Youth films: In addition to small love, there is also big love
2022-04-27 11:00:59Source: Guangming Daily
The May 4th Youth Day is approaching, and youth films have become popular in the film market. Works such as “Miracle · Stupid Child” and “I Really Hate Long-distance Relationships” have attracted the attention of the audience and aroused the attention of all walks of life in the creation of youth films. In recent years, a new type of youth film, which is different from the previous youth campus love, has risen strongly in the film industry and is particularly eye-catching. Films such as “Miracle · Stupid Child”, “The Sky of Burning Wild Boys”, “My Youth Has You”, and “Five Boys Throwing Water” have greatly expanded the breadth and depth of the theme of “youth”, with a series of distinctive characters. The exploration of youthful images and diversified genres has promoted the aesthetic evolution of domestic youth-themed creations.
Deeply explore the theme of youth with a strong awareness of problems, social responsibility and the spirit of the times
Although the previous youth films and the creations of the past two years are both themes of youth reality, the two have different understandings of youth and interpretation of youth themes. The narrative of the former is generally limited to the theme of “love + campus + friendship”, while the latter extends the lens to a broad realm of reality and develops a richer connotation of youth. For example, in “Dog Thirteen”, the loss of a dog named “Einstein” led to a series of conflicts between the girl Li Wan and her father, stepmother, younger brother, grandma, and grandfather. “Over the Spring” starts from the mental journey of a girl Pepe in finding her identity, and tells a story of an alternative youth from Shenzhen and Hong Kong who wander the streets of Hong Kong and Shenzhen to bring goods on an adventure. It is from these sharp conflicts and exciting adventures that we see the awakening of the youth’s self-consciousness and gender consciousness, and the tenacious growth of youth in the face of adversity.
If the youth shown in “Dog Thirteen” and “Over the Spring” brings people a thought-provoking warning, then “The Sky of the Burning Wild Boy” and “Send You a Little Red Flower” express the ashes Reborn, more inspiring youth. “The Sky of the Burning Wild Boys” intervenes in the spiritual world of “backward” high school students with humanistic care, and strives to describe the process of their desire to succeed and achieve success, and sings a song “Although it is grass, it will not fall against the wind”. ; “Send You a Little Red Flower” uses love stories to show the process of a young cancer patient’s rebirth after baptism of illness and nirvana; “Miracle · Stupid Child” and “Home at One Point” focus on reform and opening up and the youth in the construction of new rural areas Entrepreneurship has written a song of youth entrepreneurship with the spirit of the new era; and “My Sister”, with the help of the issue of patriarchal preference, which has attracted wide attention from the society, endows the connotation of “responsibility and obligation” with the theme of youth, and further expands China’s The performance space of youth films. When developing the theme of youth, these youth films inject a strong awareness of problems, social responsibility and the spirit of the times, reflecting a strong sense of realism, showing a more diverse youth, a broader youth, and a more aggressive youth.
Write an inspiring chapter of struggle with a three-dimensional plump and typical image of young people in the new era
The expansion of youth films in the breadth and depth of youth themes mainly relies on the creator’s three-dimensional shaping of a series of new era youth images with distinct characters and different temperaments. In “The Sky of the Burning Wild Boys”, the young and old dog used a movie time to learn a dance seriously, pure and happy. In “Glitter Girls”, the girls who formed the folk band are either quirky, handsome and taciturn, or pure and cute. They seem weak, but they use sonorous and powerful national music to arouse people’s responsibility to protect and inherit the excellent traditional Chinese culture. and mission. In “Home at One Point”, Wei Jinbei, who was once sunk after repeated entrepreneurial failures, has a dream of e-commerce. In the face of failure, the optimist Peng Xiubing has a dream of express delivery. Li Shaoqun has a coffee dream, these three young characters and their dreams come together, symbolizing the dream of countless young people in the contemporary era who are eager to realize the value of youth. In youth films, there are more and more inspirational figures and strugglers, and they are becoming more and more conspicuous. These figures enrich the gallery of youthful images with their distinctive character traits and full of human charm.
It should be particularly pointed out that while showing the high-spirited and positive spirit of the younger generation, the youth image created by youth films has also made breakthroughs in three-dimensionality, authenticity and typicality. Different from the flat images of pure girls and confused teenagers in previous youth films, the protagonists in youth films in recent years not only show more aspects of their personalities, but also reflect more social phenomena in their family backgrounds and life situations. and real issues. For example, in “My Sister”, An Ran proudly walked out of the dilemma of a family that favored sons over daughters, and became a butterfly in the conflict between self-pursuit and family responsibilities; and Wei Yi, a cancer patient in “A Little Red Flower for You” With the help of family members and loved ones, she gradually got out of the psychological haze caused by the disease. These images full of strong positive energy write inspiring chapters of struggle with blood, adding a bright color to the aesthetic evolution of youth films.
Explore the fusion of multiple aesthetic elements and styles to inject innovative vitality into the development of themes
The fusion and innovation of multiple aesthetic elements and styles is another important change in youth films in recent years. This is mainly reflected in two dimensions. First, the creators broke the strict barriers between traditional types, and explored various new models such as “youth + singing and dancing” with innovative ideas. For example, “Your Wedding” and “I Want Us to Be Together” released last year tell love stories in youth themes. Different from the conventional plots of young scumbags and villains hurting each other in the past, the protagonists in these two films work hard to be worthy of their sparkling lover and want to become a better version of themselves. This kind of love is the mutual progress of mutual appreciation and expresses positive values. Going further in terms of genre fusion are “Home at One Point” and “Sky of Burning Wild Boys”. The former combines elements of youth, suspense, comedy, science fiction and other genres. In the plot of delivering the courier, the creator used thriller shooting techniques, comedy performance style, and suspenseful music to create a strong sense of absurdity. At the same time, the film uses jump cuts and fast editing techniques, and cooperates with the humorous entrepreneurial process of the entrepreneurial trio, which greatly increases the comedy effect of the work. “The Sky of the Burning Wild Boys” boldly explores the integration and innovation of youth, singing and dancing, comedy, love and other types of elements, especially the exploration of singing and dancing elements, which opens up a new imagination for the diversified development of domestic youth films.
Second, in recent years, youth films have also taken the lead in the exploitation and application of youth aesthetic elements. Works such as “Glitter Girl” and “Take My Brother Away” try to incorporate two-dimensional elements. The so-called two-dimensional world is a concept opposite to the three-dimensional real world. Animation, comics, and video games are the main elements that constitute the two-dimensional world, and they are also the main channels for people to enter the two-dimensional world. They have a large and stable group of young fans. The organic integration of two-dimensional elements into the creation of youth films just fits the preferences of the youth group. Taking “Glitter Girl” as an example, the work adds visual spectacles such as comic exhibitions, role-playing, and figures, and through slightly exaggerated methods, further amplifies the dramatic contradictions and character conflicts, so that young audiences can gain the benefits of the two-dimensional life scene. Identity recognition, aesthetic pleasure. There are also works ingeniously implanted with novel theatrical concepts such as “parallel time and space” and “travel”. For example, in “Send You a Little Red Flower”, the white salt lake imagined by the protagonist Wei Yihang appears many times. This parallel space transcends material, time and space, expresses people’s good hopes for ordinary life, and conveys the concept of “no matter how hard the day is, you have overcome it”. The youth film “Take My Brother Away” uses the concepts of time travel and time travel to realize the fantasy setting of “My brother becomes her brother”, strengthens the dramatic conflict of characters, and has a strong emotional impact.
Active, diverse, rich, and passionate, this is the intuitive feeling that youth films have brought to the audience in recent years, and it is also the best look of youth. The creators promote the diversified aesthetic transformation of youth films through theme exploration, character shaping, and genre fusion, so that youth films present a more three-dimensional appearance, and also allow the audience to have a deeper understanding of youth, society and life.
(This article is a phased achievement of the National Social Science Fund Art Project “Research on Unrighteous Behaviors in Digital Art and Its Confrontation Mechanism”. The author Ma Lixin is a professor and doctoral supervisor of Shandong Normal University, and Yang Liping is a master student of Shandong Normal University)