A Brief Discussion on the Great Protector

Talk about the plot background and character shaping of "The Great Protector"

In recent years, China's excellent animation can be described as an endless stream, in the past seemed to be the final work of the work, in just five years there are "The Return of the Great Sage", "The Great Protector", "Big Fish and Begonias", "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", "Mr. Miao", "Jiang Ziya" and so on, although these works still have various shortcomings, we still have to recognize their excellent production. Next, let's appreciate the Great Protector.

"The Great Protector" is an anime work based on the traditional ink painting method of Danqingzhong in China, and from the perspective of painting style, it is closer to what we call a children's film, but why does it have a box office of 80 million? This has to talk about the best part of this film - the plot, character development and spiritual core, let's first briefly tell the content of this movie: the Great Protector came to Peanut Town on the way to find the prince of their country, and then experienced the hunt and being hunted down, and gradually discovered the truth between peanut people and people. And the personalities of the people in this story are very personal, we can't clearly define their good and evil, basically they are just people who pursue what they want. Even this story is a very two-sided story - "man and man" or "man and animal".

First, analyze the plot background from multiple angles

On the one hand, how the "people" who are treated as slaves and two-legged sheep gradually go from insensitivity and ignorance to self-will under the external conditions of high oppression, propaganda brainwashing and concealment of the truth, rise up to rebel and overthrow the rulers, that is, the "gods" in their eyes.

What about the other angle? A slaughterhouse relies on the daily sale of the remaining useful limbs and other remnants of the slaughtered animals to make a profit, and for a long time in the past the slaughterhouse has been quiet, until one day the slaughterhouse owner found the animals to be slaughtered and began to spit out words, and then the state superior leaders personally declared the slaughterhouse an illegal institution and needed to be dismantled immediately, and even in the end, the boss's descendants also gave the boss a backstab to leave him, and the decades of hard work disappeared.

These two stories are obviously the same story, why do they have very different effects when described? We need to know that the biggest difference between these two angles is whether we regard peanut people as "people", if we look at peanut people as another secondary species, such as pigs, cattle, sheep, etc., then the story is developed on the second: animals can speak human words and learn to rebel; but once we really treat peanut people as people, that is the first, this problem is the problem of oppression between people, we can easily find a clear position. And stand on the moral high ground to condemn those who trample on human dignity. And this is not SiFan's brilliant pen in the construction of the plot, he wrote the good and evil of the characters very clearly on the surface, telling the audience that the person is the villain, but when we watch the whole film and think about it ourselves, we will find that it seems that the position of the characters in this movie is not very clear, and we can find their correctness from various angles.

Second, the character characteristics of the combing

Human nature is arrogant, we will bring a sense of compassion for other species (dogs, cats, etc.), high above, we will wantonly play with animals but get used to it (ants, rats, spiders, frogs and other animals), in the same way, peanuts are a group of "livestock" in the eyes of Ouyang Jian, and livestock do not deserve any feelings, so they will be shot even if they are just kissing, peanut people in their short lives are only to usher in the final slaughter - the growth of ghost mushrooms, Ouyang Jian said that ghost mushrooms are symbols of the plague, They should die to stop the spread of the plague, and the remaining peanut people are also silent in the fear of the plague, but in fact, this is just a lie compiled by Ouyang Jian, what is the truth? The ghost mushroom symbolizes that the peanut man has matured and can be sold as a "cargo", which is essentially no problem, but why does this arouse the sympathy of the prince and even the Great Protector?

Because they know that peanut people can communicate, they have enough intelligence to compete with humans, and even they can spit out human words, so in their eyes, peanut people are "people", which has been given at the beginning of the movie, and the great protector said at the mouth of the town: "The people here are really strange." This shows that in the eyes of the Great Protector, peanut people are just strange people. Throughout the film, the Great Protector and the Prince also call the Peanut Man as a person, and they also become friends with one of the Peanut People; And Ouyang Jian? He called them pigs, called them beasts, and did not allow them to have their own feelings and their own thoughts, after all, no one wants to make their goods self-conscious and become difficult to control.

Another important person in this chapter, Ku Ji, who is a descendant of Cu Ding, lives in Peanut Town in order to become an ancestor-like person to get ahead, Ouyang Jian may not promise that he can have countless peanut man corpses for him to practice, so he became Ouyang Ji'an's special butcher, and according to his attitude when he first met the Great Protector, we can also see that his attitude towards the peanut people is the same as Ouyang Ji'an, but he is an ignorant state, he does not know that the peanut people can talk, Not knowing that peanut people have intelligence, he only thinks that this is an animal, so when he later heard Xiao Jiang speak, he vomited violently, proving that he himself was unacceptable to this kind of thing, he was doubting what he had done in the past, but in the conflict between reality and ideals, he chose to continue to be confused, which also led to his final tragic ending.

This is a story that is extremely gray, and Bu Sifan tells a bleak story with a cute painting style, and composes this story with the fierceness of human nature.

Bu Sifan used animation to borrow reality, the real life of the businessman, high-ranking officials, fools, executioners and the next generation infected by power to write out, Ouyang Ji'an is a thorough businessman, for money he can do anything, Xiaoming is more knowledgeable than him, he is the right, from the plot it is not difficult to see that he will stop at nothing to become a heavy subject around the prince, and the prince was finally forced to accept him; the peanut people are silent and only look down, most of them are passive whether they are enslaved or rebellious After Ouyang Ji'an fell, they turned around and liberated another monster who did not know good and evil- mother, bowing down and praying, completely ignorant; Cu Ji'an was a stupid and relatively simple person, everything he did was for dreams, even if he killed people for this, even if he couldn't bear it, but he would always pretend to be stupid and help abuse.

In another work of The Extraordinary, "Mr. Wonderful", this style is still the same, he seems to like to describe the world of ignorance and ignorance, he is eager to tell the dark world in his heart, he wants everyone in the world to understand what is right. But in this dim world, there will always be those few beams of light, the prince, Ding Guo, Yin Feng, Old Man Liang, the Great Protector; in their eyes, this world is not satisfactory, they either escape, or to change, but in the end the prince decided to take charge of the world, and said goodbye to the self who would only escape, Ding Guo did not want to kill good people, but if he wanted to spend good people on the other side, he had to die, so he asked Mr. Miao: "What is the reason?" He chose to let people make their own choices, and Yin Feng was very decisive, in her eyes, a person's death for the peace of the world is worth it, so she will kill the host of the other side of the flower, the Great Protector will be confused and anxious, but he will still choose to draw the sword; their choices are different, but they all become the dawn.

Bu SiFan may be trying to tell us that the world may be bad, but there will always be people who will break this world for us. His works have always appeared with a sense of contrast, "The Great Protector" is a film with twelve prohibitions, but Sifan told us that he hopes we are all children, maybe this is what he expects from the world.