Absurd, touching, real! We live in a time of epoch, when the big screen comes super-successful blockbusters, such as Barbie with a box office under $ 1.5 billion with a fashionable background and agenda! These pictures are absolutely... flat and empty, their scripts are terribly boring, and the acting is incomprehensible. The success of such works is due to the construction of Western society, where the mass product of consumption began to degenerate into a social instrument of compulsory approval of actual values, which leads to the loss of artistic culture in the realities of the infallible right of the minority to the thoughts of the majority.
Simultaneously with these cultural processes in the West, we also see the “back side of the moon”, although it is rather just a look to the East, where all these processes do not exist. Eastern culture is not stagnating, it is on the rise, all over the world every day more and more fans of Japanese animation, Korean dramas and Chinese feature films; at the same time in all countries of the East there is a development of animation and the film industry in the broad sense of the word, as they say, “when somewhere artistic value decreases, somewhere it arrives.” And these reflections lead us to a picture that deserves far more attention and respect than any Western blockbuster of the last 3 years, Moon Man.
Absurd.
Absurd is a powerful artistic technique that turns the ordinary into something phantasmagoric, giving the viewer the opportunity to reveal familiar images or events in a completely unexpected context "on the edge"; here lies the greatest danger of absurdity, which lies in the risk that even a small redundancy of this technique will lead the picture to delirium without artistic value. The work of Zhang Chiyu demonstrates the delicate balance between absurdity and sparkling humor, piercing in moments when you do not expect it at all.
Touching.
Any quality work always finds a response in the hearts of the viewer! And to achieve this quality, you need a whole network of neural connections in the natural environment of a work of art, where the script will not be indifferent, the acting will be deep and in accordance with the images, the musical accompaniment would encourage us to empathize, and the turning points would take heart. Moon Man has all this and more, we are given the opportunity to experience several layers of narrative, which is generally characteristic of Chinese full-length fairy tales.
Real.
Behind all the conventions of this picture, you can see a simple thing in words, but difficult to do in practice - the correspondence of each hero to his role, his story, his weaknesses and his actions. Here we see the cultural gap between the modern West and East, we see in this work a clear structure of values based on morality, and, for example, not on gender ("Barbi") or other superficial superstructure of the external culture of society. Our joy, sadness, laughter, embarrassment when watching Moon Man is real, the picture gives these emotions at almost every moment of timing!
Afterword.
Still, it is impossible not to mention the companion of the main character, although the graphics were not absolutely perfect everywhere, the attention that was paid to Kong deserves special thanks to the large team that worked on this film. I would like to believe that in the near future we will find many such films from hopeful Chinese filmmakers.