Abstract
<p class="1Body">‘Red Classics’ can be considered as an important subgenre of Chinese cinema animation, which is often adapted from war novels, revolutionary model opera, songs and live-action films<em>. </em>Animated film <em>Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (2011)</em>, as a Red Classics cinema animation production, has provoked heated discussion among Chinese netizens in two largest online film communities and review aggregator sites <em>Douban Movie </em>and <em>Mtime</em>. This paper reveals the Chinese netizens’ reception process of this movie before and after public screening by analysing the relevant brief comments and longer film reviews from the above two websites. Chinese audiences’ expectation on <em>Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy</em> was relatively negative before exhibition in cinema. This can be partly attributed to the emotional discontent over the previous Chinese animation and government intervention on artistic creation. However, there has been a gradual shift in the attitudes of netizens towards this movie after the public exhibition, the reviews have become more objective, rational and positive. This article aims to identify the reasons behind such attitude change by applying reception studies approach, and how and to what extent these elements have affected Chinese netizens’ evaluation process.</p>
Highlights
The so-called ‘Red Classics’ (Hong Se Jing Dian/红色经典 in Chinese) is widely considered as a Post-cultural Revolution terminology with a huge controversy in China
This paper reveals the Chinese netizens’ reception process of this movie before and after public screening by analysing the relevant brief comments and longer film reviews from the above two websites
Longer film review issued from Mtime illustrates a parallel situation. On this site the most popular commentary is ‘TTMS—An Amusing Chinese RCCA Full of Sincerity’ which has attracted 63 replies. It interprets this movie from three aspects: to begin with, the author maintains that characters within TTMS, whether protagonists or antagonists or anthropopathic animals, demonstrate their distinctive personality; following this, as a realistic themes animated film which reflects the history of counterinsurgency, the plot of TTMS is neither tedious or too straightforward but full of recreational factors and action scenes; as a cinema animation adapted from Red Classics works, TTMS shows the integration of three animation genre, which caters to the theme of romanticism and heroism
Summary
The so-called ‘Red Classics’ (Hong Se Jing Dian/红色经典 in Chinese) is widely considered as a Post-cultural Revolution (note 1) terminology with a huge controversy in China. Bendazzi continues, ‘the Shanghai studio was closed in 1965, the filmmakers were sent to educational camps and the studio did not open until 1972’ (Bendazzi, 1994) During this period, artistic and literary works ‘only featured both socialist-minded and professionally competent factors’ (Yang, 1997) could pass the strict censorship by the cultural departments such as the Ministry of Culture and the Revolutionary Committees, majority of productions were known as Red Classics. In spite of abnormal high production capacity of cinema animation and its TV series counterparts (note 3), Chinese animation has started to encounter a series of problems such as ‘low-level quality’ and ‘lack of Chinese stories and a propensity to imitate’ (Lent & Xu, 2010) This paradoxical phenomenon can be attributed into three main reasons: firstly, a number of Chinese animation studios are being engaged in the outsourcing work from its overseas counterparts which are mainly come from Japan or United States. Most of the respondents are dissatisfied with the animated figure’s stiff movement in the joints, the excessive similarity of dubbing for completely different characters made their personality less prominent
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