Thursday, September 12, 2019

One-Off??

The usual meme, presented in the usual way regarding China's hit animated feature:

... Considering the high levels of money and time needed to turn out a good animated film, many fear “Nezha” may be a one-off success story. Investment in Chinese animation saw a boom after 2015’s summer blockbuster “Monkey King: Hero Is Back,” which grossed $134 million, but that wave of interest died down. ...

"Can these Chinese animation creators do it again?"

You could substitute lots of other names: Walt Disney, Blue Sky Animation, Pixar (etc.) and do pretty much the same article at various points of entertainment history.

And the answer is always the same: "it depends."

It depends on if you have a compelling story.

It depends if you have characters audiences want to spend eighty-five minutes with.

It depends if your movie is released on the same weekend as the latest Avengers extravaganza.

Stories grow organically. They can't be paint-by-number affairs. Generally there's a lot of wrong turns and sequences that don't work and characters that don't play before the creators get the project "right". And sometimes it's never right. Even Pixar made a flop dinosaur movie, just like Spielberg's London animation studio Amblimation made a flop dinosaur movie (after making the hit dinosaur movie "Land Before Time".)

So the question of whether a Chinese animation studio can do it again is easily answered. Of COURSE it can do it again. But whether a studio in the middle Kingdom does has the same set of variable attached to it as every other creative entity on the globe.

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