Originally published on The Paper on January 13, 2019, "There is a drama".
Last year, "The Breadwinner", which won the Annie Award for Best Independent Animated Feature, the Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature and other honors last year, is mainly composed of several women from different countries: the original author of the best-selling novel and the co-writer. Deborah Ellis is a Canadian female writer, another female screenwriter Anita Dolan was born in Ukraine, female director Nora Tomei is Irish, and one of the producers is Angelina Jolie from the United States. An international cast of women has determined the global vision of the film about 11-year-old Afghan parwana who disguises herself as a man and lifts the burden of her family under the Taliban under the Taliban.
The women revealed in the film are strictly prohibited from going out without the company or written permission of their husbands, brothers, sons and other male members of the family. When going out, women must wrap themselves in a burka burqa. Girls are not allowed to go to school or even marry early. The issue of education rights is not unique to Afghanistan, which was enslaved by the Taliban regime. It is also true of Pakistan, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries that were once shrouded in the shadow of totalitarianism. In India and other places today, the fate of women is still cursed by gender. Animated feature films such as "I grew up in Iran" and "Tehran Taboo" are excellent works that reflect such issues.
In 2014, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded 17-year-old Pakistani girl Malala Yousafzai the Peace Prize for her continuous efforts to fight for children's equal right to education. At the age of 12, with the encouragement of her parents and others, Malala wrote anonymously through the BBC blog from a child's perspective and recorded the Taliban's destruction and closure of many girls' schools, including the school she attended, calling on people to cast their eyes on the ravaged children. The earth has gradually aroused widespread media attention around the world. With the exposure of her true identity, it became commonplace to receive death threats and was shot by a masked gunman, but fortunately survived. These encounters did not make her withdraw from the dormitory, on the contrary, the more she fought, the more courageous she became. When she went to England for re-education, she took advantage of the enlightened environment to further her message.
Compared with Malala, Parvana, the little girl in Deborah Ellis' novel "The Breadwinner" (also translated as "Parvana's Waiting"), is much less fortunate. Parwana means butterfly in ancient Iranian language, but when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, the butterfly's wings were tightly bound.
Because Afghanistan is located in the heart of Asia, there have been constant wars against foreign countries or inside and outside since ancient times. In the 1960s and 1970s, the air in Afghanistan was free and open, allowing men, women and children to live freely. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, followed by frequent wars in Afghanistan in the past 10 years. Although people's lives were affected, they did not plummet and fell into dire straits. In the novel "The Breadwinner", Parvana came to earth as the third child in the family a month before the Soviets withdrew their troops. At that time, her parents were a history teacher and a writer. Both of them had a good income. The whole family lived in a big house with a courtyard. The family not only had a TV, a refrigerator, a car, but also two servants. As a young butterfly, Parwana could have grown and transformed happily on the beautiful Afghan carpet while waiting for the birth of her younger sister and younger brother.
But when Parwana had official memories, the entire city of Kabul was in ruins. The civil war that broke out in Afghanistan after the Soviets returned home has shattered the lives of ordinary people. By the time the Taliban took over Kabul in September 1996, Afghanistan soon became synonymous with Les Miserables. Cannonballs without eyes and landmines that could go off at any time blew up the Parvana family's big house, blew off a leg of her father, and blew out her brother's 14-year-old life.
Along with these disappeared, there was the material and spiritual wealth of the Parvana family. In addition to indiscriminately killing innocents and burning books, the Taliban also issued draconian laws to kill civilization, banning all voices of opposition, requiring women to return home from the workplace and school, and stipulating their going out. Dress code. As a result, both parents are unemployed. In order to survive, they, like many Afghans, began to move in exile several times. The house became smaller and smaller. The clothes, jewelry and even the father's prosthetic limbs were exchanged by the father to buy basic food that could barely satisfy their hunger. Fortunately, in addition to changing everything that the seller can sell, Dad can also set up a stall at the market to help people read and write letters.
Helping her father to and from the market every day has become one of Parwana's daily tasks, because only her height is just right. The other thing only she could do was go downstairs and fetch water until a small bucket filled a large tank. The younger sister is too young to carry the bucket, and it is difficult for the mother and elder sister to carry the bucket full of water up and down the stairs when they are wrapped in burka. Moreover, without a man to accompany them, they may encounter danger at any time when they go out.
Both the novel and the film begin with Parvana squatting with her father at the market, bringing out the devastated history of Afghanistan. However, Parvana, the "flower of war" created by the film, is more independent, decisive and brave. Although Parvana in the book has been dedicated to her family again and again, the author has always reminded readers not to forget that her protagonist is only a young girl, and she, like her peers around the world, has certain age-specific joys and sorrows. She gets angry when she argues with her sister to fetch water; she wants her mother to be blamed when she learns that her favorite clothes are also being sold by her mother. But in the film, Parwana has almost no girlish childishness in her body. She works hard and does everything she can, and only wants a high price when she sells clothes.
More importantly, after her father was taken into prison in the book, Parvana was persuaded by the assertive and active Mrs. Vera, as well as her mother and sister, to passively cut her hair short and replace her brother's old hair. clothes, and dressed herself as a boy. In the movie, she took the initiative to pick up the scissors, and there was no longer Mrs. Vera by her side. Director Nora Tomei handles it like this, the cruelty of war becomes more and more prominent, children do not need to lead the way, and the extreme environment catalyzes their self-maturity.
But as many news reports have reported, wars more often turn children into cold-blooded animals at a young age. The specific reason for my father's arrest, which is not explained in the novel, is explained in the film by a former good student in my father's eyes, who is now a young Taliban soldier. This young man, who was not a few years older than Parvana, was haunted by a certain past event, so he recruited his older companions to beat his former teacher and threw them into prison. However, the irony is that he only dared to act as a "hero" in front of the old, the weak, the sick and the sick, and when he learned that he was really going to the battlefield, he was immediately at a loss.
However, this does not mean that the film is more desperate than the novel. On the contrary, the tenacious power of life that the film intuitively shows makes people more moved by the glimmer of life. The driving force in the novel that motivates Parvana to keep moving forward is that she wants to become Malali's heir. In my dad's story, the teenage Malali was a Joan of Arc-esque heroine, an incredibly brave Afghan woman who led demoralized Afghan soldiers to beat British enemies to the ground. In the movie, a teenager with the same name as his dead brother Suleiman appears in Parvana's fantasy world. In order to help the villagers recapture the seeds robbed by the Elephant King, the young man set out on the road alone to find three weapons that could subdue the Elephant King, and finally overcame his cowardice and ushered in victory.
Real life and fantasy world are two completely different styles of gloom and bright side by side. It seems that it is difficult to intersect, but the seed is undoubtedly a symbol of hope. It can not only grow into food in dreams, but also travel through time and space. Flowers bloom in the land of the film, giving the film's open ending a bright possibility. And these flowers are naturally what Deborah Ellis wants to see. As the novel draws to a close, Parwana, who is about to set off with her father to find her mother and other family members, planted seeds at the market where flowers were impossible to grow, and was helped by an old man and a tea boy.
The few who stood out in the silent crowd, apart from Parvana, the old man, the tea boy, as well as Parvana, who dressed as a boy to earn money to support the family, a Taliban soldier who secretly helped Parvana rescue her father, etc. . To borrow a sentence from the old man's book, "Afghans love beautiful things, but we have seen so much ugliness that we even forgot how beautiful things like flowers are!" They are ugly witnesses or even indirect manufactures but also a cultivator of beautiful flowers. Just like the end of "Tehran Taboo", forced by inhuman religious laws, she can only be reduced to the heroine of the Dust Girl, using her "I am kind" behavior to prop up the hope of the whole of Iran.
In addition, the Afghan children's novels written by Deborah Ellis include "The Breadwinner", "Parvana's Journey", "Dirty City" and "My Name is Parvana". These three books follow the brush of humanitarianism, and tell the story of Parvana and Vaugia, who is both a "sister" and a "brother", and their drifting and survival trajectories in a country still in war. .
I am very much looking forward to the production company of the film "The Breadwinner", and the Cartoon Salon animation studio from Ireland can also adapt the other three novels into animated feature films. The animation studio that produced "The Secret of the Book of Kells" and "Song of the Sea", although the number of works is limited, it uses traditional painting styles such as hand-painting and paper-cutting that are full of imagination and beauty, so that the animation audience has become accustomed to it from a long time ago. In the 3D world, the 2D world is brought back, and at the same time, the works are given a humanistic height that is different from the American animation films, so that the audience can vaguely see the author's characteristics in the past Eastern European and Japanese animation films.
https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_2848713
View more about The Breadwinner reviews
