Director Ling Shu talked about the source of the animation film "Avanti" in the interview of "Animation Past", because the 30th anniversary of the American Film Studio was to make a gift film, and at that time he happened to have this idea, at the beginning, the director of Tewei Factory did not quite agree with this concept, he thought that the film needed a plot, and the folk legends about Avanti were just a question and answer quotation record, and the main story was not formed.
Recording words into movies, which seems impossible. However, in the reverie and struggle of Teacher Ling Shu and all the staff of the Studio, this puppet animation film "The Story of Avanti" came out, which also confirms the words of the predecessors, and the creation can often survive.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > folk art in animation - even taste</h1>
When asked why he wanted to make this cartoon, Teacher Ling Shu said that because he had this idea at that time, and happened to have this opportunity, he felt that he would try to do it. As for why it is shown in the form of stop-motion animation? He replied so, because Avanti needs "even taste", the so-called "even taste" is that it can simulate humans, but its mechanical design makes it not as flexible and generous as humans, and the puppet itself has the characteristics of "restraint, clumsiness, and solidification", such a strange artistic image can not only attract the audience, but also more in line with the main story of the character of Avanti. To put it simply, Teacher Ling Shu feels that puppet performances are suitable for telling myths or fables.
In fact, I personally agree with this concept, because every time there is a festival in the Chaoshan area, there will be "puppet shows", more accurately, "puppet plays" (puppet plays). According to the elders, this kind of play is not actually for people to see, but is specially performed for God, and from a certain point of view, it is faith-conscious. Regarding this statement, I later found confirmation in the collection of the Guangzhou Library, "The Magical Cloth Bag Play", that Teacher Huang Guangnan believed that "puppet play" was a manifestation of the embodiment of the ancestors' beliefs, and performance needed to have a sense of ceremony.
The reason why Avanti's story chooses to use this special form of expression is actually to consider the convenience and uniqueness of puppetry. The Avanti we know now is an artistic image that has been processed and created by generations of predecessors, and the Avanti mentioned in the animation is a fictional mixture. Puppets do show the frozen beauty of the character better than other art forms, and it is also more convenient to state this Uighur fairy tale.
"The Story of Avanti" is said to be a puppet animation, and more detailed is a puppet animation, even after many years across the screen, the cloth lines on the face can still be clearly seen. It is worth mentioning that the birthplace and identity of Avanti, a folk hero, have different theories in different regions, so Qu Jianfang paid special attention to the arc of his eyebrows and beard and the density of hair when designing, so that the Avanti presented to the audience at the end of the film has both an Arabic flavor and a Central Asian look, and also participates in the Uyghur aesthetic - it looks very serious and seems to be very humorous.
In addition, Avanti's appearance design belongs to the length of the upper body and the shortness of the lower body, and the hands are also thin and thick. In fact, this is mainly influenced by The teacher Ling Shu's own profession, sculpture design believes that the human figure can be developed through the upside-down "deformation" and its solidification beauty and craft beauty, in fact, it also proves that such Avanti is indeed more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people and unique.
The luckiest thing about Avanti's animation is not the opportunity to meet the director of Ling Shu and the anniversary gift film, but the first Chinese puppet film "Emperor's Dream" was born in 1947, in the intervening thirty years, the Studio has had nearly forty puppet animation experience, of which mainly based on Jin Xi's "Divine Pen", "Zhao Shu Tun", "Flame Mountain", "Peacock Princess", "True and False Li Kui" and other works.
When "The Emperor's Dream" first came out, it was not as smooth as expected, and the excessive promotion of opera and the exaggeration of costumes caused the performance to be cumbersome. At the same time, foreign experience in puppet animation production was subsequently introduced to China. On this basis, the puppet animation of the early American film studio was mainly based on learning from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, especially the Czech Republic, until the later stage slowly had experience, and only then did they determine their own cultural characteristics and animation production direction, and "The Story of Avanti" was germinated in the greenhouse planted by the predecessors.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the finalization of animation scripts and images</h1>
As mentioned earlier, Avanti in different regions and cultures has different identities, some people say that he is a shoemaker, some people say that he is a carpenter, some people say that he is a healer... So what kind of person is Avanti in reality?
What we now call "Avanti" is actually not a personal name but a title, it is derived from the Turkic "E fend i", there are two main uses, one is a general reference to men to call "sir", the other refers specifically to the learned "teacher", it can be said that Avanti is the representative of "wisdom", the same expression method such as the Hui Imam.
In Uyghur culture, Avanti was a pro-people sage who avenged injustice for the people, rehabilitated injustice, and dared to ridicule the rulers of feudal society. The production team in positioning Avanti's identity, mainly considering the effect of the story and the distance with the working people, so they blurred Avanti's identity and gave him a feeling of traveling in all directions and making home in the world, in fact, this is the same as the intention of the medicine seller in "Strange Cat", where he is needed, he appears wherever he is needed. The peculiarities of the characters' professions will make the people they can contact more widely, and indirectly make the development of the story reasonable and smooth.
Limited by the length of time, the animation does not tell the folklore of Avanti one by one, but selects a few more intriguing paragraphs, including fourteen sections such as "Rabbit Sending Letters", "Looking for Happiness", and "Planting Gold". It is worth noting that in these fourteen chapters, the story named "Donkey" appears three times. Why are "donkeys" given appearances so frequently?
Unlike the people around him, Avanti is the embodiment of "wisdom, warrior", the embodiment of Allah. The disconnection of identity creates a situation where he can understand the working people at the bottom, but the people do not necessarily understand him. In order to break this incongruity, the anthropomorphization of the donkey makes it easier to create a feeling of "having a confidant and doing things easily", just as the gods in Chinese mythology always have a mount or a subordinate who expresses it for him, and Avanti's "donkey" completes these two attributes.
In addition, it also cleverly reduces the exaggeration of the story, such as the "Treasure Donkey" section mentions that the superior Kazi obtained the capital to marry his wife by squeezing the people in the city, and in order to punish this immoral and selfish official, Avanti stuffed gold coins into the donkey's ass, deliberately creating the rumor that "my family's donkey can pull gold coins", tricking Kazi into spending money to buy his donkey to pull gold coins to marry. Without the artistic image of the donkey, it is certain that such a wonderful fragment would not have come out, and the persuasiveness of Avanti's travels in all directions would have been much lowered.
"Miserly" also appeared a few short stories, and I personally remembered the most in the section where Burke asked Avanti to watch the door, and as a result, he carried the door directly to the market. In fact, the prototype of this paragraph is the "Gate of the Mosque" in the Story of Hogar, Avanti himself lost the door, asked around without success, he directly carried the gate of the mosque, passers-by to the reason, he replied, Allah must know who stole my gate, as long as he handed over the thief, I will return the gate.
In "The Hunt", when Avanti passively let the donkey transport his clothes under the oppression of the prince, he "accidentally" hung the clothes on the tree, and when he was questioned, he cleverly said, "Fortunately, I did not wear the clothes on my body, otherwise it would be people", here is the plot of "Fluke". "Fluke" mentioned that once Avanti saw a white shadow fluttering in the back garden, he took up a bow and arrow and shot it out in a hurry, and then when he ran over to see it, he found that it was just a shirt of his own, and Avanti, who came back, said to his wife, fortunately, it was not in the clothes at the time, or I was shot.
In addition to the transfer of the protagonist of the above jokes, there is also the grafting of the hero subject, such as "Selling Shade" and "Strange Marriage", which is actually a legend of folk heroes fighting wits and courage in other areas of the Uyghur people, which has become the story of Avanti under the needs of the film. For this kind of "subject image grafting", it is actually understandable. Mr. Duan Baolin of Peking University said that every place has its own Avanti, but the Avanti in the animation is a combination, it is the expression carrier of folk art, it is loaded with a lot of ideals and expectations that may not belong to it but belong to the people. In literary creation, this is acceptable.
Not only the "protagonist grafting" appears in "The Story of Avanti", but also the story of a child in "The Wise One Hugh" and the folk experience of Ji Gong in "Living Buddha Ji Gong" who descended demons and exorcised demons. Literature itself has "fictionality", and this way of expression is easily affected by the wind direction of the times and the economic situation of society.
At first, Avanti of folk literature was still a devout believer, such as "The Controversy with the Three Monks", which tells the positive propaganda story of Avanti persuading and leading the monks to convert to Allah, and then the Avanti in the painting books we see later is a hidden wisdom in the folk, who despises the etiquette of feudal society, teases the king Mullah Imam Bhai, and fights for the rights and interests of the people, he is a typical Uighur hero.
In fact, this is also the idealized portrayal of civilian heroes by the Uighur people, which is a cultural symbol of an era. But who was the real Avanti in history? What kind of person was Avanti in the beginning of Xinjiang?
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the structure of Avanti in different regions and at different times</h1>
The myths of Avanti did not only appear in Xinjiang, but existed widely throughout Asia Minor (that is, between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire), including Arab, Turkish, Transcaucasian, Sicily and other religious countries or regions. In the book Concepts of Folk Culture, it is mentioned that the original prototype of the Avanti story is the 10th-century Abbasid Juha, whose full name is Abkhasang. root. Sabit was a sage who read the teachings intensively and presided over the church. Mr. Avanti Juha of this era was still a flawed ordinary believer, and most of the widely circulated folk jokes in the East also originated from his real life portrayal. For example, "Avanti of Turkey" mentions the incident of Avanti smuggling donkeys and taking advantage of small profits, in fact, whether in Turkey or Arabia, it has retained a cultural image of its own country "Avanti".
Compared with some countries, the religious purpose of the "Avanti" in Turkey is more obvious, mainly due to the influence of the domestic political/religious unity at that time. Folk literature has a characteristic of oral narrative oral transmission, and the background of this collectivized story creation also determines its subjectivity. Under the influence of the Silk Roads, Avanti's folktales ran into the cultures of other countries and were eventually localized. In the case of Arab Iran, the Avanti portrayed by these two countries has shortcomings and shortcomings, but stories such as the promotion of religion can rarely be said to be basically absent from picture books.
In addition to being related to the social identity of creators, it is also related to the beneficiary groups of the times. After entering China's Xinjiang region, Avanti was also influenced by the post-1950s Zuo Qing thought, which is why many of the "Avanti Stories" we see now reflect the contradiction between rich peasants and commoners, and literary story animation works are the products of the times and the mainstream/consciousness of the microphone.
Influenced by Zuo Qing's thought, the literary creation of that era paid special attention to combat effectiveness and the expression of the gaps and contradictions of different classes, and Avanti's becoming a national hero was also the driving force of the ideas of the times. The people's idealized tendency towards heroes has moved from unconscious to conscious, that is, active creation.
For now, what is really more worthy of the animation "The Story of Avanti" is its nationality and idol taste, both of which are missing parts of modern animation. From the perspective of modern people, the idea of animation naturally lags behind, but the "humor, humor, and humor" of the Uighurs in the film are still vivid.
The isolated and remote northwest region is frequently disturbed by nature, and this troubled dilemma has given birth to their strong, bitter side. Avanti's joke is more like a long-standing work of art that has been perfected by working people, and his body is tucked with the tastes, ideals and attitudes of the Uighur people. As Marx said, suffering in religion is both a portrayal of life in reality and a protest by the people against reality. For this suffering, the Uighur people chose to bring it in a "humorous and funny" way, Avanti's "humor" is the epitome of the entire national character, and people understand that accepting him is actually the Uighur people's tolerance of themselves.
In fact, almost all tragedies are hidden in jokes, such as Chaplin's clown performance, Lu Xun's Ah Q, and the more comedic characters often contain a deeper "tragic charm". Avanti's joke material itself has a sense of powerlessness and self-encouragement, the people in reality do not dare to rebel against the Kazi scholars, even if they verbally argue these high-ranking officials and nobles, but the misfortune of the people will not exist, so Avanti's joke is more like the Uighur people through this self-deprecating entertainment to achieve spiritual relief, which really understands "humor" (the meaning of jokes).
Where the Avanti joke originates is actually not so important, what is important is the cultural characteristics of the times reflected behind it, the image of folk literature is only the carrier of emotional narration, it represents the transformation of human development from the primitive ecology of competition with nature to the competition with society and people, in a certain way, this is actually the progress of the times.
It is precisely with the help of puppets, which are folk art images, that the animation spreads Uyghur folk literature and is loved by the audience. In fact, this is also the direction we have to learn from the current animation production, showing which era of the spiritual concept is secondary, the original taste, local materials, and the preservation of national uniqueness are the main factors in modern animation to win the hearts and minds of the people, of course, the way of storytelling is also very important.