How did the Japanese animation industry develop?

As long as we pay a little attention, we have to admit that Japanese cartoons have invaded our lives. Not to mention the children's favorite Slam Dunk and Peter F, even the popular Japanese dramas Tokyo Love Story and Meteor Garden were first born and became popular in the form of comics or games. And 200 1, a movie generated by pure computer animation, is a series of games of a famous brand. Here we juxtapose comics, video games and comics because in Japan, they are usually regarded as an economic whole: AGC (animation, games, comics).

Are there any domestic cartoons that impressed you in the last ten years? Domestic animation producers who still live on the basis of capital do try to operate in a market-oriented way. They learn from foreign experience and surpass most international counterparts in number. Even some animation agencies said in an interview that their strength "has surpassed Disney", but what is the quality of the animation produced? Take the blue cat Naughty 3000 Q, which is known as "the world's longest animation" and won the China Best Animation Award for many times, as an example: a blue cat with simple lines and black and white squares stands in the center of the picture, carrying out boring science education with a straight face. Compared with the Shanghai Animation Film Studio's havoc in 196 1, and even the Princess of Iron Fan in 1926, it is not too much to use the word "back to the starting point" to describe the situation of animation in China today. If the animation in earlier years still has a strong flavor of China traditional culture in terms of form and content, the most "localized" point of today's Naughty Blue Cat 3000 Question is that it will actively conduct prize-winning telephone quiz like other domestic TV programs.

Violence and puppy love will definitely not appear in domestic cartoons. There is usually a condemnation in China's comments on Japanese cartoons. While China people were making Blue Cat, Miyazaki Hayao, a leading figure in Japanese animation, made Spirited Away with the theme of educating young people to be hardworking and kind, and won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2002. This film not only earned $300 million in the Japanese market, but also entered Hollywood's lair and made more than $200 million in the North American market.

This is just the tip of the iceberg: in 200 1 year, the market size of Japanese animation industry reached186 billion yen (about130 billion RMB), while the total assets of Japanese animation were 600 trillion yen. According to the contribution of various industries to GDP, the animation industry can be listed as one of the six pillar industries with the largest output value in Japan. This is really enviable. After all, in the next few years after China's entry into the WTO, the growth of gray industry and service industry will be the new focus of China's economy, just as the animation industry is at the intersection of the two.

If you go back 40 years, you will find that China and Japan have the same starting point in the animation industry. 1963

In 2006, a black-and-white cartoon named Iron Arm Atom was released on Fuji TV, which became the beginning of Japanese animation industry. Later it was called Astro Boy in China. 196 1 year, China animation industry also produced a landmark work: Make a scene in Heaven. This beautifully produced film not only won the audience in China. L, and won many international awards, which almost represented the highest level of international animation production outside Disney at that time.

What caused the gap between the two? Is there any chance for our animation industry in the future?

Compared with the American animation industry, which has a strong cultural color and is aggressive on a global scale based on high-quality products, Japan has taken a road of low-cost and high-market development, and the cultural background behind it is the conflict and integration of Chinese and Western cultures. Look at the history and mechanism of AGC industry in Japan from the beginning. If this isn't us,

The best route we can take is at least one from which we can learn a lot.

This cartoon "Xiuluo Field"

Although the Japanese animation industry may never produce 3000 super novels like Blue Cat, as an industry, the vitality of Japanese animation far exceeds that of its domestic counterparts. According to relevant statistics, in June 2002, Japan showed 62 cartoons simultaneously every week, and this number increased to 80 in August of that year. At the peak of 165438+ 10, there was a competition for100 cartoons. Television stations take cartoons as their competitors, and even television stations that only broadcast cartoons have appeared. However, if we think that every cartoon can be transformed into greater value through cartoons, video games, toys, videos, DVDs and even movies and TV series in the upstream and downstream of the value chain, then it is not an exaggeration to understand a successful cartoon as a gold mine.

However, the process of gold panning makes people deeply realize the word "cruelty". Three Weeks of Japanese Juvenile Comics —— Random Talk

Youth Magazine by Tan She, Youth Sunday by Primary School and Youth Jump by Tan She vividly show the cruelty of competition in the past decades.

From 65438 to 0959, Junior Magazine and Junior Sunday were founded successively. At that time, Japan was similar to China today. Cartoon industry is a new industry, but the animation industry has not been transformed. People who join the animation industry are also a group of marginalized people. At that time, young people who lived together in an apartment called Chang panzhuang formed a small group. Fujiko Fujio, who wrote Astro Boy and Robot Cat, are the leaders of this group, and their works quickly established the market leading position of Youth Sunday.

In order to improve this situation, we must establish an "editing core". 0 system ",and it has been used for decades: editing is no longer a job of recruiting painters and editing magazines, but also putting the greatest energy into suffocation." The editor is equivalent to the producer of the film, and the shape and direction of the work are determined by the editor. If necessary, hire a screenwriter to write the script, and then find a cartoonist with the right style to write it. This kind of group work no longer requires everyone to be all-rounder, which reduces the requirements for painters.

In order to be close to the market, Youth Magazine made full use of the prize inviter to investigate the blindness of a country in abandoning chips.

There are more than 70 questions on the list: "What kind of cartoons do you like to read?" "If it is a work of a certain theme, what style of painting do you want to see?" "Do you want to see the same theme continue, or do you want to keep changing the theme every week?" ..... Under the guidance of this carpet bombing problem, magazines can soon launch corresponding cartoons, or completely change the comic style being serialized-this can be regarded as the embryonic form of industrial comics.

1968 how did the "youth jump" born survive? The answer is closer to the market. After market research, the theme of "Youth Leap" is "hard work, friendship and victory", and all the cartoons serialized by it must fully embody or even exaggerate these three themes. In addition, unlike Youth Sunday, which only uses the works of famous artists, and Youth Magazine, which only uses painters as tools on the assembly line, Youth Jump gives new people plenty of space. As long as the works are recognized by readers, anyone can immediately become the protagonist of the publication.

The most extreme way of "Youth Jump" is to conduct a reader survey once a week, so that readers can rank the comics, and the comics at the bottom of the rankings for three consecutive weeks will be immediately stopped. Therefore, some people call the magazine under this editing system "Xiuluo Field". Although ruthless, it does ensure the quality of the magazine, so that a large number of fine products are precipitated in more than 20 cartoons serialized in each issue.

Japan's comic book industry has maintained a high growth for 30 years: in the early 1990s, Young Jumper once sold 6.53 million copies a week, while the other two magazines sold about 5 million copies. If each magazine includes tax and yen, the business tax paid by the three magazines will be more than one billion yen per week. Although Japan's economy has declined in recent years, the styles of the three companies have gradually merged and the competition has become more intense.

Although it occupies a dominant position in the Japanese comic industry, the three major weekly magazines are only a part of the market. The whole comic market is divided by weekly, monthly and quarterly magazines of Ubuntu comics, according to the subdivision of children, teenagers, girls and teenagers. Only from this perspective, we can see that its market is highly mature.

Why can the Japanese comic book market reach such maturity in a few decades? In addition to completely following the laws of the market, its historical foundation is also worthy of our pen and ink writing: after the end of World War II, Japan, the defeated country, fell into a trough in economy and culture, and the rule of the United States led to a strong impact on western culture. However, Japan did not become an accessory of colonial culture, and sought a breakthrough because of the impact of old and new concepts and systems. Yukio Mishima and Kurosawa, who appeared in this period, were the products of the integration of Chinese and western cultures.

Because people's life is generally boring, a small picture book quietly circulating in the market of daily necessities exchange has become mass entertainment. Because it is mostly covered with red paper, it is commonly known as the "little red book" and is the earliest comic book. Its main content is an inspiring but humorous fictional story. This seemingly vulgar work has become chicken soup for many Japanese people, and it has also made many young people with dreams of saving the country embark on the road of painters.

One of the most talented and influential young people is called "family pest control". If there is anything that China's animation industry needs most, it may be a standard bearer who treats insects at home.

"100 million people treat insects with their hands first."

If history is often remembered because of legends, then the history of Japanese animation industry can start from this moment.

Here we go.-One

1951may, Disney's cartoon bambi was shown in a theater called onzo in Tokyo, with 7 performances a day. On the first day of the screening, an eccentric audience came. A man bought seven tickets and sat in the cinema all day. The next day, he appeared in the cinema again and bought seven more tickets. The 20-year-old man with thick glasses sat in a high position for two weeks and watched Bambi's 80 games. He analyzed each scene like a research: why this one made people laugh, and how the other one moved the audience ... In the second screening, he watched another 50 scenes.

He is an expert in pest control, and his major is medicine. At the age of 33, he got a doctor's degree in medicine. But when I was a child, I was shocked by Disney Animation and Princess China, and decided to make it my lifelong career. /kloc-started drawing cartoons at the age of 0/8. 1947, a little red book named "New Treasure Island" was sold in Japan for 40 hours, which was his work when he was 19 years old.

At that time, the definition of comics, except for single picture and four squares, was the same concept as China's picture book, picture

The film is accompanied by narration, and the relationship between painting and painting depends on words. But artists try to make film-making techniques attract comics.

(Just like a multi-angle shooting of a scene) The distribution of pictures is determined by the method of split mirror, and pictures of different sizes are juxtaposed, resulting in the effect of similar lens passing.

He started the Japanese sports industry. 196 1 when he set up "Bug animation studio", Japanese animation.

The output can't compare with Disney at all. It takes about three years to write a long article. Handicraft artists broke the principle of keeping mouth shape consistent with speech in Disney animation system, and tried to use the mode of blinking three times and moving three frames, which greatly reduced the cost and ensured the animation production cycle of 30 minutes in a week. He is betting on the future of comics in TV media. These two measures have created a unique road for the future development of Japanese animation industry.

Hand-home life painting, with 400 volumes 150000 pages, is the most fruitful cartoonist. At the busiest time, he wrote 13 works at the same time. He slept less than 4 hours every day and painted for three days and three nights in a row. His last words before he died were "Give me a pencil". 1 The Japanese call him "the home of 100 million people to control insects", which means that all Japanese are his comic readers, and he is worthy of the reputation of "the father of animation" in Japan.

But the biggest contribution of "Procedures" to the animation industry is that it constantly broadens the dimension and depth of animation. He and other cartoonists of his time, such as Fujio Fujio and Matsumoto Zero Earth, never take violence and pornography as their selling points, but design sci-fi, history, sports, emotions and other topics extensively based on personal thinking about life, society and the future.

From 65438 to 0956, many parents in Japan were greatly dissatisfied with the cartoon flooding the children's book market, thinking that it affected students' grades, and a "cartoon expulsion movement" took place, and even primary schools burned cartoons. In this regard, "home pest control" issued a fierce response: "children's low reading ability is not the fault of the cartoon trend ... Nowadays, children's literature works describe some daily life in a gentle way. For children, they are tired of these rigid things ... I don't think there is such a thing as a dream in children's literature now ... Today's children just lack the fantasy of leisurely stretching and unlimited dreams. That's why I am here. -this gauntlet, how suitable for today's animation market in China!

Killing insects by hand represents the efforts and sincerity of the animation industry, and also sets up a basic style for comics: he himself is the originator of juvenile comics and juvenile comics, which were later separated. The former emphasizes the endless pursuit of dreams, friendship and victory, while the latter emphasizes the pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty. Although there are many works with vulgar forms and artificial contents under the pressure of the market, the artist's spirit still guides the work of most cartoonists until today.

"Pikachu Miracle" under the Industrial Chain

If we look back on the past 10 years, the biggest miracle of Japanese animation industry belongs to a golden mouse pickup truck.

Hill ". This name is also friendly to children in Japanese overseas markets such as China and the United States. According to rough statistics, the economic scale of this game, which has developed into an animated cartoon, is close to 1 trillion yen. It can be said that every link of the entire animation market industry chain in Japan has benefited from this. Through it, we can have a little taste of how the AGC industry chain in Japan is linked. Nintendo had a preliminary idea about the game "Petelf" as early as April 1989. This game was developed based on the new game Boy and has the function of online battle, but it was officially launched seven years later. If a player defeats or captures a pet elf in the game, he can collect it as an illustration, and the day of the game is when all the illustrations are collected. Because each pet elf has different looks and characteristics, it still has a certain growth, which makes players feel quite fulfilled.

But the most successful part of this game is its online battle function: two pet elf players can fight or exchange information. This essentially changed the lack of communication in the past and made it a communication system for primary school students.

The success of "Petelf" is more important because Nintendo properly mobilized the entire animation industry chain to gain the strength of Taiwan Province, making the concept of "Petelf" well known to everyone.

When exploring the market, Nintendo has already launched a powerful propaganda offensive in the most influential children's comic magazine (GoroGo Conlid}). Three months after the launch of the game, that is, in the May issue of 1996, Nintendo launched the advertisement of "No.15 1, the pet elf's dream', 20 gifts, which will never be found", and the response was enthusiastic. Two months later, Yi borrowed a new handheld game machine and started another round of public relations. In June of 5438+00, when the peripheral products of the game (toys, stationery and daily necessities) began to be sold, GoroGoro Comid had already started the related comic series.

Later, the animation on TV added fuel to the fire, which not only made gamers feel close.

Gee, it's also the fantasy of children's players. Moreover, the excellent production of this series of animations is also the reason to attract the audience: the extremely fast lens language may not be suitable for adults, but it is not pleasant for young viewers.

With such a market foundation, Nintendo can be said to have no mercy on market development. At first, the game was divided into two cards, red and green. Because pet elves are different, you must buy two cards to find all the cards of 150. At the beginning of 1997, Nintendo launched a cyan game card, which only changed the game pattern and the market positioning and appearance probability of pet elves, and immediately sold nearly 620,000 sets. Later, a game card specially designed for color handheld devices was introduced. The biggest feature of this card is that Pikachu will always follow the player's actions and have different expressions in different idle States. 1998 sales exceeded one million, and there are more than 250 kinds of pet elves in the game. Nowadays, the pet elves have surpassed the best-selling games in history, such as the brave fighting the dragon and Super Mary.

Similarly, Nintendo has also opened up the American market. American children also agree with this "training and fighting" model. 1When the cartoon "Peter F" was released in June, 1999, it broke the historical record of American TV cartoons in one fell swoop. By July, more than 150 TV stations in the United States had broadcast this animation, and the scene was spectacular. When the film "Pet" was released in N month, it earned100000 dollars a day, setting a new box office record for cartoons in American film history.

China Market: Outbreak or Death?

Today, the animation market in China has reached a mature stage, but it is not enough to break out. All kinds of Japanese are diffuse

The baptism of painting and animation (mainly piracy) has made this market accept all kinds of mature products. Have data

According to the report, only in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou,10.4 ~ 0.3 billion yuan of people in the age group spend more on animation every year.

The only-child group, RMB, is precisely the one who lacks "dream", "friendship" and "hard work" education. But at present, China lacks artists like "hands-on insect control", and there is no mature animation market operation mechanism, let alone a complete industrial chain.

Although the pace is slow, the domestic animation industry has begun to understand the power of the market hand. Once too much is produced.

In recent years, Shanghai Animation Film Studio, which focuses on fine animation, has also begun to transform, adjusting its audience from young to teenagers around 14 years old, and testing the water market with products with American and Japanese characteristics. This year, they painstakingly managed a biography of heroes in Sui and Tang Dynasties. CCTV is making an animation called Dreamer, which is adapted from Yao Feila's famous works in China. However, Hunan Chensan Company, which is still making "Blue Cat Naughty 3000 Questions", is trying to raise HK$ 300 million from financial tycoons such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to expand its production strength.

However, if we look at the current input-output situation, we will know that the current market is a 20-minute domestic cartoon, and the production cost is as high as 300,000 yuan. Only by broadcasting it on TV can we earn the copyright of 100 yuan. Even the lotus lamp, which is regarded as a new classic, earns only 20% of the investment cost. In Shikoku, it is said that among nearly 100 cartoonists, only a few can make a living by creating, and most people earn 100 yuan by painting a page.

What is more backward is not money. Miyazaki Hayao, who is over 60 years old, can scratch the animation handle at a speed of 24 tA per second.

Animators in China hardly bother to do animation for 20 minutes with very little foreground or background. Someone is online.

On the Internet, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, which created the image of "making trouble in heaven" based on Peking Opera masks, was accused of painting the Monkey King's face purple in Lotus Lantern. I'm afraid this is a question that no one can answer directly.

Is it necessary for China animation industry to completely submit to foreign countries? At most, do cheap labor for Japan and the United States in the form of outsourcing?

In order to change this dilemma, I am afraid we must first give strong support in policy. This kind of aid is not a grant to individual animation companies, nor is it the official approval of several cartoons, but gives greater freedom to the whole market. For example, the introduction of Japanese cartoons, which was slightly improved, was completely shelved because the contents of Japanese cartoons were unacceptable to the management, which also prevented more healthy works from flowing to China, while "unhealthy" works were circulated in the form of piracy, which deviated from the original intention of the management. If the management department can open the door to convenience in this field with the mentality of removing the rough and selecting the fine, it will certainly have a great demonstration effect on the market.

China animation industry is full of vitality, but this force is still concentrated in the people. They may be scattered for a day.

This animation was drawn in an outsourced small studio or flashed in an animation forum on the Internet. Only when the big capital in the industry has enough strength and determination to snare them can this power really flourish.