【Review of film and television】
Recently, a batch of sweet pet-themed film and television dramas have been launched together.
Although there are a lot of them, their influence is average.
People can't help but ask, has the sweet pet theme that was once sought after by many audiences "fallen out of favor"?
In recent years, sweet pet-themed film and television works have experienced a process from a market explosion to a gradual decline.
In 2017, "The Concubine of the Two Worlds" used "Sweet Pet" as a label to successfully promote the market. Sweet Pet was upgraded from the traditional "element" of film and television to a vertical subdivision of online audio-visual and film and television dramas.
Since then, a large number of sweet pet themes have emerged every year on major video websites, satellite TV platforms and even prime movies, harvesting the traffic and box office of young audiences.
However, as the number of sweet pet creations increases year by year, the market tends to be saturated.
Looking at the online drama market, sweet pet works have risen from 31 in 2017 to 57 in 2018, and then to 106 in 2019, and they have begun to make great strides.
This creative craze took a turn from 2020 and began to decline, with the number of online titles falling to 39.
Judging from word-of-mouth, the Douban score of a sweet pet work that was strongly promoted on Valentine's Day this year was as low as 2.7 points, making it the first sweet pet work ever to be searched on Weibo because of its "ugly".
Not only did the number decline, the word of mouth overturned, and the ratings and box office also plummeted.
The creative problem of sweet pet themes has a long history.
Some producers lack sufficient respect for the film and television market and audiences. In order to pursue short-term income, sweet pets are regarded as traffic passwords. The investment in creation is insufficient, and the innovation ability and awareness are lacking, resulting in old-fashioned stories and stereotyped plots.
The main plots of many works are supported by the same fixed templates, and it is not uncommon to find love at first sight and happy enemies.
As far as youth campus dramas are concerned, the protagonist line is from the deadly enemy to the one who never leaves, and most of the supporting lines are the setting of the affectionate male second and the vicious female supporting.
The story of going out of the campus and entering the workplace generally starts with the female newcomer knocking down the male leader, and the two finally achieve a positive result after layers of fetters.
Occasionally, some eye-catching novel settings appear, and soon they become boring under the constant repetition of many subsequent works.
The sweet pet works can't escape the problem of the childishness and thinness of the protagonist's character.
The protagonist's characters are repeatedly stubborn girls and playful masters, ordinary scumbags and high-cold school tyrants, ghost-horse girls and affectionate princes, with a single background, a single personality, and some behaviors lack sufficient psychological motivation. A nervous, inexplicable feeling.
There are also some pipeline-replicated scenes, lines, and conflicts. The audience guesses the ending after reading the beginning, and it is difficult not to produce aesthetic fatigue.
Not only that, sweet pet dramas often excessively and deliberately show the sweet state of the hero and heroine getting along, resulting in unreasonable plots and loopholes in logic.
The background of the story of an ancient costume drama is set in the Ming Dynasty when the etiquette was the most strict. The male protagonist hugged him ashore but was not worried about the damage to his reputation.
In another play, the hero's sister easily broke into the heroine's house and released a mouse. The heroine was afraid and used this as an excuse to easily stay at the hero's house.
In addition, the male and female protagonists will touch their mouths when they fall, slamming on the wall for no reason, as well as instant noodle kisses and upside-down kisses. Although the audience watches sweet pet dramas for "sweetness", too much artificial saccharin will only make the poor quality sugar. People are disgusting.
In addition, there are still some sweet pet works that lack profound ideological connotations, and even have the problem of biased value orientation.
In addition to the bloody plots such as dropping out of school, car accidents, abortion, and going abroad, there are also protagonists in the sweet pet film and television works who are in love with their brains, blindly chasing love and have no intention of working and studying.
In the face of relatively younger market subjects, such works will make them have unrealistic or even incorrect cognition of emotional life, and have a profound negative impact on social culture.
The sweet pet routine is no longer a market vane, but is actually closely related to the high-quality development of my country's film and television market.
With policy guarantees, platform support, capital investment, and the emergence of talents, excellent film and television dramas are frequently produced, and the audience's aesthetic ability has risen.
Whether it is "Awakening Age" and "Changjin Lake" with themes of revolutionary history, or "Mountain and Sea Love" and "The World" with realistic themes, or genre creations such as "The Beginning" and "The Silent Truth", there are endless boutiques and innovations everywhere.
In such a market environment, young audiences have gradually formed a high-quality aesthetic pursuit.
Therefore, the "falling out of favor" of sweet pets is not just a matter of the subject matter itself.
The market still needs high-quality sweet pet film and television works, and how to improve the quality of sweet pet themed works is the key to the problem.
High-quality sweet pet film and television works should innovate the plot mode, expand the ideological connotation, and convey positive values.
Taking "The Day I Became You" and "Sto" as examples, these kinds of dramas are popular, mainly because of the themes and plots of swordsmanship, which make people's eyes shine.
And "You Are My Glory", "You Are My Fortress", "Snow Pear Stewed in Rock Sugar", etc., show sincere love, show the passionate dreams and inspirational youth of the hero and heroine, and convey the selfless dedication and dream for the people of the country. Tenacious struggle and other positive values, so as to generate spiritual resonance and emotional resonance with more audiences.
At present, China's film and television market continues to mature, and the audience's aesthetic needs and artistic taste have greatly improved.
The theme of sweet pets should no longer be limited to "routines" and only aim to stimulate the audience's sense of pleasure.
Routine works compensate the audience's desire experience in the form of daydreams, and the creation of high-quality sweet pet themed works should respond to the social reality of the new era, provide insight into social reality, and pay attention to new social and cultural contexts Under the change of people's emotional structure, aesthetic structure, and cultural preference, we can realize people with emotion, move people with emotion, and educate people with emotion.
(Author: Bie Junhua, Lecturer, School of Culture, Creativity and Media, Hangzhou Normal University; Li Ke, Master Student, School of Culture, Creativity and Media, Hangzhou Normal University)