One day, you inadvertently saw blocks of brick carvings, and you were suddenly attracted by the vividly carved water pine, birds and beasts, and the warriors who looked back at each other with swords. At this moment of time, will there be a thought that suddenly burst into your mind: if all of this can be moved?
Huang Yong, associate dean of the Animation School of Beijing Film Academy, is one of the animators deeply influenced by the history of creation and development of the Chinese Animation School. He often recalls classic domestic cartoons that he had watched as a child, such as “Nezha Naohai”, “Tadpole Finding Mom” and “Nine-color Deer”. These classic domestic cartoons have influenced several generations of Chinese animation industry A monument to the development of Chinese animation. He is often annoyed that the Chinese anime, excluding manpower, material resources, and time cost, has already shown a shaky loneliness after just a few decades.
As a successor, Huang Yong consciously carried forward the responsibility of China Everbright Animation, and was deeply worried about its prospects. Because people who can create hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in just over ten minutes, like the older generation of animators, are already rare. Moreover, ink, paper-cutting, shadow puppets, murals and other vectors have been tried by others. It’s too difficult.
Fortunately, in the years of perseverance, Huang Yong also has several young people like him who want to carry out Chinese animation to the end. So, three years ago, there was a scene similar to the narrative at the beginning. After an instant flash of magical light, Huang Yong and his team decided to take a different approach and do what the predecessors had never done-brick carving anime.
At the beginning, Huang Yong and his team tried to use ordinary bricks, and found that the carvings could not be delicate and realistic at all, let alone let the picture be flexible. After several attempts, they discovered that ancient blue bricks were the materials they needed. However, there are very few blue bricks of this kind, and it is simply whimsical to want to use them to complete hundreds of thousands of brick carvings. In desperation, they thought of their own antique firing.
To this end, Huang Yong and his team played “muddy”. They used fine sand soil, white sea sand, gray oil sludge and other materials to change the formula again and again, and tried to solidify again and again. Finally, they found the closest formula to the texture of the blue brick, and they also made the material plastic and smooth. . Next, Huang Yong and his team went to Wuyuan, Jiangxi, to experience the carving art in the Hui-style architecture on the spot, and found the inspiration of brick carving technology from there. After that, Huang Yong and his team decided to use brick carving to tell “The Story of the Happiness Chamber”.
With the script, Huang Yong and his team finally began to create. In order to ensure the original taste, they first used a computer to create a template, and then carved on the blue brick, or squeezed each frame of material into shapes. The blossoming of flowers, the surging of a spring, the cry of a bird, the raising of a person’s hand, all condensed their mental strength. In the case of no accidents and no re-start, only a few frames can be taken in a day, but Huang Yong and his team resolutely guarded the hardship and loneliness, and silently worked hard.
In order to make the work more Chinese, Huang Yong and his team also made various attempts: using high doors and windows in ancient buildings to make delicate transitions, using traditional techniques to apply gold to lacquer ware to break the blue brick. The audience’s single sense, showing the main importance of the nine-layer sculpture with light and shadow, and the first introduction of shift-axis photography to set the background … It
can be said that every advance of “The Story of the Happiness” condenses the tears and sweat of team members. The cost of manpower, time, and financial resources far exceeded expectations, but no matter how difficult it was, Huang Yong and his team insisted on it. They had a belief: to regain the taste of cartoons as a child and let the Chinese animation king return.
The sincerity of Huang Yong and his team also greeted with the end of the production of The Story of the Happiness. In August 2018, the short 30-second movie trailer surprised countless people, and triggered more than 20,000 Weibo reposts within a few days. Everyone who has seen it said: This is the best look of Chinese animation in memory!
The animation, which lasted only six minutes and a half minutes, took three years and used tens of thousands of blue bricks and consumed a huge amount of financial resources, because Huang Yong and his team possessed the ingenuity of recreating Chinese animation.
