Film Name: 大雨 / The Storm
The Storm, an animated feature film written and directed by Bucephalus, was my most anticipated film this January. Not being able to go see it first thing on Friday gave me some less-than-ideal feedback …… so I tempered my expectations in time.
But even after taking the precaution, I was disappointed with The Storm: a film that, when examined, is good in every way, but not good enough to watch.
The film sells itself well, with excellent art, creativity, concept, dubbing and technical prowess.
Take the characters and forces that appear in the film for example, the names alone are very good, the bottom of the poor father and son do not deserve to have a name, only to express the desire to eat a full stomach nicknames ‘Daguzi’ and ‘steamed buns’, such as the fluid-like Jiao monster rampage, the theatre drums on board the ship! The old captain and Mu Yingzhi are in a battle for existence; the Liu family, representing the human power elite, commands the Black Dragon Army to kill with cruelty or gentleness; and the people of the Night Plume hope to cleanse themselves of all sins by the divine bird of the rainy night. ……
I kept thinking as I watched the film: the names are all so nice and apt, the setting is subtle and pretty enough, and there are all sorts of metaphors, imagery, and musings about the real world that uneducated and incapable people really can’t do.
Not to mention that ‘The Storm’ is a two-dimensional animation, the picture is quite full and comfortable, static and dynamic performance are noteworthy, especially the climax of the closing scene of the long shot, so that the audience to the first-person point of view travelling in the theatre inside and outside of the drum boat, to see all the characters life and death of the state of separation and return to the same state, can be said to be stunning and outstanding!
As a matter of fact, with such an impressive production and base, and so many narrative points that can be deepened, The Storm will definitely be a masterpiece if you pick any one of them to tell it through……. As a result, the film is rather tied up, and wants to talk about something else.
Class criticism, injustice, human greed, anger and struggle, the cycle of history …… There are too many points in the film that can be developed, but they are all compressed and packaged into more than 100 minutes, and all these ‘black and deep cruelty’ topics are set in a small shell of a story about a poor man’s father’s love for his son. I’m not accusing the film of being too bad.
I’m not accusing the film of being bad, but the perspective of the poor and powerless being forced to get involved in a fight between the gods is an excellent choice – except that what Bu Si Fan is really trying to tell us is not this universal warmth, but more like a security cover for the sake of the market, In order to add a layer of protection for the market, and not much effort to shape and fullness, so the film story gives me the feeling that those profound metaphors are full of riddles attributes, walk three steps back two steps, accusation and expression of the effect is greatly reduced, and pushed to the front of the stage of the father and son love and very thin and shallow, and finally left the steamed buns that ‘Daguzi! Daguzi!’ The only thing left in the end is Steamed Bun’s ‘Da Gu Zi, Da Gu Zi, Da Gu Zi’.
The end credits say, ‘May the love you have in your life be able to withstand the world’s heavy rain.’ That’s true, but it doesn’t feel right for The Storm to say it, because it’s all about ‘the rain falls fair and square, and only we (the poor, poor, poor people) get wet.’
Hey, ‘The Storm’ is similar to that ‘Mr. Miao’ three or four years ago, still committing the old problem of high concept, low execution, carrying a gold mountain, but can only use the torn nylon cloth to show to others. …… Thinking about it like this, seven years ago, BuShiFan was able to find a sense of balance between content and form in ‘Dahufa’, which is not an easy thing to do. It was not easy to find a balance between content and form in Dahufa seven years ago.
Films should always be watched as a prerequisite for good looks. According to my temperament, I would have been excited to talk and write about the richness of The Storm, but because I didn’t have a good time watching it, I can only talk about it a few times now.
However, I will still support animators such as BuShiFan who insist on authorial expression and 2D hand-drawing, and I hope that in the future they will stay sharp while also picking up a bit more ground and creating more works that can be accepted and enjoyed by a wide audience.
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