[Explanation] As the National Day film market kicks off, the National Comics movie "Jiang Ziya", which has been stranded for more than half a year in the Spring Festival, is finally released under the attention of the public.
As of 14:00 on October 2, the country's total box office including pre-sales reached 1.2 billion yuan, of which "Jiang Ziya" was temporarily the box office champion with 575 million yuan.
A few days ago, a reporter from China News Agency interviewed Cheng Teng, director of "Jiang Ziya", and interpreted the story behind the film.
[Explanation] The story background of "Jiang Ziya" is set after the Conferred God War. Kunlun disciple Jiang Ziya led the gods to defeat the fox demon, overthrew the brutal Shang Dynasty, and won the victory in the Conferred God War.
At the apex of being named the head of the gods, he was demoted to the mortal world and cast aside by the world because of a short time.
To return to Kunlun, Jiang Ziya embarked on a journey.
In the ending of the movie, Jiang Ziya found himself in the ruins after the war.
Cheng Teng has his own ideas for the character setting in the play.
[Concurrent] Cheng Teng, director of the movie "Jiang Ziya"
I don't want to "magically change" the original work too much, but what I actually like more is to develop more deeply on the basis of the original work.
That happened to be Jiang Ziya, he was actually an old wise man in the original book.
Jiang Ziya, in fact, is a bit like a captain of the Conferred God team, "tool man", he is such a feeling person.
So from my point of view, he actually gave me something on the basis of not destroying the original setting, and gave me some room to play, so we designed him as a cool uncle who is a little tight. Then I have a bit of that kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then I usually pretend to be cool, but in fact, I am a bit non-human, and my survival skills are not too strong.
[Explanation] Different from the image of the old man with white hair and beard in many previous works of Fengshen, the movie has created a version of the image of middle-aged Jiang Ziya.
Cheng Teng explained that the process of Jiang Ziya being demoted to the mortal world is very similar to the scene when a college graduate just entered the society.
He hopes that through Jiang Ziya's story, young people can understand how to firmly believe in themselves and at the same time find a point of harmony with society.
[Concurrent] Cheng Teng, director of the movie "Jiang Ziya"
Because I was thinking about Jiang Ziya, what kind of personality or character trait he assumed.
Because of Jiang Ziya, he should actually say that we call him a "community animal" in the fairy world.
He cultivated himself into a god step by step.
But in our entire movie, we are actually talking about the process of his collapse of faith and then rediscovering himself.
In fact, this is especially like a state of mind when college students have just entered society. I was at least like that at the time, so I actually wanted to be a Jiang Ziya that young people could substitute.
Then I will be a little scared. If he is made an old man, he will have a little (accepting) difficulty for young people.
[Explanation] From the day it was launched, "Jiang Ziya" has been compared with the previous "Nezha".
But in Cheng Teng's view, although they are all from the same producer and with similar themes, the character characteristics of "Jiang Ziya" are destined to make him unique.
[Concurrent] Cheng Teng, director of the movie "Jiang Ziya"
In the past, many humans were better than Nezha or Great Sage, Nezha and Great Sage, because it is a bit like what we call "the son of the heavenly chosen". He has been different from others since he was born, and he has also experienced hardships and tempers. They all experienced him in a state of extremely strong ego personality or self-consciousness.
But Jiang Ziya actually looks like someone we can see in ordinary society, including mortals like ourselves.
He actually established his belief step by step, a belief in the Kunlun system, and then we broke this belief directly through some stories.
Then he experienced that we can also say "middle-age crisis", or this kind of life disorder. In short, after experiencing a very big collapse of faith, he needs to re-establish his faith very slowly. Our whole The movie, in fact, the slogan is called "being your own god".
[Commentary] In order to put Jiang Ziya's story on the screen, Cheng Teng and his team prepared for nearly four years from 2016 to the end of 2019.
Compared with character and plot design, scene design is more difficult.
[Concurrent] Cheng Teng, director of the movie "Jiang Ziya"
It is difficult to design this world. It was at the end of the Shang Dynasty and the beginning of the week. At this point in time, there were basically no unearthed cultural relics, but we actually have no reference materials.
It’s not like the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing, each has a particularly clear element symbol, which is equivalent to that we are starting from scratch, and we want to create something that makes the audience feel very Chinese. This may be ours at that time. A very big difficulty in early stage visual design.
Like Youdu Mountain, it is a forest, but how can you make it Chinese?
Then we went back and forth how to do it, and it looked like a Nordic forest, and then it was changed to a bamboo forest.
But we think bamboo forests are too conventional, so we changed the bamboos to purple bamboos with huge foreground areas. There are many ways in this way.
[Explanation] It was released for two days, leading the box office, and the word-of-mouth divergence. Some people think the effect is amazing, and some people think the plot is too esoteric and not suitable for children to watch.
In this regard, Cheng Teng said frankly that he had never thought of making "Jiang Ziya" an animated film similar to Disney's family carnival, hoping to keep his own ideas and let the audience understand the values that the film wants to convey.
Reporting from Beijing by reporter Fan Siyi and Zhang Xi
Editor in charge: [Wang Kai]