The pictures from top to bottom are stills of "Thirty Thousand Miles of Chang'an", "Deep Sea", "Nezha: The Devil Boy Comes into the World" and "Three Thousand Miles of Chang'an". Layout Design: Zhang Danfeng
Li Bai was so drunk that he poured wine into water, and cranes appeared in the water.
Together with Gao Shi, Du Fu, Cen Fuzi, and Dan Qiusheng, they soar on giant cranes, "Will drink, don't stop drinking", which is extremely wild and romantic... The animated movie "Thirty Thousand Miles of Chang'an" that is currently being screened is rushing The poetic sentiment of Chinese cultural genes has resonated with the audience. So far, the box office of the film has exceeded 1.7 billion yuan.
Chinese animation is showing a gratifying trend of skyrocketing. In recent years, excellent animated films such as "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage", "White Snake: Origin", "Nezha: The Devil Boy Comes into the World" and "Deep Sea" have appeared one after another, with surging creative vitality and good box office reputation, sending a clear signal : China's animation market is booming with huge potential.
Rooted in the fertile soil of Chinese excellent traditional culture, domestic animation is embarking on a road of creative transformation and innovative development that highlights Chinese characteristics, Chinese style, and Chinese style with extraordinary imagination and steady steps.
Chinese style
Exploring the road of national style and expressing Chinese cultural genes
[Camera] From the prosperous and inclusive Chang'an, to the small bridges and flowing waters in the south of the Yangtze River, to the desert and solitary Saibei, they are all condensed in 168 minutes and 48 Tang poems. The audience in the movie theater couldn't help reading and reciting. Comments such as "Chinese culture is the greatest confidence in the film" and "the gene of poetry surging in the blood" were highly praised... This is a vivid microcosm of the surge in traditional culture in recent years.
Since the first advertising animation "Shu Zhendong Chinese Typewriter" was released in 1922, Chinese animation has gone through a hundred years. In the ups and downs, the course remains unchanged, that is to follow the background of the excellent traditional Chinese culture and "explore the road of national style".
"Havoc in Heaven", "Little Tadpoles Looking for Mother"...Su Da, the director of Shanghai Animation Film Studio, recalled, "Among the brilliant group portraits of the works of the Chinese animation school, there are traditional culture-literature, opera, architecture, music, and rich ethnic groups. The art forms of Chinese style - ink painting, Dunhuang murals, New Year pictures, and the spiritual connotation of the Chinese nation - kindness, tenacity, hard work, bravery, etc."
Looking at the animated films that have come out of the circle in recent years, "national style" and "national trend" are still key words. "Nezha: The Devil Boy Comes into the World" endows traditional characters with new connotations and creates an image of Nezha whose "my fate is up to me"; The cultural core of the Chinese nation; "Big Fish and Begonia" beautifully shows the world cultural heritage Fujian Tulou...
"Traditional culture is a magnificent treasure trove of Chinese animation film creation. The core of the Chinese animation school is nationalization, using nationalization to show our own literary and artistic image, and creating a set of expressions based on traditional culture to express Chinese cultural genes. "Ma Hua, a professor at the Animation School of Beijing Film Academy, concluded this way.
Creating animations with traditional cultural themes is both a strength and a challenge. Well-known historical figures and stories lower the threshold for audiences to enter the cinema, but test the basic skills of creators.
For this reason, the creative team of "Thirty Thousand Miles of Chang'an" has traveled to many places to collect songs. "We went into the Shaanxi History Museum to study the layout of Chang'an, stood on the ancient city wall of Tongguan to feel the tragic mood of Ge Shuhan, and wandered around the ancient city of Songpan to find the inspiration for the design of Yunshan City and Lushui Pass..." Xie Junwei, director of "Three Thousand Miles of Chang'an", introduced , Every shot, detailed to the screen wall outside the sheriff's mansion, the wine raising game played by the literati, and the poem board in the temple of the post house, referred to nearly a hundred documents and many unearthed cultural relics. "Annual Annotations to the Complete Works of Li Bai" and "Annotations to the Anthology of Gao Shi" are "reference books that the team always has at hand".
Some directors described animation as "imagining dreams in the wild". Combining free and unrestrained artistic expression with traditional cultural stories, "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage" released in 2015 has become a phenomenon-level work of domestic animation films. The great potential of the mythical genre was discovered.
In recent years, the diversification trend of domestic animation themes is remarkable, and animation films with realistic themes have huge market potential. For example, the recently released "Tea No. 2 Middle School" is a campus-themed animated comedy, while the previously released "Deep Sea" focuses on the exploration of the inner world.
"The way people receive knowledge is changing from generation to generation. Post-95s and post-00s are accustomed to getting in touch with new things through videos. It is necessary to attract more people to get in touch with and understand traditional culture with the literary and artistic forms that young people like to hear and see, and then love traditional culture even more." "Chang'an Yu Zhou, the producer of "Thirty Thousand Miles" and the president of Chasing Light Animation, said, "Young people's recognition of Chinese culture makes us believe that the rise of domestic animation films is not just a slogan, but also the present and the future."
It is also what MCA hopes to broaden the space for animation creation and give more animators the opportunity to create diverse works. "There are many dimensions to evaluate an animation work, which can be artistic level or commercial success, but what is more important is to meet the audience's call and expectation." He hopes that the development of animated films will have more "experimental spirit" ", keep an open subject matter, allow young practitioners to innovate more boldly and consciously, explore the boundaries of different directions, and let more good works be seen by everyone.
Sense of technology
Talent training is becoming more and more perfect, and the bottleneck of animation film production capacity is constantly being broken
[Lens] "10 years, 7.5 billion frames" - On the day "Three Thousand Miles of Chang'an" was finalized, Wang Wei, the founder of Light Chasing Animation, posted such a Weibo. It is not surprising in the world of animation that numbers on the order of "100 million" are often used. Take the gorgeous Penglai Wonderland at the beginning of "New God List: Yang Jian" as an example. In just a few seconds, the single-lens model has 14 billion faces, the file size is 5TB (terabytes), and the total rendering time of the whole film is as long as 410 million core hours. (Central processing unit consumption, measured by core times hours), requires thousands of servers to work continuously for 24 hours.
The multiplication of a series of numbers looks a bit "sci-fi", and behind it is the inevitable logic of the hard-core development of the film industry's technology.
"To some extent, the history of animation is the history of people's exploration of light and shadow, and the history of the integration of technology and art." Ma Li, president of the Chinese Animation Society, said. As an art that blends virtuality and reality, as key technologies such as new-generation network transmission, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, and motion capture penetrate into all levels and links of animation creation, production, dissemination, and consumption, the relationship with creators The imagination is fully integrated and mutually empowered, and animated films bring a higher level of audio-visual enjoyment to the audience.
Compared with the production cycle of a live-action film of one or two years, an animated film takes three to five years or even longer, and the project is more complicated. Taking "Nezha: The Devil Boy Comes into the World" as an example, special effects shots accounted for nearly 80%. More than 60 teams and more than 1,600 production staff distributed around the world worked intensively for 5 years, and finally raised more than 5 billion yuan. Box office miracle.
In fact, complicated production is also a challenge for the coordination of the whole process, and this challenge needs to return to industrialization itself. According to industry insiders, problems such as high degree of dispersion in the production stage, uneven outsourcing quality, and lack of unified special effects standards once hindered the industrialization level of China's animation.
With the gradual maturity of the industrialization process and the improvement of talent training in all links, the bottleneck of animation film production capacity is constantly being broken. According to industry reports, in 2017, there were no more than 30 companies that could fully produce Chinese animations. Today, there are nearly 1,000 upstream and downstream animation companies active in China, and 120 of them can produce high-quality animations. It is worth mentioning that industry observers pointed out that China's position in the global animation industry chain has been significantly improved, from the OEM position at the bottom of the industry's "smile curve" to the two ends of the curve with higher yields, and content production has gradually emerged. "Reverse outsourcing" trend.
A huge group of people are exploring in different ways, gathering a huge joint force to improve the level of domestic animation.
Walking in the office workshop of the light-following animation, you can see the orderly distribution and synchronous operation of the teams corresponding to each link. Pre-design, storyboard, 3D modeling, material, rigging, animation, character special effects, scene special effects, digital matte, lighting synthesis, post-editing, technology, production... a complete chain of animation creation.
"The creation of an animated film can almost 100% be born in this building." Yu Zhou introduced that among the more than 300 people in the team, the production staff accounted for about 90%. The three major series of culture have established a rolling creative process of three works since its inception, and the time-consuming of each work is stable at 3 years, and each work is continuously iterative and cycled, driving an industrialized system production line."
Industrial production pursues "fast" speed, and aesthetic and artistic expression pursues "fine" quality. How to balance it? On the one hand, stable quality depends on the accumulation of "internal strength". "For example, the liquid and hair problems overcome in the production of "Cat and Peach Blossom Land" can be directly applied to Shen Gongbao's mount in "New God List: Yang Jian", and the technology has accumulated like a 'snowball'." Yu Zhou said, another On the one hand, it is to optimize the process. "Following the Light has a work tradition. After the completion of each film project, there will be a project summary meeting in each link to summarize the achievements and propose future improvement and development goals. Every film that follows the Light is Building on the experience of the previous installment.”
Originality and disruptive innovation not only rely on the improvement of "tools", but also test the determination of "people". Director Tian Xiaopeng spent 7 years in "Deep Sea", brewing an experiment on visual effect innovation: the original "particle ink" style, which combines freehand ink and realistic three-dimensional innovation, traditional Chinese painting colors and Western impressionism The fusion of fine arts creates a dreamlike deep-sea world.
"During the creation process, in order to restore the elegance and graininess of ink painting, we mixed detergent, acrylic, food coloring, milk, etc., and repeated it more than 100 times." Tian Xiaopeng said that all technological innovations are for content services , Dismantling the "Splitting the Sea" lens in the film, the single-lens particle effect has more than 100 layers, and the number of particles is as high as billions, which creates a detailed and extremely realistic scene texture.
How to find a 3D animation style unique to China? In Tian Xiaopeng's mind, the combination of two-dimensional and three-dimensional and the exploration of its boundaries may be one of the breakthroughs. "Two-dimensional animation is inherently subjective, but three-dimensional animation is more mature in terms of immersion, lens and light and shadow. Combining the respective advantages of the two, Chinese animation provides a unique possibility." This idea. It sprouted when making the title of "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage", and accumulated more mature processes and methods in "Deep Sea". "Innovation is the driving force behind my animation," said Tian Xiaopeng.
Influence
Create more cultural IP carriers and let Chinese stories go to the international stage
[Shot] Time goes back to 1964, and the first color animation feature film "Havoc in Heaven" created by the "strongest lineup" assembled by Shanghai Meiying Factory came out. The film has been exported, distributed and screened in 44 countries and regions. It has participated in more than 10 international film festivals and won many awards. It is world-class in terms of aesthetic expression and technical level. After nearly 60 years, Shanghai Meiying Factory led the creation and co-produced the animation short film "China Strange Story" with Station B. The spirit of the Chinese nation and the oriental aesthetic style have returned in the attitude of a "new generation", telling Chinese stories to the world.
How can the brilliant Chinese excellent traditional cultural IP "go out" and further liven up and become popular? "Don't imitate others, don't repeat yourself" is the consistent creative concept of Shanghai Meiying Factory, and it is also the key to the domestic animation going global.
"In the past, Hollywood, Disney, and Pixar were the templates for our creation, but the market response was not satisfactory, and the audience did not buy it." MCA said that from imitation to partial originality and then pure originality is the only way for the growth of Chinese animation. "'Copying' can learn things at the level of skills and experience, but the direction of topic selection, aesthetic system, and the spiritual core conveyed by the story are all misplaced."
Regarding this point, Tian Xiaopeng also has personal pain: "When I was doing "Journey to the West: The Return of the Great Sage", I was often asked a question, what is our own oriental performance?" Slowly found his own context, "The stories, art, and performance methods of creation are all oriental, and the national style naturally flows in the blood of domestic animation."
Under the gaze of the world, exploring the road of national style has become the trend of the Chinese school, and the animation works carrying the excellent traditional Chinese cultural genes have once again attracted attention. Behind it are the unique Chinese-style visual art, the ever-improving animation production technology, and faces full of ambitions like young Li Bai and Gao Shi.
With the "14th Five-Year Plan" Chinese Film Development Plan clearly pointing out support for animated films that demonstrate the spirit of the Chinese nation and oriental aesthetics, the Chinese Writers Association "reveals the list and assumes command" to help China's original animation creation. A series of measures have inspired more and more creative vitality. The recently concluded China Animation Week attracted 71 social organizations and industry companies to participate, exhibited more than 500 IP projects, and reached 83 cooperation intention projects on the spot; the 19th China International Animation Festival held in June came from 67 countries 567 Chinese and foreign enterprises and institutions, 2,305 exhibitors, merchants, and professionals from the region and the region participated in the exhibition, and the intended signing amount reached 1.485 billion yuan, which played a positive role in promoting international exchanges in animation and promoting excellent domestic animation to go global.
Turning over the vast "chapters" of animation, people have witnessed the exploration and advancement, trends and ambitions of Chinese animation.
Today's animation is not only a literary style, but also includes comprehensive trendy figures, gaming e-sports, digital entertainment, immersive experience theme parks and peripheral products, which gives creators a broader space. Statistics show that the total output value of China's animation industry has exceeded 220 billion yuan, and animation has become one of the mainstream content categories. Animation + tourism, animation + performing arts, animation + design, animation + games, animation + parent-child education, etc. are interconnected and integrated, further stimulating the industrial potential of animation art.
"The vitality of Chinese culture not only depends on the development and inheritance of the works themselves, but also comes from the operation of IP." Suda introduced that in recent years, Shanghai Meiying Factory has continuously strengthened the management of copyright and trademarks, focusing on 40 major categories such as clothing, food and toys. Class has carried out more than 1,500 trademark registrations, building a new ecology of IP transformation.
Looking forward to the future, Ma Li believes that the two-way empowerment of new technologies, new applications and the operation of the entire industry chain will become an important way for the leapfrog development of Chinese animation. "Standing at a new historical starting point, the Chinese animation industry must strive to anchor and improve The three major goals of high-quality originality, industrial competitiveness, and international influence will show a new look in promoting the high-quality development of Chinese animation, and provide strong support for enhancing the cultural confidence of the Chinese nation."
"Make Chinese animation with ideals and quality, make Chinese animation that can be concentrated, and make Chinese animation that can be handed down." Ma Li's appeal is also the voice of many animators. Extending the historical context and writing the magnificent chapters of the times with high-quality creations, the Dapeng holds high and crosses the sky of the land of China, and the wind it brings is enough to stir and continue.
——"As long as the poems and books are there, Chang'an will be there."
