The presentation:
The essay:
The most crucial factor in mythology adaptation is expressing one thing clear.
As an art form, the film is not pure entertainment or commercial behaviour but also contains rich cultural connotations and an intuitive culture carrier. The culture of a country and a nation can be fully reflected in its films (Liang, 2008). The film market is based on the audience, and the box office is an important criterion to test whether a film is good. An excellent film will arouse the audience’s deep resonance, and the profound reason for the resonance is cultural root search and identity (Sun, 2020). Myth story is based on national culture, and myth story has a broad mass base and story background, which is of great help to film storytelling. A good film needs to tell the story clearly and express its culture. A good adaptation of fairy tales requires not only re-innovation or defamiliarization to integrate the characters or the story itself to make it more in line with the expectations of modern audiences but also understanding the cultural significance behind the fairy tales to deceive the audience for their spiritual expression. This article will talk about how fairy tales can be adapted and recreated to make them more accessible to modern audiences.
The adaptation of mythological films should take into account the audio-visual experience of the audience and take into account the cultural connotation of mythological stories. There have been numerous examples of adaptations of myths into films in recent years, both successful and unsuccessful. Myths can be divided into ancient, religious, folk, and literary myths (Jiang, 2020). Open our eyes to the whole world, the successful examples are the pagan imagination of Harry Potter, the symbol decoding in The Da Vinci Code, the cultural roots of Avatar, the symbol origin of the Matrix, the cultural fusion behind Kung Fu Panda, and the original belief in Wolf Totem (Sun, 2020). No matter what kind of myth adaptation, it has not fundamentally changed the archetypal code rooted in the cultural soil. Otherwise, the plot will feel abrupt and difficult to understand due to the lack of a mythological background.
Similarly, unsuccessful examples include warner Bros. ‘2004 big-budget film Troy, which did not receive the expected results after its public release. The reason is that although the film is adapted from Greek and Roman mythology, in fact, the participation of “gods” is omitted in the film, and the contradiction between God and God and between God and man is completely ignored in the epic, which directly evolves into the contradiction between man and man and between countries. Such adaptations are a disappointment to those who want to experience the beauty of mythology. After all, the audience is looking to transform their gods into images (Liang, 2008). As a comprehensive audio-visual art, the film needs to present all the gods, Buddhas, gods, Taoism, and forms, which have been in people’s imagination in the myth story one by one (Zhang, 2014). In the story, the audience expects to see subversion and reconstruction. Although the story has changed, the spiritual core and the excellent traditional culture carried in the story have not changed (Jiang, 2020). The above facts show that successful adaptations are based on a correct understanding and clear expression of the culture behind their myths, rather than re-creating confusing content. In the following, this paper will discuss the importance of telling only one thing clearly in adapting myths by taking the story of Dijiang and Nezha as examples.
I. Dijiang’s Tale
“When it comes to adaptation, the most important thing is to say only one thing.” “Said Junyan Liu, MA animation major at University of the Arts London. Her work, Dijiang’s Tale, is adapted from the ancient Chinese myth “The Book of Mountains and Seas” — the divine bird Called Dijiang, who lives in the Tianshan Mountains. According to Mountains and Seas · Xishan Jing, Dijiang was like a yellow cloth bag and as red as fire. He had six feet and four wings, but he knew how to sing and dance (Sun, 2018). Liu designed it as a fat red doll with four arms and two legs and no facial features. It would blossom with flowers and butterflies flying around it as soon as it appeared. It also had wonderful music, which was very consistent with the myth setting. And because of its lovely appearance by the students around love. Liu set up two other powerful gods in the story. Unable to understand that Dijiang had no facial features, the two gods took a hammer and pick and chiselled the facial features on Dijiang’s face. However, because they attacked him too hard, The whole face of Dijiang was broken, just like a ceramic doll. At the end of the story, A butterfly-like creature with three pairs of wings emerges from his broken body and continues to sing and dance happily, enjoying flowers and music. Throughout the film, every frame and every second tells the story of Dijiang’s obstinate persistence in an unrecognized environment. Even under great pressure from the outside world, he regained himself. The spiritual meaning of the story of Dijiang is similar to what Liu said in the interview with the author: “When the content of what I want to do is different from the requirements of my tutor, in fact, IN the end, I still feel that my insistence is right.” Whether in the animation story or the life outside the story, Liu summed up his thoughts to a point, and the whole animation also revolves around this point to adapt and re-create the myth. “If you try to express two ideas in one piece, it will confuse the audience,” Liu explained in an interview.
II. Nezha: Birth of the Demon Child
Similarly, take Nezha, an animated film that became the highest-grossing film in The Chinese mainland in 2019 (Wikipedia, n.d.). The theme of “Break stereotypes and be your own hero” runs throughout the film. Nezha does not follow the classic plots of NeZha films and TV series to focus on the conflicts between Nezha and the Dragon King. Instead, it takes a unique approach and adds a delicate design. In the original novel, Taiyi is ordered by his master to escort the magic beads down the mountain to be reincarnated. And the film design the magic beads as a consuming nimbus of heaven and earth mixed yuan bead, mixed yuan bead divided into the magic pill and spirit bead. Nezha should be the spirit bead reincarnation, but because of some reason, he was transformed into the magic pill. The film is about which Zha although born in the devil, never obey fate and fight with growth (Jiang, 2020). Nezha transforms into three heads and six arms when he saves Chen Tangguan where is his hometown. The sentence “My life is determined by me, not by nature” brings the audience’s emotions to a climax, conveying the correct value of “man can conquer nature” to the audience, telling them that their own destiny is in their own hands, which becoming a classic quotation of the film (Dan, 2021). In the dissemination process, the actor’s line was translated into “I AM THE DESTINY” according to the theme, and the translation was divided into the American version and the Australian version. Among them, “Fuck your life” was translated into “Screw your life” in the Australian version and “Forget your destiny” in the American version(Jin, 2020). As the core theme of the film, “My destiny is determined by me, not by God”, is Nezha’s cry against destiny. Through the growth process of Nezha, the film shows that he has changed his destiny from ignorance to desolation to courage (Wang, 2020). This theme is not only reflected in the protagonist but also in every character: the dragon king who lives at the bottom of the sea knows his own fate, even that of his clan. He knew the consequences of fighting fate, of course, but he still worked for hundreds of years to break out of the dragon’s thousand-year captivity. AoBing knew his mission from birth and had succumbed to his destiny, but the seeds of rebellion had been hidden at the moment when he met Nezha. “Badman” Shen Gongbao is trapped in prejudice, but want to be in the fairy class, get ahead, is not want to “my life I make decisions” (Wang, 2020)? The film won the best screenwriter award of the 35th Hundred Flowers Award for Popular Film and the Best Animation Screenwriter award of the 16th Golden Dragon Award for Chinese Animation (Wikipedia, n.d.), which is enough to show that a film can tell one thing clearly, it is good enough.
The essay details one of the elements of a successful adaptation of a fairy tale: getting one thing right. Of course, the success of adaptation also needs to consider many aspects, such as the screenwriter needs to understand the cultural connotation of the myth expressed, the spirit of the adaptation of the story should meet the needs and aesthetic needs of modern audiences as universal values. Looking at the films adapted from myth literature in recent years, we can find that while inheriting myth literature, they combine the values of modern people and re-interpret classical myth stories with modern people’s understanding. Nevertheless, the essential thing for narrative language is to tell the story, and the most crucial thing for telling the story is not to mix the core ideas, not to take on too much. To explain an idea clearly in a short film time is the simplest, and many screenwriters can not reach it. Maybe this essay can remind people who create more meaningful works.
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Reference:
Dan.Y.C (2021) ‘A Study on the cultural diversity of Chinese film and television from Ne Zha’, Voice & Screen World, no.13, p46-47.
Jiang.J. (2020) ‘Modern Transformation of Domestic Animation Design——Take NE ZHA as Example’, Design, no.20, p132-134.
Jin.L (2020) ‘Film communication from a cross-cultural perspective: A Case study of Nezha’, Public Communication of Science & Technology, no.17, p33-39.
Liang.G.H. (2008) ‘An analysis of the mythological background of the movie Troy’, Movie Literature, no.02, p66-67.
Liu.J.Y (2021) ‘Dijiang’s Tale’, Post-graduate work.
Sun.H.F. (2020) ‘Mythological Explanation and Ｒeflection on the Film Nezha – Birth of the Magic Child’, Journal of ChuXiong Normal University, vol.35, no.1, p34-39.
Sun.Q.D, 2018, Classic of Mountains and Seas, JiLinwenshichubanshe, Jilin
Wang.W. (2020) ‘Nezha’s Demon Child’s Descent into the World: Adaptation and Inheritance of Traditional Fairy Tales for film and television’, Presumably new, no.01, p146-153.
Wikipedia n.d. Available from: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%93%AA%E5%90%92%E4%B9%8B%E9%AD%94%E7%AB%A5%E9%99%8D%E4%B8%96
Zhang.C (2014) ‘On the Transformation and Development of “Myth” in Film’, Journal of Changchun Education Institute, vol.30, no.12, p32-33.
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