Flavors of Youth is a Chinese-Japanese co-produced animated film released in August 2018. What made the film especially promising was that its mid-stage production was handled by Japan’s CoMix Wave Films, the studio behind a number of Makoto Shinkai’s animated works. Its consistently high level of animation—particularly its ability to reproduce backgrounds—has long been astonishing. The film’s promotional video was indeed striking when it first appeared, and this writer, at least, had expectations for it.
The finished film is divided into three parts, telling separate stories of youth centered on three protagonists in Hunan, Guangzhou, and Shanghai. The three stories stand on their own. Judged purely by the quality of their plots, I would rank them in something close to an exponential curve. But the box-office figures and Douban ratings make it plain just how unconvinced the general public was. The Beijing News headline, “Flavors of Youth: A Neither-Fish-nor-Fowl Youth from a Chinese-Japanese Co-production,” may sum things up rather neatly. Unfortunately, the film still failed to solve the problem of how to address Chinese audiences and tell Chinese stories well.
1. The Modern Idea of “Romance”
Since the film contains elements of youthful romance, before discussing the animation itself I want to begin with the question of the modern Chinese idea—and origins—of “romance,” and from there turn to the relation between physical space and social life.
The modern idea of “romance” is a social conception of romantic love. “Romance” can mean many things and can certainly be understood as a form of social action, but first of all it must be a socially recognized relationship. For such a relationship to come into being is also for “lovers” to come into being at the levels of interpersonal relations and social identity. The problem is that in premodern China—in the mainstream and most common forms of socially legitimate relations between men and women—there was no category corresponding to “romance.” Between “waiting in the women’s quarters to be married” and “becoming a wife,” there was no generally recognized legitimate social relationship of this kind.
Of course, we have no way of knowing whether “love” existed between a poor scholar traveling to the capital for the imperial examination and a young woman who spent one passionate night with him. Psychology might let us discuss some form of “affection” shared across ancient and modern times. Yet even if such feelings existed, from the standpoint of social relations and social action, the “romance” and “romantic relationship” familiar to us today are thoroughly modern things. It is difficult to imagine an ancient person introducing the woman beside him by saying, “This is my girlfriend.” The existence and active promotion of the “romantic relationship” first owed much to Shanghai’s “progressive women” around the turn of the last century. Many factors produced this phenomenon. It is not wrong, at the level of ideas, to see it as another effect of Western influence. But we should not overlook the enormous role played by quietly changing physical space—understood in contrast with the world of ideas, and therefore also encompassing institutional factors.
It is easy to notice how often “free love” was associated with students. From the modern period onward, large numbers of new-style schools appeared in Shanghai, while “parks” and inns also began to emerge in both the foreign concessions and Chinese-administered districts. The former offered men and women a physically and socially legitimate space in which to be together; the latter provided convenient places for a “romantic relationship” to unfold. Young men and women who shared the identity of “student” spent several years together in the same educational spaces, while the spread of modern schooling also brought men and women of “marriageable age” into those settings. In that sense, perhaps “puppy love” was actually the earliest version of “romance” (laughs).
What appears pioneering when a custom first emerges comes to seem self-evident once it has become widespread. For that reason, I often find emotional plotlines in historical films and television dramas hard to watch. We simply take the pattern familiar to modern people—“develop feelings → date and fall in love (repeat as necessary) → marry and form a family”—and apply it naturally to people in antiquity. This is little more than romantic imagination and retrospective projection. Rather than searching for some vague continuity between ancient and modern life, it is more useful to put ourselves in the historical situation and ask: what conditions allow a particular behavior or feeling to exist? I have become keenly aware that our conceptual imagination is deeply constrained by physical space, especially where social life is concerned.
Coincidentally, in an interview Li Haoling, director of the third story, “Love in Shanghai,” spoke about how his impressions and feelings concerning first love resembled those he associated with shikumen, the old residential buildings in which he once lived. In the cramped houses and lanes, neighbors gathered to talk and laugh, scarcely distinguishable from family. He had once assumed that this “family” would always remain together, watching over one another. Yet as time passed, everyone moved far away into new apartments. That change, he felt, resembled the coming together and drifting apart of first love. The relationships among the story’s three characters are not simply those of classmates, nor merely the feelings that develop from such ties. We cannot ignore the fact that the story is set in the shikumen: a distinctive space now unfamiliar to many people, together with the intimate neighborhood relations it sustained. In contemporary urban discourse, such relations among acquaintances are often stigmatized as nothing more than petty, mercenary vulgarity. After the 1990s, this spatial form and the relationships bound up with it gradually disappeared, taking his and her story with them.
As cramped traditional residences gave way to spacious new apartments, urban interpersonal ties also became thinner. This time, Director Li wanted to depict the architectural form of the shikumen through animation, so that viewers could feel the warm, heterogeneous atmosphere of that space—an atmosphere that now survives only as memory.
2. The Discovery and Reproduction of Landscape
To “tell Chinese stories well” might, in this film, mean artistically reproducing our lives, especially the lives of our youth. The three stories differ in narrative effectiveness, but from the standpoint of “reproduction” none can be said to have “departed from the people’s productive activity and everyday life.” From the Hunan countryside in the first story to the Shanghai shikumen in the third, what they show is, to one degree or another, our “everyday.” Why, then, did so many viewers flood the scrolling comments and review sections with declarations that they “felt nothing”? Did the animation reproduce our “everyday” or not?
But the question itself contains a major problem: what is our “everyday”? In Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Kojin Karatani discusses the “discovery of landscape”: “landscape” in the conceptual world does not exist innately. It is discovered by writers—or, put differently, it passes through a process of signification. Landscape is not simply “there” by nature; a subject must excavate it. When we think of Japanese youth, describing its “everyday” is easy. “Trains,” “(better-looking) school uniforms,” “school festivals,” and so on compose a rich but definite “everyday landscape.” For outsiders like us, perhaps we owe all this to the workers of Japanese ACGN culture—the “discoverers of landscape.”
At times, such signification does more than produce “landscape” in the conceptual world. It also has an “invasive” effect on how people in the real world construct the forms of their own lives. Consider, for example, the Hollywood culture industry’s symbolic construction of Vienna. It not only led people around the world to construct a Vienna viewed through Hollywood’s eyes; decades later, actual Vienna itself even came to look more like the Vienna Hollywood had imagined. A “landscape” supplied by the Other can reach the level of cultural hegemony.
That said, apart from deliberate processes of signification, the relative uniformity of the physical spaces of Japanese social life may be a precondition. From Kyushu to Hokkaido, in large metropolises and smaller cities alike, people of the same age in Japan live amid broadly similar scenes. Across generations, everyday life certainly changes, but the differences do not amount to an unbridgeable chasm. It therefore becomes possible to generalize a model of “everyday life” or “youthful life” capable of resonating with most people. Even somewhat distinctive groups, such as people who live around a shopping street, have works devoted specifically to their “everyday” life—Tamako Market, for instance. Their “everyday” has been incorporated into the cluster of signs called “Japanese everyday life.”
But we cannot say what “the everyday youth of Chinese people” actually is. Is there a symbolizable “everyday” shared by students at Shanghai High School, students at Hengshui High School, and students at an ordinary high school in an ordinary prefecture-level city? Is the distance between the “youthful memories” of a Beijinger and a Sichuanese person as vast as the physical distance between the two places? Perhaps this is not the result of a poverty of imagination among cultural producers, nor do we need to grieve and indict the defects of some “education system.” From the perspective of social life and physical space, the country today may still be “fragmented.” Subways and light rail have yet to cover every city; milk tea and coffee remain tastes enjoyed by a minority; the one readily available “landscape” of baggy school uniforms seems too inelegant for respectable representation; the nationwide spectacle of preparing for the gaokao looks too brutal; and romance exists, for most ordinary high-school students, only in their hormones. Between divisions in public opinion and hesitation among creators, our “everyday” has been aborted.
Under such conditions, asking a single animated film to represent “the everyday youth of Chinese people,” much less the shared longing and Asian culture that the interviews say might generate a sense of common feeling, may itself be an impossible task. The problem is perhaps already visible in the film’s construction from three independent stories by three directors from different regions. Coordinating diversity with a sense of unity inside the work would already be difficult. How much harder is it to overcome the “fragmentation” of audiences, social landscapes, and ideas outside the work? Even though the Japanese team worked painstakingly—“making repeated location trips to China, striving for perfection in every detail, from the layout of spaces and the way buildings should be drawn down to the growth patterns of plants… In order to convey how delicious the rice noodles truly were, they would eat thirty or forty bowls in a single day”—it was probably still impossible to present “the everyday youth of Chinese people.” This was not because the production team lacked seriousness. A different string was sounding outside the work itself. If, in the eyes of many viewers, Flavors of Youth proved unequal to the task, that outcome is understandable.
Enough of language that sounds accusatory. This is not an accusation, but an attempt to point out the enormous differences in lived experience across generations and geography, differences that place cultural production aimed at everyone—or at young people as a whole—in a certain predicament. Even now, we do not know what the “everyday” we possess and wish to reproduce actually is. When it comes to animation depicting everyday life, we are accustomed to standing outside the shop window and “appreciating” imported “Japanese taste.” But within this “fragmented,” or simply diverse and differentiated, world of life, are we capable of discovering a “landscape” that is uniquely ours—an “everyday life of Chinese high-school students”? We shall see.
Editor’s Note
This editor also took part in writing some of the article (laughs).
Once again, many thanks to front-end CSer @YdPro_ for helping produce the cover image.
Sources for the Director Interview Cited in the Article
- Newtype, September 2018 issue
- Animation Academic Party, “Behind the Scenes of Flavors of Youth: An Interview”