Commercial innovation in China's animation industry: "role-centered system" or progress

In the new business and new media environment, not only China, but also countries with mature industries such as the United States and Japan, the entire animation industry needs new paths. Faced with the user form of online consumption and online residence, the traditional audio-visual industry will inevitably need to refocus and make new choices in its industrial direction.

In the new business and new media environment, not only China, but also countries with mature industries such as the United States and Japan, the entire animation industry needs new paths. Faced with the user form of online consumption and online residence, the traditional audio-visual industry will inevitably need to refocus and make new choices in its industrial direction.

Disney's "Zootopia" is a milestone, but it is more in the field of production and technology. Hollywood's further exploration in this field has left China a few streets behind in the early stage, and this time it continues to leave China a block away. The gap between them does not need to be repeated. However, in the face of the new environment, the backwardness of the content and business ends of the audio-visual industry, as well as the backwardness of content and production levels, does not fully mean that China has no opportunities.

Compared with production, the commercial breakthroughs of the American audio-visual industry are limited. Although the fertile ground (animation) that has been formed over the past 30 years is only intensive at the micro level (such as "Zootopia", which shows outstanding advantages at the content level), it is enough to make people afraid). However, China's audio-visual industry does not need to belittle itself. Based on its role as the center of the Internet and its large market, the speed and depth of commercial innovation may be better than Hollywood.

Hollywood's fertile soil comes from the accumulation of traditional operations, but in the historical cycle of the entire industry's leaping transition, the incubation of new things has resistance from its own mature, huge and solid systemic structure. The opposite of the advantage may be the disadvantage. To start again, ripe fruits need to break ground and sprout again. This process is not easy. If China is better, to put it bluntly, it will be regarded as a "waste" and needs to be prosperous. There is much less structural resistance.

Faced with the domestic situation of strong Internet and weak entertainment, online ticketing has proved the strong impact of China's Internet advantages on the entertainment industry. Recently, it is also an encouraging signal to see animators put forward the concept of "role image centered system". The Internet's involvement in the audio-visual industry is moving towards deep water. Of course, the China market is accustomed to the concept of storytelling, and the "role-image-centered system" cannot get rid of suspicion, but it does touch on the essence of the film and television industry.

They believe that the biggest assets of the film and television industry are characters and images, not stories and plays, and regard characters and images as asset carriers and value exports; at the same time, there are two levels of content around "characters": 1. Focus on content under the blockbuster strategy, and 2. Light operations based on the laws of media liberalization (fragmentation and light content). The purpose is to maintain content output and sound volume and solve the problem of excessively prominent peaks and troughs in the film and television industry.

Therefore, its commercial development idea is:

the front-end "heavy content"(drama series and movies) opens up a situation of large traffic; in the middle, by forming light content and light operations (comics, Short Video, graphic creativity) around the character, the red star effect of the "character" on the user side is maintained.

The backend uses "roles" to accept content traffic, making it the main development target of business.

This concept is innovative, but at the bottom of it, it cannot be completely said that it was original by China. Mature industrial countries in the United States and Japan have always done this in traditional operations in the past. For example, Disney's character creation goes deep into generations, and the classic images of Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto form the humorous elements in the cartoon.

The book "The Comedy Film Handbook" by American screenwriters and scholars Andre Horton and Joannarapf introduces that the generation of jokes in Disney animation also revolves around the characters, creating frustrated, naive, curious and witty images to arouse the audience's recognition of the value behind the character's image.

The role image-centered system is just based on the laws of new media, and the China people themselves have iterated and updated the model. Although similar explorations have been made abroad, no clear theory has been formed. In this regard, the country is slightly better than the United States and Japan. Characters (images) are regarded as the value-depositing container of the play and the best window for communication with users. Therefore, they are the most core process in the production of the entire play, which is the basis of the role-centered theory.

The domestic film and television industry focuses on stories and often ignores characters. The "role image-centered system" means that whether the role can be established or not is the source of whether the story can be established or not. Therefore, the "story" is the result of the "characters", rather than prejudging the story logic and then filling in the "characters" in the story structure, making the characters become pawns serving the story. This is the reason why the roles in the domestic film and television industry are weak and flat, and even the story logic itself often goes wrong.

The role-centered system believes that because stories are valued, characters should be valued more. At the same time, they also creatively proposed the "online survival" of image characters, that is, characters should not only survive in the play, but can also survive independently externally after leaving the play.

The unique user connection characteristics brought about by liberalized communication allow personalized character images to accelerate their precipitation in the audience's memory, providing a good soil for the growth and development of characters in film and television works, and enabling characters to get rid of being used as marketing materials. destiny, thus having their own world view and complete personality. This is the realistic foundation of "role survival".

However, there are more or less explorations in this regard abroad. For example, Social networks promote characters in films. If they form their own positions and are sustainable, it can be regarded as an online survival game for characters, that is, they live alone in the external world without the original play.

On June 10, 2016, the short video released by Zootopia about missing people received 1700 likes, 137 shares, and 69 comments. The video calls on netizens to find the lost protagonists, and also cooperates with the setting that the protagonists are police officers in the Animal City to form an exchange between virtual identities (characters) and users 'real identities, thereby virtually completing the integration of the online world and the offline world. This is the new concept of the world.

However, the external environment relying on domestic Internet social networking and Internet applications is indeed better than that of many countries, providing a very good experimental ground for the implementation of this strategy. This is a unique opportunity and advantage for China.

Editor: yvette