Culture is the result of the accumulation of human living experience and knowledge. Take a pyramid as an example, the elite culture goes to the top level, the popular culture goes to the middle and the folk culture goes to the bottom part. Folk culture is the foundation of traditional cultures that not only extends from the original essence of culture, but sets a diversified tone for the culture of a people and a region.
Folk culture is the best soil for the growth of animation. The momentum of animation is nurtured by the core essence of folk culture. Animation is a multi-carrier that crosses multiple media. It is cultural, metaphoric, with symbolic representations, educational, popular, entertaining, inclusive, diverse, oriented to the general public, and derivative. Adopting the element of folk culture in animation can add charisma and an ethnical sentiment to the works themselves, and also create a media representation of folk culture.
The animation film, Big fish Begonia, not only hits a high record at box office but is marked as the most discussed work ever over the media and the Internet in Chinese animation history. Therefore, this article chooses Big fish Begonia as the subject of study.This article takes in-depth interview and content analysis as the main approaches of research, and interviews 20 cross-strait academic scholars and industry specialists in the animation field. The theories for research here focus on folk culture and are compared with the interview data of the interviewees for analysis and organizing. The 3 main issues pertaining to the research are “the contextual connection among folk culture, folk literature and the cultural and creative industry”, “how to successfully apply folk culture and folk literature to animation works”, and “the interviewees’ recognition of aspects pertaining to the animation film, Big fish Begonia”.
The theoretical purpose in this study is to sort out the connection among folk culture, folk literature and the cultural and creative industry, expand the dimension of research for folk culture and folk literature, organize the importance of folk culture and folk literature to the animation industry, connect the new tasks in folk culture, folk literature and animation research, propose new positions in animation research, and call for the attention and recognition from the academia. The practical purpose is to explore how to apply folk culture and folk literature to the animation industry, call for the animation industry to take folk culture and folk literature seriously and recognize them, sort out critical success factors of animation and provide them to animation companies for their reference, write a conclusion on Big fish Begonia as a reference for subsequent researchers, and provide the study results of Big fish Begonia to the film’s production staff for reference.