What is the meaning of the mascot of Beijing Olympic Games?

The mascot of Beijing Olympic Games consists of five personified doll images, collectively called Fuwa, which are called Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini respectively. The pronunciation of these five names constitutes the homonym of "Welcome to Beijing".

Beibei turned into a fish swimming in the boundless sea, Jingjing played an innocent panda in the dense forest, like a Tibetan antelope running on the vast grassland to say hello, and Nini sang happily in the sky like a light Jingyan. They gathered around Huanhuan, the Olympic flame symbolizing the Temple of Hera in ancient Olympia, and formed a sonorous word "Welcome to Beijing" with their respective names, sending invitations to children, their brothers and sisters and their parents all over the world.

The mascot is the "upstart" of the Olympic family. As a representative of oriental civilization, what kind of notes can China add to this never-ending Olympic movement?

Compared with the 100-year history of the Olympic Games, mascots are just new members of the Olympic family. 1972 At the Munich Olympic Games, a puppy named Valdi first appeared as a mascot at the Olympic Games. Since then, the mascot has become one of the core images of many Olympic Games and an important carrier to convey the Olympic spirit and the concept of this Olympic Games. As the image ambassador of an Olympic Games, he appeared widely in all fields of the Olympic Games, and was deeply loved by people, especially children, with his lovely image and distinctive personality, and became the most popular image of previous Olympic Games.

Judging from the selection of mascots in recent Olympic Games and other major world events, there is a design trend from directly selecting animal images to recreating them as prototypes, and there is also a brand-new interpretation to create new images. In the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, the deformed images of three unique exotic animals-mole, kookaburra and platypus-were selected as mascots, representing land, water and air respectively. In the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, Athena and Fevos, two mascots created according to ancient Greek mythology, won a full house applause with their rich Greek cultural characteristics and lovely shapes, and became the most "hot-selling" featured goods in the Athens Olympic Games. Every Olympic Games will choose a suitable mascot according to the history and culture of the host country. Every mascot is unique. They all have vibrant personalities and embody the Olympic ideal of friendship and fair competition. Mascots personify the Olympic value and give it an actual shape, which is incomparable to other images in today's Olympic symbol system.

Once again, the whole world pays attention to China and looks forward to Beijing! In order to create a mascot that is also loved by the whole world, on August 5, 2004, BOCOG officially sent an invitation to professional design institutions and designers around the world to openly solicit mascot designs for the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The solicitation activities have received enthusiastic response at home and abroad. Can Olympic mascots be produced from effective collection of works? It has become a long-standing problem in the hearts of relevant staff.

5: 30 on June 5438, 2004+February 1 is the final deadline. In the past four months, BOCOG Cultural Activities Department, which is in charge of the collection work, has become the busiest place, with consultation calls, letters and emails pouring in from Beijing, the whole country and all over the world. More than 3,000 letters and amateur design drafts, and countless consultation calls have kept the staff in the collection office busy. After qualification certification in accordance with relevant regulations, 662 valid entries were confirmed. Among them, Chinese mainland works 6 1 1, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan works 12 and 39 foreign works.

The solicitation activities attracted great creative enthusiasm of China designers. Except for two provinces and regions in Chinese mainland, there are design institutions and personnel involved. Overseas Chinese and students studying in China also sent their love works. Many foreign designers are also very concerned about this activity. Designers from Britain, the United States, Canada and countries such as South Korea, Japan, Singapore and India in Asia also sent their works. In their works, there are not only images of giant pandas, the Monkey King, Tibetan antelopes and elk which are very familiar to the public, but also many new shapes with distinctive expressive force and unique style. Most of the works not only show the characteristics of China, but also absorb the creative concept of Olympic mascots.

On June 5438+February 65438+May 2004, according to the Rules for the Selection of Mascot Design for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the Olympic Organizing Committee invited 24 experts and scholars who have made outstanding achievements in the field of art and culture at home and abroad to make artistic selection for all valid entries according to the requirements of mascot design. On the same day, 662 works were laid out on the table in the conference hall on floor 0/6 of Bocog/Kloc-the judges had to select 10 works that they thought were satisfactory.

Pang Bangben, the painter and executive vice president of the Comic Branch of China Oriental Culture Research Association, recalled that their choice at that time was quite difficult. Many of their favorite images may have thousands of similar things, which leads to the trouble of repeated inspection of intellectual property rights in the future. Due to the particularity of mascots, space should be reserved for future materials, cartoon shooting of mascots and extensive market development. Therefore, there are many factors to consider in the initial evaluation.

From June 5 to July 6, 2004, BOCOG held a working meeting of the mascot recommendation and selection committee. The 10 recommendation selection committee, including famous artists Jin Shangyi and Chang Shana, reviewed and commented on 56 works that entered the recommendation selection stage. Among them, the art selection committee selected 50 works and recommended the selection committee to nominate 6 works. After a full analysis of the selected works, the recommendation selection committee suggested that six works, namely panda, tiger, dragon, the Monkey King, rattle and Ah Fu, should be taken as the revised direction of the mascots for the Beijing Olympic Games.

What makes the revision team embarrassed is that it is difficult for each work to meet the requirements of the Olympic mascot. Every dark cloud has a silver lining. China Fuwa surfaced.

Although the direction of revision has been determined, can mascots be produced from these six works in the end? Nobody has a bottom. In March this year 1 1, a nine-member revision team led by the famous artist Han Meilin gathered in Yanqi Lake, Huairou. Their task is to put forward revised plans for six projects.

The revision team immediately entered the intense work. Around the six works, many characters have been turned over and over. 500 sheets of A4 copy paper were used up in one morning. They also read a lot of reference materials and revised six works from different angles. But fun is not easy to use, easy to use is similar to the past, not suitable.

The jury was recommended to be very optimistic about the rattle. Everyone thinks it can play a role in creating an atmosphere, and it is also very fun. However, the rattle has no feet and lacks elements of movement, which has great obstacles in its application. After checking the weight, it is also found that the mascot chosen by China Consumers Association is the rattle.

The image of the tiger is good, but as a single mascot, it has been used in 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. Panda is an image praised at home and abroad, but the space for re-creation is very limited because it is used too much; The Monkey King is a well-known image of China, but it is difficult to make a breakthrough in modeling; The concept of dragon is very tough, but it has the characteristics of royalty, royalty, and poor affinity, and its image is not very good in the eyes of some westerners. Duff earth tiles are made up of a bunch of small round clay figurines, and they have no feet, showing a strong regional concept. The revision group also put together six works, including a panda, the Monkey King and a tiger, but the shapes and colors were not very good.

One of the most important problems in the revision process is that experts feel that a single work is not enough to meet the needs of designing a mascot with comprehensive meanings. The revision work is in trouble. The "Ji Shen" activities supported by governments all over China made the members of the revision team feel a great responsibility.

In this case, the leaders of BOCOG, while comforting and encouraging everyone, proposed that they could break through the framework of the six works and boldly try to redesign them.

This idea inspired the members of the revision team, who reread the shortlisted works and found that a work composed of five animals was conceptually desirable. So, around the "five-year plan", everyone began to think. There are five rings in the Olympic Games, five elements in China, five continents in the world, and five places in the world, such as "Five Blessingg" and "Five-Year Senior High School Entrance Examination", and they all talked about more than a dozen things related to the five-year plan in one breath.

It was on this day-March 22, 2005 that the idea of creating a group of five mascots was initially decided. China Fuwa has a prototype.

Han Meilin's studio is almost full of mascots. Several mascots competed in modeling, and finally Jingyan surpassed the dragon.

After a short joy, everyone moved to Han Meilin Studio of China Artists Association in Tongzhou District.

What images can you choose from in "Five"? People are really hard to adjust. Some want antelope, some want monkeys, some want Sichuan pandas, some want elk, baiji, dragons and so on. There are no five mascots in the history of the Olympic Games. Even if there are five mascots, people can't hold such great hopes. Choosing who is better has become a difficult problem.

Han Meilin recalled: "I think, isn't the big-headed doll in China very good, and the hat is also very good?" Just associate the hat with the mascot, so that you can wear a tiger hat or a panda hat. Later, we made a big fuss about it and checked a first draft. Five dolls came out. It represents the five elements of gold, wood, water, fire and earth, and blends into the water pattern and bronze culture of painted pottery in China. Fire is the figure of Dunhuang murals. Han Meilin has a very deep memory of this. He said that he took a cold bath that morning and took two pills a day just to make a big fight and give some ideas.

At that time, everyone had a heated discussion and even quarreled for a while; I was silent for a while, working at my desk. Every part of the graphic has read a lot of materials, and added as many cultural elements of China as possible. Wu Guanying, deputy director of the Graphic Design Department of Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts, said that at that time, there were more than 70 bags of materials in ordinary schoolbags, which were fully filled with a van. In order to find information, he ran more than 50 times from Haidian to Tongzhou in ten days.

After three months, I drew tens of thousands of pictures and revised them sixty or seventy times. On April 5, 2005, the five shapes were basically finalized. The leaders of the Olympic Organizing Committee saw this work and said that we saw the dawn. With this sentence, the members of the revision team have been hanging for a long time and their hearts have fallen like stones. This is the credit of everyone, the result of brainstorming and the crystallization of collective wisdom. Han Meilin said that revision is a process of re-creation. Without 662 finalists and six revisions, Fuwa would be hard to be born.

On April 29th, the 53rd Executive Committee of BOCOG deliberated and passed the mascot modification plan, and thought that the concept of "China Wa" (flame, panda, fish, Tibetan antelope and dragon) had China characteristics, and choosing a group of images with China cultural representation as the mascot of the Beijing Olympic Games could meet the expectations of all sectors of society. During the "May 1st" period, Han Meilin further revised and improved the "China Eva" plan according to the spirit of the Executive Committee and suggestions from all walks of life. Considering the differences between Chinese and western dragon images, this paper puts forward a modification scheme of replacing the dragon shape with the traditional Beijing kite "Jingyan" shape. In terms of expression techniques, the strokes of the Olympic emblem are combined with the style of the China seal of the Olympic emblem, and the hand-painted techniques of traditional China ink painting are boldly adopted to redraw the images of five dolls, highlighting the lively personality characteristics of the mascots, which has made a major breakthrough in the artistic expression of the overall image. So far, the basic image orientation of the mascot of the Beijing Olympic Games has been basically completed.

Verbruggen, an old friend of BOCOG and chairman of the IOC Coordination Committee, chose August 18. He knew it was an auspicious day for China people, so on this day he sent BOCOG a confirmation letter of the mascot.