Title Diagram The inverse quantitative change of the immortal will eventually lead to the qualitative change.
In the development process of domestic animation, fantasy has long been a mainstream theme. In 2023, more than half of the domestic animations will be broadcast throughout the year, and more than half of the works are adapted from fantasy online texts. Open the chasing table of several ** platforms,From week 1 to Sunday,At least 1 fantasy animation update is arranged every day,Even in station B, where the theme type is diversified,Week 4 Sunday with higher traffic is also left to fantasy animation。
In the second half of this year, there have been eye-catching works in the fantasy network text reform animation launched on several ** platforms, in addition to the Douban high-scoring animation "Cangyuan Tu" that we wrote in detail last week, as well as the "Legend of Mortal Cultivation of Immortals", which has been broadcast exclusively by station B and has always been unique in production, and Tencent** produced the unexpected "dark horse" work "Immortal Rebellion". The innovation and uniqueness of these works also mean that under the differentiated production, the adaptation and animation of fantasy online texts can also make new ideas.
Slower: "The Legend of Mortal Immortals" is a combination of live-action performances and animated audio-visual effects
In 2018, after "Douluo Continent" opened up a new world of domestic New Year production, the advantages of New Year were refined in a few years - it can not only provide strong user stickiness, but also create influential IP with stable long-term updates, so all platforms have begun to do New Year. But the year also has its limitations. Since the source of the content is concentrated in fantasy online texts, most of the plots of this kind of theme serve the protagonist in the narrative process, coupled with the long-term ** caused by the plot template, after being adapted to the year, it is destined to make the audience tired at a certain point in time, which requires the year to be able to present enough differentiation and freshness to the audience. This differentiation and freshness is reflected in two aspects, on the one hand, the continuous improvement of the audiovisual effect of the animation, and on the other hand, the continuous improvement of the animation narrative level. There are now nearly 10 annual episodes in China, among which the more expressive is "The Legend of Mortal Cultivation of Immortals" at station B.
Today, the production mode of "Mortal" is summarized, that is, the performance of live-action drama is combined with animated audio-visual effects. It uses a large number of motion capture technology in production, with professional martial arts actors providing computer capture of action scenes, and film and television actors providing facial motion capture for the characters, so that the animated characters have a high sense of movement fluency and fine facial micro-expression changes. The animation highlights the identity, personality, and psychology of different characters through actions and expressions, which is similar to the performance of live-action film and television dramas, and cooperates with the UE5 engine to build a very realistic scene, making the overall performance of "Mortal" unique in domestic 3D CG animation.
The user reputation established by the "Mortal" anime today is completely different from the comment trend at the beginning of the update. When this anime was first launched in 2020, it was questioned by anime fans as "Uncanny Valley" because of its overly realistic character design. The adaptation of the first few episodes of the first season not only streamlined a lot of the psychological activities of the protagonist Han Li, but also portrayed a number of supporting characters who were originally fuller as tool people, much to the disappointment of book fans. Fortunately, the production team World Wide Cat Animation and Force Animation focused on listening to persuasion, and adopted the suggestions of book fans in the later content, and modified the unreasonable plot and dialogue, so as to restore the narrative core of "mortals cultivate immortals, and cultivate human feelings and sophistication" in the original work. This change has also become a unified adaptation idea of the animation, that is, by restoring the character of the protagonist who acts steadily and likes to take advantage of a little advantage, plus the stories of other supporting characters to enrich the whole work, portraying a world of cultivating immortals by the weak, so that all the behaviors of the protagonist Han Li, who only seeks immortality, when facing the seven emotions and six desires of mortals, become reasonable.
Many supporting roles in the animation are impressive, such as Li Huayuan, Zhong Wu, Mo Caihuan, Senior Sister Chen, and so on. Through the redesign of the plot of the supporting characters, the layering of the characters is more obvious, and the experience of these characters and Han Li's personality characteristics are more delicate under the combination of live-action performance methods and animated audio-visual effects, which also fits well with the narrative characteristics of the animation of "Mortal", and reverses the impression of most audiences on the work. However, outside of animation, the various production characteristics of "Mortal" may not match its update mode, and not all animation audiences can accept it.
Since the start of the summer of 2020, the animation of "Mortal" has been updated intermittently in 3 and a half years in the form of quarterly broadcast + special + annual + remake A total of 76 episodes have been updated, and the duration of a single episode is less than 15 minutes, which has led to the narrative of some over-episodes being relatively flat, while some viewers hope that the animation can fully focus on the growth of the protagonist. Obviously, in the face of production capacity, the narrative innovation of animation is a bit "difficult for a good woman to cook without rice". In the latest broadcast year, Han Li finally got married, and this plot is the 398th chapter in the original book**, to do a total of more than 2,400 chapters of the book, the "mortal" animation will probably be an incomparably long year. Hurry up: "Immortal Rebellion" with a super fast narrative rhythm to meet the audience's demand for coolness
In the animation of "Mortal", after Ergen "cameo" Li Huayuan (Han Li's master in Huangfeng Valley) returned to the West, the production team designed an easter egg to reincarnate him in the world of ** "Immortal Rebellion" created by Earroot, and won the protagonist Wang Lin of "Immortal Rebellion" at the beginning. Of course, this is just a meme for the production team. You must know that in the recent "Immortal Rebellion" animation broadcast on Tencent**, Wang Lin, the protagonist who also started cultivating immortals from mortals, only took 4 episodes to reach the 15th layer of the condensation period, and 14 episodes reached the middle stage of foundation building, and the first 14 episodes finished the plot of the first 140 chapters. This upgrade speed was simply beating Han Li.
This animation can often rush to the forefront of Tencent's domestic animation popularity, and the number of ratings and scores have been rising, and it is full of stamina. In order to achieve a fast-paced narrative, the animation of "Immortal Rebellion" has made very big changes to the original work**, such as Wang Lin did not be selected to cultivate immortals** after finding a short-sighted plot, and the plots such as going home to visit his parents after entering the immortal gate have been deleted, only retaining the common plots in the stories of cultivating immortals such as his upgrade and hanging, and at the same time, the "adventure" plot between him and Situ Nan has been pre-positioned to make the upgrade progress more reasonable, and it also makes the animation narrative rhythm seem to be three times faster. For those fans who keep urging to update and can only feel happiness once a week, the adaptation of the animation has indeed achieved the effect of "multiple times the happiness".
In the first 14 episodes of "Immortal Rebellion", Wang Lin started from a mortal to embark on the road of cultivating immortals, and experienced important plots such as the destruction of the sect, the killing of Teng Li, the killing of his parents by the Teng family, and the entry into the foreign battlefield to seize Shemaleon, and at the production level, the animation team also designed as many as 6 models for its changes in different periods and different experiences. If this is placed in other fantasy animations, it will take more than ten episodes for the protagonist to change the modeling. A very important reason why the fast-paced narrative of "Immortal Rebellion" can be recognized by fans of the original work is that the production team has grasped the character characteristics of the protagonist Wang Lin.
When in-depth online literature enthusiasts evaluate online articles, the word "water injection" is indispensable. At the same time, based on the framework of fantasy online narrative, the works of different authors are also different in terms of protagonist settings, cool point settings, etc., from the perspective of adapted animation, it is actually feasible to streamline the plot that has nothing to do with the main line, but this requires retaining the highlights of the original work, so as to form a difference from other fantasy animations.
Many fans commented on the original work of "Immortal Rebellion", and the deepest impression of the character of Wang Lin was that he was unwilling to be ordinary, had the courage to resist, and was decisive in killing, and even left the famous sentence "My generation of monks, why not fight a war", and at the same time criticized the narrative of the first few hundred chapters for being too slow. The fast-paced adaptation of the anime just corrects the shortcomings of the original work while amplifying the charm of the protagonist's character. For animation viewers who have not watched, there will not be much obstacle to this kind of fast-paced narrative, after all, in the current domestic animation market dominated by fantasy themes, animation audiences are very familiar with various settings, and there is no need to pay too much attention to the setting of cultivating immortals, and the fast-paced narrative has made "Immortal Rebellion" differentiated in this year's fantasy animation.
However, it is easy to ignore the portrayal of the character's personality and thoughts. While many fans recognize the animation, they also raise their own concerns about the portrayal of other important supporting roles in the animation, after all, many of the supporting roles that appear in the middle and late stages are impressive. The first season of the "Immortal Rebellion" animation has passed the halfway point, and it remains to be seen whether the level of the plot in the later episodes can be consistent with the first 14 episodes.
Summary
"The Legend of Mortal Immortals" and "Immortal Rebellion" both belong to "mortal**" in terms of subject matter subdivision, but when they were adapted into animation, they chose diametrically opposite adaptation ideas because of different production models, broadcast modes and story details, and gained a large number of fans. The adaptation of "Cangyuan Tu" is like the "original crusher", which is even more bold and sharp, leaving a deep impression on the audience. The fact that these works can stand out is not unrelated to the current situation and changes that fantasy animation is facing in the Chinese animation market.
In some core animation fan groups, fantasy animation, especially fantasy animation produced by 3D CG, has always been at the bottom of the animation contempt chain. On the one hand, the reason is that the development process of animation IP in overseas mature markets has not been completely applied in China, and "animation" and "comic" are separated in China, that is, domestic comics have not become the main content adaptation source of domestic animation, but online texts have replaced the status of comics.
On the other hand, the original fantasy animation has problems such as fast food, routines, and lack of nutrition, coupled with the fact that the domestic animation industry is accustomed to adapting animation with 3D CG, in order to pursue commercial success, fantasy online text + 3D CG production has formed a relatively complete system, and a large number of works use simple and direct sensory stimulation and narrative logic to win potential audiences, which can achieve a certain scale of mass production, but at the same time, it is inevitable to produce similar modeling, plot homogeneity and other shortcomings.
For this development model, in the short term, it seems to be "finished!".I'm surrounded by Chinese 3D garbage animation", in the long run, the rapid production of a large number of adapted animations with its own traffic in an industrialized or streamlined production mode can quickly form a huge audience for animation. After several years of user training, the domestic animation audience has accumulated a huge base, for example, Tencent** has announced that the number of animation users on the platform exceeds 200 million.
Even Japan, where the Japanese comic industry is extremely developed, is also a similar development path for the production industry. Today, Japan can produce more than 200 new films per year, which is closely related to the fact that 2D animation has formed an assembly line production model many years ago, for example, there will be as many as 76 new films in October 2023, and I believe that a large number of core anime fans have only seen some of these works. Restricted by communication channels, the new ones that can be noticed and recognized by domestic animation audiences are only about a dozen or even fewer per season. Among the remaining works,There are a lot of animations with homogeneous content,There are even low-cost animations with broken pictures,But they have formed the "bottom" of the Japanese animation industry,Accumulated audiences with different animation needs in the global market for Japanese comics。
The rapid accumulation of user volume is also beneficial to the development of Guoman industry。 High-quality animations of other themes can receive more attention, and works can go more smoothly at the commercial level, such as "Painting the Bad People of the Rivers and Lakes", "Fire Phoenix Liaoyuan", "Medicine 2", "Five Elements of Foggy Mountains" These excellent domestic animations.
In addition, quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes, and when the production quantity of fantasy animation reaches a certain stage, the improvement of quality will inevitably come. Not only "The Legend of Mortal Cultivation of Immortals", "Immortal Rebellion" and "Cangyuan Tu", domestic animation producers who have accumulated a certain amount of experience have focused on using animation to restore the original work from the beginning, and gradually realized obvious upgrades in narrative, character design and audio-visual, removing the chaff, rendering the character's emotions to the extreme and making the audience want to stop, which is the stage that the industry is destined to usher in when it reaches a certain process.
These works can stand out from the domestic animation with a total annual output of nearly 100 pieces, which also represents that the audience aesthetics of domestic animation are also constantly improving, so it is better to give domestic animation some more time.