"Strange Tales" is indeed a very good cartoon, and in terms of the three episodes that have aired so far, it does cater to its title "Strange Tales from Liaozhai".
But among the three episodes, the weirdest and most difficult to understand episode and the one that makes you feel lost after watching it is undoubtedly the second season of "Goose Goose", don't be afraid of everyone's jokes, when I first saw this title, the first thing that came to my mind was the song "Song of the Goose" Luo Bing Wang wrote when he was seven years old:
Wild goose goose, singing to the sky. White hair floats in green water, and red anthurium stirs up clear waves. ”
I thought it was the story of King Luo Bing and the goose demon, but I didn't expect it to be more bizarre than this. This is actually the story of a salesman who encounters a vixen while transporting goods.
So, what is this story about, what are the strange things in it, and what truths do it contain?
1。As is customary, let's first introduce the story of "Goose Goose Goose" and the allusions behind it.
This episode is interesting. It is adapted from the Southern Dynasty supernatural story "Yangxian Scholar", but it is not complete. We'll look at that later.
The story of "Yangxian Scholar" is relatively simple, and there are not so many hidden metaphors. The play tells the story of a young salesman named Xu Yan. His family was relatively poor, and he often crossed the mountains to deliver goods to the people of the town. Make a living. Legend has it that on this day, Xu Yan met a scholar with a leg injury on the way to deliver a goose. Faced with help, he decided to give him a ride.
Unexpectedly, after the scholar got into the goose cage, the goose cage did not get bigger, the scholar did not get smaller, and the salesman did not feel that the goose cage became heavier. Walking under such a big tree, the scholar begged Xu Yan to let him out, and wanted to invite Xu Yan to eat something.
Xu Yanzheng wondered about the food he got from **, but the scholar spit out the delicious food from his mouth, and the two ate it with relish. The scholar added that he actually had a woman accompanying him and wanted to invite her out to dinner. Before Xu Yan could react, he suddenly opened his mouth and spit out a beautiful woman.
The woman poured the scholar a glass of wine. Soon, the scholar got drunk and fell to the side to rest. Subsequently, the woman motioned for Xu Yan to keep it a secret, because she was still carrying a man, so she spit out another man from her mouth.
After a while, the scholar rolled over and seemed to wake up. The woman hurriedly ran over to help him sleep. Only Xu Yan and the man were left at the scene. As a result, the man also signaled Xu Yan to keep a secret for him, because he also brought a woman, so the man spit out another woman's ......
Finally, the scholar is about to wake up, but the woman is devoured by the man, the man is devoured by the woman, and the woman is devoured by the scholar again, and everything returns to normal.
In "Strange Tales of China", the story has been adapted. The stories are similar, but the connotations are completely different!
It seems that "Goose Goose Goose" and "Yangxian Scholar" are only different in the following points:
There is dialogue in the original book, but when interpreted in the form of a manga, it is not only a silent film, but also has a strange tone, and expresses its intention through a narration of white letters. Black background.
Here, the scholar turns into a vixen and eats two geese from the salesman's goose cage. Similarly, other men and women are also transformed into rabbit spirits, pig demons, and goose girls.
At the end of the film, Goose Girl actually wants the salesman to take her away, but the salesman hesitates and everything is lost.
Of course, there is a follow-up to "Yangxian Scholar", that is, the salesman got a copper plate from the scholar. Later, he became a great official, and some people told him the origin of the copper plate.
Regarding the story of "The Scholar of Yangxian", although there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people, most of these Hamlets look the same.
Pu Songling of the Qing Dynasty once commented on this story:
The end of the world has come, and there is nothing in this world that cannot be kept in a cage."
This sentence is very philosophical, meaning that life is in **?It's not unreal, the goose cage attracts readers, readers attract beautiful women, beautiful women attract hunk men, and macho men attract beautiful women......Layered on top of each other, it is difficult to distinguish between the real and the fake.
In the same way, it can also refer to the desires of the human heart. The salesman analyzes the desires of these people from the perspective of a bystander. Just like the people who eat melons, the incident of the four modern beauties hooking up with others belongs to those who only watch the excitement and don't think it's a big deal. However, those in power are confused, but bystanders are clear. Although the bystanders do not tell the truth, they do not know that sometimes the bystanders are also the authorities.
Relatively speaking, "Goose Goose Goose" is a relatively successful adaptation, and its meaning is deeper and broader.
Everyone reads it with a different meaning. Here are a few more touching examples:
Some people read about love. Only when they are drunk do they dare to spit out their sweethearts, but when they wake up, they hide again.
Some people read desire. The fox likes the simplicity of the rabbit, but the rabbit likes the roughness of the wild boar. Wild boars like the elegance of geese, and geese want to pursue free ......They all like what they don't have. This is called desire.
Some people think it's timidity. Love is a kind of bondage and imprisonment, and they dare not speak out loud ......Only when they are drunk do they dare to take it out and take a quiet look.
Someone else read helplessness. It turns out that everyone loves her, but they can't love her. Although there was a person standing in front of her, there was another person living in her heart, like a nesting doll.
However, although this understanding is beautiful, romantic, and people like it, this is not what the director wants to express. The reason is also very simple, because the name of this anime is "Goose Goose Goose". Obviously, the goose is the protagonist. As for the love and desire mentioned above, it actually has little to do with geese. They are the same as chickens, ducks, and dogs.
But why does it have to be a goose?
In fact, since the exploitation of human society, the meaning of this goose is no longer simply hungry. There is a famous saying about taxation in ancient times, and that is:
Pluck the most goose feathers and listen to the fewest goose calls! ”
So, when I saw this title, in addition to Luo Bing Wang's poem, I also thought of Jiang Wen's movie "Let the Bullets Fly". There's a goose town there, and there's a lot of geese at the end. In fact, since then, the word goose has been given a new meaning.
4. Keep in mind that the title of this episode is "Goose Goose Goose". There are goose mountains, goose cages, wild geese, goose girls, and wild geese. This means that its theme is talking about geese.
As for the scholars, fox spirits, rabbit spirits, and pig spirits, they are all to highlight the last goose girl and the flying swan.
Goose, as the name suggests, a me, a bird, I represent me, and the bird represents freedom. I was bound by freedom and turned into a goose. So, the protagonist we should represent is not a salesman, nor a vixen, but a goose.
Secondly, in general, the development of a work is mostly explained by two identities. The first person or third person, on the one hand, has a sense of substitution and immerses people in the scene; On the other hand, it takes the perspective of God and can see things that people can't.
and "Goose Goose Goose" is in the second person. This substitution is better than the third person, but worse than the first person. Obviously, the author wants us to see what is happening in front of us as participants and not as God. So, all the narratives are about how you get lost, how you are curious, how you hesitate, how you get lost, ......
And me? It's the goose in the goose cage on the back of the salesman!
Although it is a bit winding, from the perspective of the goose, this salesman is indeed more in line with the plot development of "Goose Goose Goose" and its unique narrative style. It also proves that the whole animation is terrifying and weird, and if you want to escape but can't do anything, the tension is suffocating.
Therefore, if the first episode of "China Story" "The Summer of Little Monsters" is about the cruelty of the workplace, then "Goose Goose Goose" goes further and talks about the oppression brought by class in the workplace.
5。Moreover, the sense of oppression in "Goose Goose Goose" is not only felt by us geese, but also by the salesman carrying the goose on his back. It doesn't matter from whose point of view we draw conclusions. Almost identical.
At the beginning, the salesman walked on Mount Eyre with a pair of black circles under his eyes and two helpless geese on his back. Then, a line of narration appears:
This is Mount Eyre, it's you. Where he disappeared! ”
At the same time, it is also the place where the geese disappear. However, even if the goose does not disappear, he is greeted either by a slaughterhouse or a breeding farm. There are no more than these two endings. Can't compare. Release into nature. If we go any deeper, this is where we are missing, because from here on, we are trapped in this story and cannot extricate ourselves.
Of course, if you watch the whole movie and watch it all over again, you'll understand that it's actually in reverse order. Let's start with the end of the whole story, that is, the salesman and his goose are missing, lost in this goose mountain.
Then I started talking about how the salesman got lost in this goose mountain step by step. It turned out that he met a lame scholar, who was actually a shrew. Contrary to what we imagined, the vixen was not begging, but forcing the salesman to carry him. This is different from the little fox in "Strange Tales from the Book of Heaven", but the creation prototype should be the fox with a broken leg.
The salesman was frightened and began to regret why he didn't listen to the hunter and rushed into Asan.
But once you enter the deep Asan Mountain, your festival is a passerby. Here, the salesman loses his heart and loses the most important thing as an independent person.
From the moment the salesman saw the fox scholar. Since then, the whole plot has become extremely terrifying, and it has begun to reveal a sense of oppression everywhere!
The salesman who had lost the two geese became worried that the fox scholar would eat him, so when he saw the fox scholar take the delicious food out of his mouth, he was so frightened that he even imagined that he had fallen into his mouth.
Because he lost his autonomy, he could only mechanically cooperate with the fox scholar to drink. Although afraid, I also had to obey.
But after a few glasses of wine, the salesman felt that he was very powerful. He was bigger than Assan. I don't quite understand this paragraph. It's a bit like when a person is oppressed for the first time. The oppressor, in order to show mercy, will first give you some favor or anesthetic to make you feel that you can still achieve great things within this framework.
Then people spit out like matryoshka dolls. It also allows onlookers to see how the framework of the vixen is realized. It's a bit like a newcomer to the workplace, where the HR department is informing the company's organizational structure.
Under this framework, everyone who can finally breathe fresh air is seriously serving their superiors. He was afraid that he had done something wrong, and he was afraid that his trick would be discovered by his superiors and make him unhappy, so he swallowed it in one gulp.
Although I am oppressed, there are times when I am comfortable, that is, when my superiors are not around and I oppress my subordinates. In this framework set by the fox Confucian scholars, the weak obey the strong, and the weak oppress the weak in turn.
In particular, this structure is based on the action of "vomiting", which is more like revealing the food chain of nature. Big fish eat small fish, small fish eat shrimp, shrimp eat purple mud ......
Seven,
Everyone wanted to regain what they had lost, so Asan was formed, and a stepped society began to come from fox scholars.
Because the salesman witnessed all this, he even had an urge to create a society in Assan, so when the goose girl asked him to take her away, he was actually a little moved in his heart.
It is important to note here that the fact that the Goose Girl begged the seller to take her away does not mean that the seller was eaten by the Goose Girl. But the goose girl wants to escape from the bottom of the ladder society created by the fox scholar and become the second ladder society created by the salesman.
In fact, when the salesman saw all this, he was already fantasizing:
You want to have a sweetheart too, but now you don't even have a goose. ”
In other words, the salesman also wants to have a sweetheart who can eat in his stomach and spit it out when he needs it. However, he doesn't have the strength yet. Not only could he not create his own society, he didn't even have a goose.
After the goose girl made a request, the salesman hesitated. On the one hand, his own strength can't even beat the third and fourth layers of class society created by fox scholars. On the other hand, he also has his own worries, worried that this goose girl will also have a sweetheart:
But you're afraid that there will be geese again, so hesitate! ”
In other words, the salesman gave me the illusion that I had nothing and belonged to the no-goose class. As I mentioned earlier, the goose represents our class without goose, that is, the class without industry. But he wanted to jump into the goose class. At the same time, he also hopes that his goose will no longer be a goose class.
Eight,
It is precisely because of the salesman's hesitation at the moment that everything has passed. The scholar fox woke up and swallowed them one by one like dominoes. In the end, the salesman faced the fox and got nothing.
At this time, there is another narration in the film:
You're a salesman, and just now, you lost three geese! ”
Originally, the salesman had a goose class, and even this goose was only temporary. Yes, after all, it has to be sent to a neighboring village. However, he was eaten by the fox scholar, the king of Ashan, and the supreme ruler, so the salesman became a gooseless class.
Just like the Supreme Treasure said in "Journey to the West":
There was once a sincere feeling in front of me, which I did not cherish. I regretted it when I lost it. There is nothing more painful in the world. ”
The whole story is like "A Dream of Nanliang". Not only did the salesman fail to become a member of the goose class, but he also became a part of Asan and completely disappeared in Asan.
The earrings that the goose girl drops at the end represent the most precious thing on the peddler's body, which is freedom. As I said earlier, the "goose" is me and the bird. I (the salesman) is still there, but the bird has flown away.
As a salesman, if he hadn't entered Asan, he wouldn't have had a goose class (the goose in the goose cage belonged to someone else)), but he didn't lose himself and he didn't lose his freedom.
However, from the moment the earrings turned into geese and flew away, the salesman could never go back, and completely fell to the bottom of the goose mountain.
As Mr. Lu Xun wrote:
I couldn't sleep anyway, and I read carefully for half a night before I saw the words between the lines. "The book is full of two words: cannibalism! ”
However, do you think that as a salesman, you can still choose whether or not to enter Asan?
Wrong, as I said earlier, we are geese. In a sense, the goose cage that accommodates us is the goose mountain that the salesman faces. There is no escape. Even if he escapes, he will still face the situation of being swallowed up by a big boss like Fox Scholar.
As I mentioned in my last article, "The Summer of the Little Monster", no matter how hard the pig demon tried, he couldn't achieve a change of identity. When he escapes from Lang Lang Mountain, there is a high probability that he will be killed by Sun Wukong. If he doesn't die, God will be merciful!
Preview for the next issue: What is the story of the third season of Chinese Stories "Lin Lin"?
If you look at the world from a different perspective, you will find a different kind of fun. If you like it, please pay attention to it!