Wang Bairong
On August 31, Shanghai Fine Arts Film Studio released the news: "Wang Bairong (1942-2018), who has served as animation designer, paper-cut animation design, director, and former deputy director of the Mei film studio, died of illness at the age of 76 on the evening of August 30. ”
Wang Bairong graduated from the Animation Department of Shanghai Film College in 1962, and then worked in Shanghai Fine Arts Film Studio, leaving for Guangzhou in 1991 to become the general manager of Times Animation. He was one of the action designers of The Golden Goose (1976), and has directed the paper-cut films "Mountain Tooth" (1978, co-op), "Hedgehog Back Watermelon" (1979, co-op), "Mr. Nanguo" (1981, co-op), "Donkey Lifting" (1981), "Rat Marrying Daughter" (1983) and "Fire Boy" (1984), etc. During his tenure as deputy director, he gave great support to the project of "Shuk and Beta".
"Mr. Nan Guo"
In terms of the evaluation of the us film studio, Comrade Wang Bairong has always taken root in the animation industry, worked hard during the work of the film studio, dared to innovate, enriched the expression of paper-cut pieces, and made great contributions to the animation works of the United States film, especially the paper-cut art films.
Wang Bairong's animation career can be roughly divided into three stages. As the creator of the Mei film studio, starting from entering the animation industry in 1962 as the original design of "Brainless and Unhappy", Wang Bairong and the older generation of animators in the area wrote the most brilliant chapter of the "Chinese Animation School".
Like ink animation and puppet animation, paper-cut animation is also a major innovation of Chinese animation. Several of Wang Bairong's paper-cut animations combine the folk customs and folk skills of different places to create a unique visual imagination style. Perhaps many people have not noticed that the same paper-cut animation, Wang Bairong has incorporated a different regional style every time.
In the paper-cut animation "Mr. Nanguo", which makes many children remember the idiom "indiscriminate counting", it accurately examines the decorative patterns of the Warring States period and integrates the plain style of ink animation.
"The Mouse Marries the Daughter"
"Lifting the Donkey" uses the paper-cutting art style of Wei County, Hebei Province, with saturated colors and strong contrasts between cold and warm, giving people a strong visual impact. Another paper-cut animation, "Mouse Marrying Girl", adopts the paper-cutting art style of Shandong Gaomi.
Kim Fu-jae, a composer who composed film music for "The Mouse Marries the Girl", still remembers the collective atmosphere when he was creating in the Us Film Studio, and everyone rushed to innovate and hoped to come up with different works. "Mouse Marrying Daughter" is also a very impressive pioneering attempt in Kim's film scoring career. "The music of "Mouse Marrying Girl" is relatively modern in previous art films. The use of the classical tonal system is not a classical tonal system but a general tonal system. The so-called melodic structure is incomplete. Many instrumental playing methods are not conventional, but with pre-made pianos (strings put key rings and other miscellaneous things, in order to change the timbre), the bow of the stringed instrument is not played in the conventional area, etc., and the percussion is also treated as a sound effect. Jin Fuzai still remembers that the cooperation with Wang Bairong was very pleasant, and Wang Bairong was very willing to let go and let various departments try new things.
Hedgehog Back Watermelon
Regarded as the peak of Wang Bairong's art, "Fire Boy" won the 1984 film "Golden Rooster Award" and won the first prize in Group C at the 1985 Hiroshima International Animation Festival in Japan. "Fire Boy" is based on chinese Hani folklore, through the performance of the Hani hero Mingza for the people to make fire, sacrificed his life to become a human. However, the teenager swallowed the fire beads, his eyes gradually blurred, his skin was swallowed up by the flames, paying the price of his life, such a tragic ending also became the "childhood shadow" of many children.
Later, Wang Bairong's artistic creation began to shift to television with the change of the general trend of Chinese animation.
He was once one of the first animation studio animation people to open their eyes to the world after the reform and opening up. During his tenure as the deputy director of Meiying Studio, in order to make China's animation industry go global, Wang Bairong presided over the introduction of animation production processes in line with international standards, and created a precedent for foreign cooperation in Chinese animation films, including "Fox Lena", "Shooting Without Shooting" and other Sino-foreign cooperative animation films.
"Panda Jingjing" is the first large-scale series of animation in China, which has been released to more than 20 countries and regions around the world. It is also the first time that the Chinese series of animation films has successfully entered the world animation commercial market.
In his later years, a large part of Wang Bairong's experience was devoted to animation education.
He went to the northeast with Chang Guangxi, director of "Baolian Lantern", Fan Madi, director of "Black Cat Sheriff", and other veteran animators to reclaim a new cradle for the cultivation of Chinese animation talents at the Jilin Animation Academy.
Wang Nan, a young animation teacher, once followed Wang Bairong to produce a large-scale series of animation films "Ginseng Genie", a 104-episode animation, and Wang Bairong, who was nearly seventy years old at the time, still personally did it himself, as the general director, and even personally helped her change the draft.
"He feels like a combination of Hayao Miyazaki and a giant panda, with a majestic and cute side." In the impression of the students, several old artists from the film studio "are all god-like beings, we can worship", and the most common teaching of these "old immortals" for the younger generation is that they must do China's own animation, "The old gentlemen of that generation are very interested in this." ”
Another Wang Bairong student at the Jilin Animation Academy, Tu Jian, is now an illustrator, he still remembers Wang Bairong's office is full of drawings, once helped Wang Bairong sort out office documents, found that he also retained a lot of the original manuscripts made in the Shanghai Film Factory, Wang Bairong on the "Journey to the West" animation at hand, to introduce them to the difficult environment of animation production that year, "see those pure hand-drawn celluloid films, I know the hardships of the production of their older generation of animators." In Tu Jian's impression, Wang Bairong has always told the students, "If you want to do animation, you must learn to persist and constantly explore, combined with the power of traditional Chinese culture to exert the wisdom of our next generation and produce more touching works." ”