Text Analysis of "The Return of the Great Sage"——a genre film that succeeded halfway

Sammy 2022-03-08 08:01:35

From the very beginning of the film, I can't wait to show how awesome the modeling is and how advanced the solutions to the water and steam problems are. The modeling of distant scenes is not good enough. We still admit that this is a benchmark for Chinese animation. But none of this explains the problem. What really makes people enjoy is that the film tells a "half-successful genre story". Even though it is only half-successful, it is still very valuable in China.
This is a story deconstructed from a small piece of content from Journey to the West. How does the selected passage, after deconstruction, reconstruct a story?
Monkey King, as the core character, is in a difficult stage at the beginning of this story, and this is a well-known story, and the background of the story is quickly established in just five minutes at the beginning. Since the great sage is in a predicament and has its own "character flaws" (the spell is imprisoned), this also implicitly establishes the true inner suffering of this story (unlock the spell imprisonment and regain the old courage) , so this becomes a story about the "resurrection" of the hero, incidentally fighting monsters. Another key role, Jiang Liuer, replaced the original role of Tang Seng (his specific role will be analyzed later), which has two effects in it. The second is to act as a factor that promotes the growth of heroes. Regarding the second point, before the climax of the story, after Jiang Liuer ran alone to save the little girl, there was a plot of the great saint falling into the water. After Jiang Liu'er left, the great sage was "sad and depressed" because of the frustration caused by the inability to solve the problem (at the same time, this was also the "pseudo-failure" of the great sage's self-identification). The water scene becomes the placenta for the growth of the great sage. This is a process of fusion of the outer self (the great sage in Jiang Liuer's mind) and the inner self. From here, the Great Sage took the first step towards awakening. Another incident was the darkness before dawn-Jiang Liuer's death, which directly contributed to the awakening of the Great Sage. Here, the main participation of the Great Sage, Jiang Liuer and the audience (familiarity with the original story text) constitutes the emotional context of "The Return of the Great Sage" and constitutes a simple, crude and effective story skeleton.
Since there is already a process in which a great sage leads the audience to "transform", what is it that causes the emotional resonance of the film to be far from what it should be?
First of all, the great sage is a heroic character, and there is a certain distance from the audience, so the emotional foothold naturally falls on Jiang Liuer. Looking at the role of Jiang Liuer, at the beginning, a small amount of space was used to describe the process of how he became an orphan, but in the subsequent episodes, the effect of this "setting" on him was like evaporating, except for following the master everywhere. , he doesn't look like an orphan. The lack of his inner portrayal shows that he is neither lonely, but brave and strong. He is a "mature" individual from the beginning, and he cannot form a character arc in the development of the plot. It just acts as an index (outer self) to wake up the "growth" of the great sage, and to sell cute soy sauce by the way. In an ideal state, this should be a process of double growth. The audience sees "transformation" in Jiang Liuer, and Jiang Liuer drives the "transformation" of the great sage, so as to achieve an experience of the audience entering the hero and achieve Deeper emotional resonance. According to the character setting at the beginning, this is an easy state to achieve, but the screenwriter wastes it.
On the other hand, the film sets a world of "monsters and evil spirits everywhere", which creates a situation where almost all difficulties come to us, because we are familiar with the story itself (that is, familiar with" The "Monkey King" symbol represents the "monster sucking attribute"), this is not a problem. The problem was the fight scene that lasted nearly half an hour. Here's the reasoning for this conclusion:
Since this is a deconstructed classic story, many plots do not need to be explained (such as why the monster came to fight the Monkey King, why did Bajie follow him, why did the white dragon appear inexplicably). But in this way, since the Great Sage came out, although the development of the story seems to be logical, it actually lacks "internal causes", and these developments are directly attached to the audience's "ideas" participation. What's worse is that in the middle of the film, a four-minute MV is used to make a quick transition. The relationships and inner changes of Dasheng, Jiang Liuer, and Bajie (albeit weak) are compressed into four minutes of "narrative-free time". It's just like cutting corners brick by brick before reaching the ultimate emotional flood. The place that could have been used to express Jiang Liuer's "character flaws" and to "grow up" Jiang Liuer's character is gone. This resulted in the middle part and the "climax" prelude being too short, and the final fight (instead of "solving the problem") too long, and although the characters grew further during the fight, they still couldn't get rid of the imbalance of the big picture.

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