Standing in the cold winter period of 2020 when the Chinese film industry is full of horses, in fact, the popularity of "Nezha Devil Child" is just a wave of "low tide" in the past two years. Entering the post-New Hollywood era of the world film environment allows us to find a similar "pattern" in countless Hollywood or "infiltrated" Hollywood elements of animation films in the past two or three decades: a large number of postmodern character settings The quantification of the character setting itself is bringing a value and even an ideology that should be incompatible with Western postmodernism (typically the Christian Protestant-style universal concept and the so-called "political correctness") back to the stage of film ideology. At the same time, it also makes the so-called plot itself become a foil. The success of "Nezha Devil Child" in today's China stems from its relative balance between characters, plot and connotation, but it is this balance that more profoundly reflects a universal structure, a A contemporary universal symbolization.
The so-called symbol can be understood as a certain time frozen in a multi-dimensional space, and the mainstream aesthetic habits of contemporary people (especially the millennials who are the main force of today’s movie-going crowd) have long since changed from the traditional single-threaded diachronic narrative. , turning to multi-dimensional synchronic ingenious structures. The so-called modernist art of the past, such as the dissociation of subject matter in painting before the rise of cinema (Modernism), the rise of atonality in music (Schoenberg), and the prospect of writing zero in literature (Proust) Undoubtedly, these are all a priori manifestations of this trend. At the beginning of art history, a mythological system evolved from a symbolic totem image (the story serves the characters), and then turned into an epic (the characters serve the story). Class culminates in the gradual monopoly of various entertainment definitions and attributes in the wave of globalization) the process of becoming king. Today, art is experiencing an opposite ebb: from classicism to postmodernism, storytelling is slowly receding, leaving only the disconnected symbols standing on the beach of art history—in which art history stops moving— - And with it ceased, today's artists seem to have retreated into nothingness, and their main task has generally become to rediscover and understand the meaning between symbols in a multi-dimensional space.
The plot setting of "Nezha Devil Child Comes into the World" grasps people's hearts through a series of "little stories" on the surface, just as the meaning is pieced together through the symbols that we use from various materials on the beach of time in our daily life. However, with the fragmentation of story and expression itself, the so-called narrative and meaning are also immersed in the messy refraction of the broken mirror of time, changing countless equivalent possibilities. This "database" aesthetic (consumption) style is more and more vividly reflected in today's Internet "big data" era. The complete story disappeared, and was replaced by an 'intelligence collection without narrative' that "can arrange the story by itself in the off-screen space (brain) according to the audience's own preferences", which can carry out emotional infusion at will. In short, a series of background symbols and character settings to be recreated.
Judging from the perspective of modernism, a large number of today's films may be reprimanded as "losing depth", "floating on form", and "cult of symbols", but from a postmodern perspective, we can also call them "signifiers" Free play” (Roland Barthes): From the “narrative-discourse-audience” audience (box office)-oriented film to the “discourse-audience-narrative” authorial film (that is, giving the audience a role, a space for imagination , freeing the audience from the dictatorial shackles of the image tyrant, at least gaining the right to freely choose to reject or accept and enter the film).
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