The plot of "How to Train Your Dragon" shows that American animated films are heading for a quagmire, a quagmire that mistook the creation of a new worldview as the most important part of the film. This kind of quagmire started from Pixar's General Mobilization series, but when people saw a world full of cars, monsters, and sea creatures, the freshness and unprecedented visual stimulation weakened people's interest in it. The pursuit of the film's plot itself. When Americans replicated this practice indefinitely, the novelty of this other world gradually declined in people's hearts, and the need for the plot itself gradually rose to the audience's first pursuit of the film. Several recent DreamWorks works, such as "Kung Fu Panda" and "How to Train Your Dragon", are undoubtedly too routine. It can be said that apart from the novelty of the world view, the audience does not see any novelty in the plot.
How can we make the story rich and innovative? I think it is still necessary to start with the core element of drama - conflict. Almost all conflicts in "How to Train Your Dragon" revolve around the protagonist Hiccup: the generation and resolution of the conflicts between him and his father (the father expected his son to become a Gallic hero, but the son was always unsatisfactory, until the father mistakenly thought that the son really inherited The father's business, and then the son finally changed his father's opinion), the emergence and resolution of the conflict between him and the Night Fury (capturing the Night Fury and releasing it, bringing the relationship closer and becoming friends, and finally fighting together), his The generation and resolution of conflicts with partners (starting from being looked down on and bullied, to being admired as a dragon-training hero, to being suspected of having dragon-training skills, and finally being followed sincerely) and so on. These contradictions and conflicts may seem colorful, but when they all happen to the same person, you will feel that the plot is actually too simple, because it is too one-liners and too fairy tale. The plot can only be truly engaging if the conflict occurs in multiple people and becomes intricate, or develops a new way for the conflict to develop.
Take the popular cartoon "Summer War" in Japan last year as an example: In fact, the male protagonist in it only bears a small part of conflicts, he and the heroine, he and the OZ world hacker, he and For the heroine's family, more conflicts and conflicts are borne by the supporting characters in the film, such as the family's dependence on the grandmother, the head of the family, and the family's change in attitude towards the wabi-suke they have rejected. These scattered contradictions make the plot seem like it is entangled in dense threads, and it seems to be supported by multiple pillars. After reading it, it makes people imagine and have mixed feelings.
Take another cartoon "Mary and Marx", which was not nominated for an Oscar, as an example: the contradiction between the two protagonists of the film is spirally developed in their exchange of letters one after another. This new contradiction develops The way it feels is very subtle. Moreover, the film especially describes the world around the two protagonists, and describes the contradictions of each of them in their own small world in detail. The richness of the plot brought by this is unmatched by the single-line plot of American animation. of.
If a cartoon, you only make A and B have contradictions, A and C have contradictions, and A and D have contradictions, then it will be biographical; but making cartoons is not about making biographies, creating a new world view The purpose is not to describe a simple story in this world, but should be a new and complex world and its contradictions under a new world view. Always shoot like "How to Train Your Dragon", that will make the film only worth watching, not taste-the so-called father-son relationship, partnership relationship, relationship between people and pets, we are all in the other long ago. tasted in the movie.
The beauty of Japanese animation in the plot is that it creates a world full of complex contradictions while creating a new world view, rather than creating a different world with only one contradiction core. Sometimes, Japanese animation doesn't even focus on creating different worlds like American animation, but on how to create this kind of moving conflict. Like the depth and breadth of each character in "Slam Dunk", like the complex society at the end of the Japanese era in "Rurouni Kenshin: Memories", like each character in "Princess Mononoke" The interest groups represented and the different ideals and pursuits of these interest groups are different; some of them occurred in ancient times, some occurred in modern times, some occurred in contemporary times, some occurred in jungles, some occurred in street markets, and some occurred On campus; whether the worldview is familiar to us is not the most important thing, and enriching the contradictions and conflicts is the real attraction of the film.
If American animation films continue to sink deep in the quagmire of another world, it will become a chicken rib of animation.
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