Yesterday blue sky：I keep thinking that if that summer had been longer, maybe we could have said goodbye
When a friend invited me to a screening of Yesterday’s Blue Sky, I initially resisted. As the age of 30 gets closer and closer, everything with the label of “youth” and “nostalgia” is avoided. That feeling is very complicated, one or two words is difficult to explain, basically is a kind of “realize the past did not reprove, and the coming cannot follow” of anger, so I would rather live in the dusty reality, rather than look back at the past, for fear that the memory will remind me of how many opportunities I missed, waste how much time, become a loser abandoned by time in the cracks.
But “Yesterday’s Sky” such as obsessive-compulsive fastidious, meticulous writing, not plot ups and downs touching, it’s all ambition seems to be on the restoration of 1999 town high school life. Then I saw a pile of post-80s and post-90s youth symbols on the screen, school uniforms, college entrance examination, Jordan, blackboard newspaper, Slam Dunk masters, Germinal, Reader, and even the back cover of the magazine were all painted out in great detail. I claim to have no nostalgia, but I was caught off guard by these deliberately arranged elements of the past. At first sight, I felt on pins and pins, as if the box of dust in my heart had been picked open, and some absurd and stupid past events poured out, breaking and reintegrating me.
I used to think that nostalgia was a meaningless act, a way to escape from the present, a way to resist the dirt of life’s journey through filtered memories. But in the process of constructing new memories, after several times being nearly destroyed by confusion and self-doubt taking over, I have to admit that nostalgia is actually a thing that requires courage. Make a complete reconciliation with yourself so that you can tell jokes about failed relationships, failed tests, and wrong majors. I was too timid to regurgitate the past, so I simply put a box in a corner of my heart, put all the bad memories into it, screwed the lock, and chained it. If possible, even like Du Shining angrily sinking a treasure chest, sinking it into the dark sea of memory.
The picture of “Yesterday’s Sky” is very beautiful. The sun has distinct layers, and the corridor is covered with ivy; Plum rainy season green apricot rolling raindrops, like just cried a; the paper plane flew away and melted into the blue sky and clouds. Delicate so, gorgeous so, in addition to the painting skills, must be the author of the homeland and youth with infinite affection. The story is clean and clear; want to say the secret love. Boys do the most “out of line” thing, is nothing more than in the girl’s mailbox secretly stuffed for her to draw comics; and the girl’s most emotional moment, but also pinch the boy’s coat corner, said: “If you don’t take the college entrance examination, then I don’t take the exam.” There were no hugs and kisses, no ceremonial confessions, not even hand holding. The same scenario, applied to adults, is ambiguous, is to refuse to welcome, is a calculated emotional game; Only in that era of high school students, do not need any physical contact, can express the summer sun like hot truth.
Later, the stack of cartoons was wet with rain, leaving only a pile of fuzzy paint, which should be a metaphor for the first love that never ended. But the rain washed away the painting, but not the beauty of the youth, and the memories of friendships, dreams, and vague feelings grew brighter with age. So in the big city comic industry alchemy furnace after several trials of the hero, choose to resign back to his hometown, relying on very simple emotional impulse, for his youth to draw a cartoon.
Will draw out the past, is not only to the youth of an inadvertent gambling account, but also to comb their life opportunity. Perhaps there is a lot of embellishment in this past story, but the process of painting out brush by brush is to remove the rough and extract the essence, is to rediscover the original intention.
Such tone fresh youth animation; always want to leave a less regrettable ending. So all the protagonists have realized their dreams when they were young，Although they never met each other again, they were not estranged from each other. No one forgot who, no one failed to live up to whom. However, this ending is too idealistic. On the night of the premiere, the producers came to interact and were asked if the main character in the story had a prototype. He said he had asked the author of the original comic book the same question, and that there were original characters, but their endings were very different. Hearing this, it is inevitable to cause sadness, and it is true that the emotional connection does not mix worldly impurities, only in the fictional world there is living space. The fictional three-dimensional plays are all pretentious. Only in the second-dimensional youth animation can the pure and sincere nature be shown.
The secret love in the movie is never finished. It is hard to say whether the person involved is brave or cowardly. A friend once said to me, “You don’t know that we introverts like a person’s mood. Saying hello in person has drained all the energy.” During the question-and-answer session, a girl told her youth story on the spot. Basically, I fall in love with an excellent person, so I change my life track, desperately improve myself, and try to catch up with each other’s footsteps. However, for every step forward, the other person also took a big step. After years of chasing, this love never had a beginning. The story is not new, but it is sad to hear, only because I had a strikingly similar experience in my early twenties. Just like in the movie, on a rainy day, the hero runs to give the heroine an umbrella. At first timid, dare not come forward, helplessly watching the girl ran into the rain. Then finally summon up the courage to catch up, but in the lane of seven turns, repeatedly missed each other’s figure.
The chat address book is expanding, but the social circle is narrowing; more and more people are referred to as “friends,” but fewer and fewer are confidants. After watching this film, there is indeed a moment, want to dig out the previous classmate record, those may have become empty phone one by one dial in the past, ask a “do you remember me”. Maybe the past will be pried open a gap, old memories will be reassembled into fresh jokes, we will be close together, become friends again. But more likely, the other person racked his brains and finally remembered me, and after a moment of civility, there was an uneasy silence between the two calls.
So I finally realized the benefits of animation. It is built on reality, leaving only a narrow passage between illusion and reality. Then close to the reality of the subject matter, transcoding into comics, let people feel that they can escape to reality for a short time.
The boom in Chinese youth films has long passed, and the animation industry is going round and round. What kind of youth movies do we need? What kind of animation do we need? It’s still a topic that filmmakers and fans can’t chew. “Yesterday Sky” opens with a point about the state of the comic book industry. The hero is taught by his boss that the cartoon should draw something popular and be “heavy”.
I admire the courage of the creator and author to bring a story so light and almost conflict-free to the screen. The people in the story played games drew outdated blackboard newspapers, and lived a youth that today’s children seem very outdated. I, on the other hand, wanted to escape to Landis, a small town in 1999, to have a rest and take a deep breath. There is an aspiration to the sky, where children still have the strength to ask what is the ideal life, what is the better version of them.
