Japanese movies are only popular with cartoons
Yangcheng Evening News reporter Li Li
Last Friday, Japanese director Shiyaguchi Yaguchi's work "Dancing with Me" was screened in mainland China.
The director has directed word-of-mouth works such as "Five Young Boys" and "Survival Family", and is well-known among Chinese movie fans.
However, the comedy musical "Dancing with Me" has received a super cold reception in the Chinese market: According to Maoyan Professional Edition data, the box office for the first three days of the film was only 484,000 yuan; the box office on the first day was 337,000 yuan. The daily box office did not exceed 100,000 yuan.
Although the box office of "Dancing with Me" is affected by various factors such as the niche genre of the film itself, the late introduction, and the low quality of the work, the experience of the film is still quite representative, reflecting the popularity of Japanese live-action films in the mainland in recent years. The current situation in cold weather.
She was praised by Jay Chou, and the audience did not buy it
"Dancing with Me" is written and directed by Yaguchi Shiyasu, and starring includes Miyoshi Ayaka, Hachijo Yu, Nagatani Mae, Miura Takadai and others.
Among them, the 25-year-old Japanese actor, model, and singer Sanji Ayaka participated in "Confession", "Not Married" and "Good morning everyone!"
"" "Spicy Teacher GTO 2014" and other classic Japanese drama daily movies, at the age of 17 with the comedy "Good morning everyone!
"The youngest daughter, Yeyue, won the "Best Newcomer" award at the 67th Japan Daily Film Awards; in the same year, she served as the first heroine for the first time in the youth drama "The Departing Island Song 15th Spring". The actors are old actors such as Kaoru Kobayashi and Shinobu Otake. She won the "Best Newcomer" award at the 35th Yokohama Film Festival.
Sanji Ayaka also appeared in the Japanese drama "Alice in the Land of the Dead", which was broadcast at the end of last year.
It is worth mentioning that Sanji Caihua starred in Jay Chou's MV "Say No Cry" in 2019, in which she played an urban girl who achieved her dream for her lover through hard work.
"Say Good Not to Cry" has made many Chinese audiences remember this new-generation Japanese beauty who is "smooth and beautiful", but this is obviously far from enough to drive a movie's box office.
What's more, "Dancing with Me" is not a youth romance that Sanji Caihua is better at and more acceptable to ordinary audiences. It is a song and dance film with a slightly smaller audience. The plot is even more "brain-open": because once Occasional hypnotized experience, the company white-collar Shizuka Suzuki (Sanji Caihua) got a kind of "weird disease", no matter when and where, as long as she heard the music, she would involuntarily sing and dance.
So, when she made important proposals in the company, she danced in front of all the leaders and colleagues; when she was dating the boy she liked, she jumped over the tables and chairs of the restaurant...
There are a lot of singing and dancing plots in "Dancing with Me", but Sanji Caihua's singing and dancing skills make the audience suspicious.
Among the more than 2,400 short comments on the Douban page, the second most popular comment that was liked by many people read: "Sanji Caihua dances really stiff and has no aesthetic feeling."
Douban high score director, this time fell into the routine
The 53-year-old Japanese director Yaguchi Shiyasu has always played a stable role in the comedy field and has created many high-scoring works.
On Douban, Shiyaguchi Yaguchi scored 8 points in total for five works, among which the highest score was "Where God Goes to the Village" produced in 2014, which scored 8.6 points; in addition, there was also "Swing" with 8.4 points. "Girls" and "Five Boys Poking Water", "Secret Garden" with 8.3 points and "Survival Family" with 8.1 points.
Except for the adaptation of "Which God Goes to the Village" from the original work of the same name, these high-scoring works are all edited and directed by Yaguchi Shiyasu.
The girls who had to play jazz as a rookie ("Swing Girls") because of the meal delivery, and the boys who were attracted by the beautiful coaches to form a men's synchronized swimming team, but the coach returned home to have a child ("Five Flopping Girls) Teenager), one day I woke up to find that the whole city was out of power, so I could only set foot on the family on the road out of the city at a loss ("Survival Family")...same as Suzuki Shizuka who was suddenly hypnotized in "Dancing with Me" , The protagonists in Yaguchi Shiyasu's works are mostly ordinary people who are suddenly thrown out of the original track by accident.
The plot is wild and unconstrained, the narrative style is light and lively and even has a little "bad taste", but the core is warm and upward. This is why many fans are fascinated by Yaguchi Shijing.
Some viewers commented: "Yaguchi Shiyasu's movie has a simple story and a simple spiritual core, but it can really move me."
But when it comes to "Dancing with Me", Yaguchi Shiyasu seems to fall into the trap of "excessive relaxation".
He tried to use the setting of "hypnosis" to ridicule the traditional song and dance film "sing and dance" routine, in order to create a laugh, but because of the first attempt at a song and dance film, he has control over the scheduling and rhythm of the song and dance scene. It seems unfamiliar, which greatly reduces the effect of the film.
Douban fan "hikari" commented: "It's a bit awkward to watch, and the rhythm is really not very good. The plot is also very mediocre. I have been looking for highlights, but I didn't expect it to be old-fashioned from beginning to end." Douban fan "Zhou Moumou" Then the evaluation: "The more the director thinks about anti-routine, the more routine he shoots. The highway part in the next hour is out of the way, and it is completely released. The song and dance design is obviously more and more ineffective." In fact, " "Dancing with Me" has a low box office in Japan. When it was released in 2019, it only received 100 million yen at the box office.
On Douban, more than 5,600 viewers gave "Dancing with Me" an average score of 6.8, which is only higher than 46% of comedy films and 25% of musicals.
The animation IP is the hottest
In addition to the fact that the genre of musicals is niche, Yaguchi Shiyasu himself "failed" and other reasons, the box office cold reception of "Dancing with Me" is more related to the recognition of Japanese movies among ordinary audiences.
The reporter combed through the introduction of Japanese films since 2015 (there was no Japanese film that had a box office of more than 30 million yuan in the Mainland before 2015) and found that up to now, the top 10 in the box office of imported Japanese films are all animated films. The top three are: "Your Name." introduced in 2016.
", the box office was 575 million yuan; "Doraemon: Walk with Me", which was introduced in 2015, had a box office of 529 million yuan; "Spirited Away", which was introduced in 2019, had a box office of 488 million yuan.
In this top 10 list, except for "Your Name."
In addition to the two new works of Makoto Shinkai in "Weather Son", the other works on the list are from IPs that are familiar to Chinese and Japanese audiences, including Hayao Miyazaki's classic movies "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Spirited Away", and the longevity animation IP " Detective Conan, "One Piece", etc., and "Doraemon" has four theatrical versions on the list.
In 2020, affected by the epidemic, there are 9 Japanese movies introduced in mainland China, which is more than half of 2019.
Among the 9 imported films, there are 3 live-action movies and 6 animated movies.
But in the end, there were four cartoons in the top five at the box office. The first was the 125 million yuan "Digimon: The Last Evolution"; in the live-action movie, only "Masked Hotel" starring Kimura Takuya and Nagasawa Masami barely ranked To fourth place.
2019 was the period of the outbreak of imported films in Japan. There were as many as 24 Japanese films released in the mainland that year, but the box office champion was released by an "old movie" "Spirited Away" that was released in Japan as early as 2001. Take down.
In 2018, the box office champion of Japanese imported film "Doraemon: Nobita's Treasure Island" is also an animated cartoon, with a box office of 209 million yuan; this year also introduced the high-scoring masterpiece "Survival Family" by Shiyaguchi. The final box office was only 11.403 million yuan.
It is worth mentioning that the situation of this two-dimensional "crushing" live-action movies is consistent with the Japanese box office performance: taking 2017 as an example, none of the top 10 Japanese domestic movies in the box office of that year was a live-action original movie.