Luis Martínez Malaga

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Updated Friday, March 1, 2024-2:30 p.m.

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Can a dragon speak English, Spanish and Chinese, fly, breathe fire (at least), survive two confinements, pass the test of Chinese censorship, overcome the incompatibilities of two ways of seeing the world and, finally, walk around? the red carpet of the Malaga Festival without dying or, at least, losing all the scales?

For now, the privilege of magical beings perhaps, maybe.

Dragonkeeper

is proof of this;

In addition to being the result of the most eventful Chinese-Spanish co-production in history (in fact, it is also the least. There is no more).

The animated film by

the Spanish Salvador Simó and the Chinese Li Jianping

opens the contest in question this Friday and does so, in fact, after a long work process of more than six years, a change of director, another of producer, several global confinements with two teams separated by more than 9,565 kilometers (those that run in a straight line between Malaga and Beijing), innumerable disagreements due to work systems, mentalities and bureaucracies, and... two hard-boiled eggs.

"

It has been very complicated

. I would be lying if I said it was easy, but, in the end, the result is there," says Simó with the same tone and expression of relief as (almost) a resurrected person.

The former director of '

Buñuel in the Turtles' Labyrinth

' came to the project as director back in 2018 to replace a perhaps exhausted Ignacio Ferreras (previously responsible for '

Wrinkles

').

Until then, Simó had worked on the draconian project as a "character developer."

Not in vain, the face and gesture of the dragon Long Danzi (that's his name) were his.

His work, it is understood.

Next to him,

producer Larry Levene

takes the edge off the matter.

"From the beginning we were clear that the union of Spanish creativity and Chinese punctuality could be unbeatable," comments a man who began his relationship with the Asian giant back in the mid-90s and who joined '

Dragonkeeper'

as a slogan. ' in 2016. Then, he shared responsibilities with producer Manuel Cristóbal who, like Ferreras, ended up leaving.

One for health reasons, Ferreras, and another for political reasons (she joined the candidacy, she also fell ill first and then died, of Ciudadanos).

To begin with, two changes.

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Originally, it was about bringing Carole Wilkinson

's novels

of the same title to the screen in 3-D animation, featuring the girl Ping, protector of the last dragon egg on the face of the Earth, longed for by good and evil (especially, by the evil ones) due to its miraculous properties.

"I found a project closer to independent animation and my intention was always to take it to the realm of popular adventure cinema. Animation currently tends to be a succession of 'gags' without further ado and we wanted to avoid that. The idea was to bring the film closer to references from the 80s like '

The Goonies'

", explains Simó.

In the ideology of the project, as its producer explains, the animation division of China Film Group (the state production company) was in charge of the design of characters, the modeling of scenarios that had to neatly comply with historical requirements close to obsession. (real period shots were used) and everything related to effects, lighting, composition and so-called 'rendering'.

The Spanish team, for its part, would be in charge of the so-called 'layout' (that is, the design and visual composition process), the cinematography and the animation in the genuine sense.

That is to say, and to sum up a lot, the most creative part, so to speak, here;

the most technical, there.

In total, almost 600 people employed and a budget of

25 million

euros (

12,750,000 euros

on one side and the same on the other).

It is not the most expensive in the history of Spanish animation (there are still the insurmountable 55 million for '

Planet 51',

by Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad and Marcos Martínez), but it is the one that accumulates the most headaches.

Ping is the main character of 'Dragonkeeper'.

"Experience tells me that to do business with China everything has to be extremely clear and extremely simple to understand, explain and write. You have to be able to summarize the principles of the agreement on a napkin. And here it all came down to the fact that the Chinese market It was for China; Europe and the rest of the world that is not the United States, for Spain, and the United States, at 50%. The key is 50%. The balance point of all production processes had to be paid for in parts equals", reasons Levene didactically.

Simó does not correct him (in fact, he agrees), but he snorts on the other end of the phone.

"We have been encountering all kinds of difficulties that are not evenly distributed. At one point, the team there (that is the town north of Beijing where the Asian studies are based) was without direction and we had to go to organize everything. It was a clash of customs and ways that began to be noticed from the very beginning," he says, takes a second and continues: "First of all,

the Chinese mentality does not understand that there can be anything implicit in the script.

Everything has to be explained because it is considered that, otherwise, the public will not understand it. It is not that they belittle the viewer, but almost. From the outset, we had to fight a lot not to end up making a four-hour documentary without head or tail. which is what they seemed to intend."

He said "from the start."

And on the way out?

"The mechanics of work itself," continues Simó, "were something indecipherable. It was difficult for us to understand that there, when something is not understood, there is no such thing as our habit of raising our hand and asking or asking for explanations. No, when something was not understood, "The answer was that it couldn't be done. Until we realized that, a lot of time was wasted."

But, nevertheless, the most serious thing was yet to come.

Against the usual mechanics of long animation processes that require overlapping cycles so that, instead of waiting for a finished phase to begin the next, tasks are staggered, the Chinese production demanded a complete end. of one level of production to, so to speak, start the next one.

"This meant that the last phase, which normally would have taken three years,

had to be completed in a single year with terrible stress,"

concludes Simó.

And then came the censorship.

Censorship in China is serious and covers every stage of a film from the script to the final result.

"Besides," Levene points out, "the censors are cultured people who know about cinema."

First of all, Ping, the main girl, could not be a slave as she appears in the original book.

And because?

"Well, because apparently slavery has never existed in China. It is China's thing that history is rewritten there every day," comments the producer and already experienced sinologist.

"I couldn't help but laugh when they told us," says Simó next to him.

And Ping became a maid.

But the most serious issue, however colorful, was the very bad bad guy, which there is.

What would it look like?

"The initial one was described as a

Western stereotype of a bad Chinese.

That is, he didn't have to look like Fumanchú. So we had to change his mustache for a beard. To top it off, they suggested that he have a Western appearance, but we didn't go through that. "Levene recalls.

Anything else?

"Much more," adds Simó.

"They did not want dragons to fly because, according to them, Chinese dragons have never lifted their legs off the ground. We had to recover Chinese documents in which reference was made to flying dragons. On the other hand, one of the characteristics of dragons Wilkinson's story is that they become what they want. That definitely couldn't be and fell out of the script," concludes the director.

And the relationship between directors?

"Well, it's better not to talk about this," Simó responds and, as he plays, we don't talk.

Everything is to respect what was implicit from before.

Either way, the movie is there.

And she is alive.

And fly.

"We must not forget that at one point in 2020, with the harsh confinements that China experienced, we feared for it in the same way that we all feared for the future of almost everything," the producer points out in order not to lose perspective. of what is truly serious.

He really likes that almost tactile character of a 3-D in which the inking strokes can be seen so far from the shiny surface near the plastic that ruins a good part of three-dimensional productions.

He shines the character of Ping as close, human and so much to the taste of a director with taste like Simó.

He confuses, however, the ostentatiousness of some effects that, in the last section of the film, seem more noisy than achieved.

But

'Dragonkeeper'

, which is what he tells, flies and does it - far from his long and already forgotten period in which he lived completely '

lost in translation

' - in English, Spanish, Chinese and even in Malaga.