvel series and DC series IP movies are unconsciously harvesting the box office of China's movies, for example, "Avengers 4" has won the third place in the total box office of China's film history. Moreover, in our existing theoretical framework, we all position them as Hollywood commercial genre films, and take it for granted that these are hollywood contemporary cultural products.
This is clearly not the case. These films were born out of the series of comics that swept through American society around the 1960s, the height of the Cold War. That is to say, the success of the Marvel series and DC series IP movies is neither a new thing nor an accident, and the popular literary and artistic experience it represents has experienced nearly half a century of digestion and absorption within American society, and has a multi-form literary and artistic presentation of cross-media and integrated media.
From "Changing My Life Against Heaven" to "My Fate Is Up to Me"
Xiao Nezha's "My fate is up to me from heaven", listening to good burning, and this word has a meaning of "changing my life against heaven", which can be traced back to "Wukong Biography" that also belongs to the "Journey to the West" universe and was serialized in 2000.
Yeah, a flash past, it's been a full 19 years.
In the past 19 years, the experience of popular literature in China's cities in the name of online literature has begun to burst and precipitate, and through the films of "The Legend of Wukong" and "The Demon Child of Nezha", it has been continuously presented in a cross-media and media--the road that Marvel walked in that year, we are also walking. This is also the greatest significance of this wave of popular literary and artistic experience in our country, all of which have to develop, and development takes time.
The cultivation of national IP, it is useless to rely on shouting alone
Whether it is the "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" series at the beginning of the century, or the Marvel and DC series in this decade, the cultivation of any national IP not only requires a complete world view setting, a huge architectural system, a deep-rooted character image and a popular storyline, but also a sound cultural industry system support and long-term production planning, intensive cultivation.
From this logic point of view, a country's national IP is not only the coordinate chart of a country's national emotional life and spiritual world, but also directly tests the average quality and basic level of all aspects of the country's film industry, is the crystallization of industry wisdom, and is also the crown jewel of a country's cultural industry.
In this sense, China's cultural industry, represented by movies, must have a "Huawei" type of consciousness, and from now on, consciously accumulate core technologies. The Marvel Universe can rise rapidly after 2008, and the most critical visual effects play a key role come from Hollywood's long-term technical accumulation.
Because, once the global trade dispute intensifies and the related trade conflicts spread to the cultural field, if we continue to choose to ignore the strategic reserves of core technologies in the cultural industry such as movies and games, what will happen?
Whether it is "Big Fish and Begonias", which has been peddling feelings since the flash era at the beginning of the new century, or the so-called "Return of the Great Sage" that was later a blockbuster, until today's "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", if there is no key technology of foreign teams, purely on our own, will there still be a place for those shining feelings to be placed? There are 70 companies behind "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", which is publicized as a good thing, and no one realizes that even if we don't consider technology, the industry concentration of our animation industry, to what extent is it at the moment?
I have already paid a round of tuition fees in history, do I have to pay them again now?
In recent years, from "The Return of the Great Sage" and "The Legend of Wukong" to "The Demon Boy of Nezha", there have been about thirty adaptations of the "Journey to the West" theme, and a number of self-contained series of films have appeared.
History is always strikingly similar, in the mid-to-late 1920s, in the large-scale capital investment boom dominated by costumes, gods and monsters, and martial arts films, due to the huge commercial success of "Pansi Cave", there were nearly thirty or so "Journey to the West" theme adaptation films, as well as hundreds of similar themes. The producer of "Pansi Cave", Shanghai Film and Drama Company, also plans to make "Journey to the West" into a ten-episode series of movies, and launched a second "Banana Fan" related information.
However, the actual situation of Chinese films today is very similar, in that round of capital investment boom, on the one hand, of course, there are the glamorous achievements of works such as "PansiDong"; on the other hand, the Chinese films of that era are also as thin as today, for example, "Banana Fan", which is regarded as a "journey to the west" theme series with "Pansidong", was aborted.
Because most of the domestic cinema lines at that time were concentrated in a few large cities such as Shanghai, and did not have a regional cluster effect; therefore, very similar to today's Chinese film industry structure, the box office "suddenly" slowed down after rapid growth, and the related high production costs brought about by the capital investment boom, including the sky-high salaries of big-name actors, were not reduced in the slightest.
In this situation, the direction of the film market is also obvious: not only most of the small and medium-sized film companies quickly went bankrupt, but even the Shanghai Film and Drama Company that launched "Pansi Cave" also lost all its money because of the box office failure of the large-scale production "Yang Guifei" at that time. After the unsurprising chicken feathers, the further exploration of the "Journey to the West" theme adaptation film also came to an abrupt end.
So, do you have to have a long snack, calm and calm?
The traditional culture of one's own family has been robbed by outsiders, and that is a real tragedy
In the foreseeable future, with the popularity of "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", the adaptation of China's "Journey to the West" theme may further blow out, and there will be strong forces other than Hollywood and other Chinese films to continue to enter the scene, and it will certainly receive more attention and cause greater controversy.
In this capital feast, whether the Chinese story and Chinese popular literary and artistic experience represented by the theme of "Journey to the West" can be created into a national IP series similar to the Marvel Universe will be the core KPI that will look back and consider this era in the future.
It is reported that the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee is also considering the image of Sun Wukong in the anime work "Dragon Ball", which is deeply influenced by China's "Journey to the West", as the mascot of the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Whether this news is true or false, whether it can eventually take shape, in the current context of developing the cultural industry represented by movies, enhancing cultural soft power through "going out" and disseminating a positive national image, can this wave of "Journey to the West" theme adaptation climax represented by "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending" take on such a cultural responsibility of the times? This may be the historical fate represented by the "Journey to the West" universe, the national IP of our country, which cannot be broken in the contemporary era.
I also sincerely hope that this industry can always have the heroism of "my life is up to me".