Comparative Study Of The Movie Art Of Feng Xiaogang And Yamada Youji From The Perspective Of The Popular Art

Though located in the same region with China and thus influenced by China’sConfucianism, Buddhism and Daoism, Japan has gradually developed its distinctivecultural characteristics. Yet during its capitalization in modern times, Japan strived toremove the regional bias and adopt the complete westernization, consequently, causingtremendous impacts on its ideology. With the opening-up and reforms, China’s economyhas rapidly developed and its political environment has greatly improved so that the artand culture has become more diversified. People are more open-minded than beforewhich brings the popular art into the mass culture. Thus the movie art developed fromthe two different forms of popular art both display the aesthetic features of the Orientyet bear distinctive characteristics.As a representative director and from a different cultural background, FengXiaogang and Yamada Youji both vividly and fully reflect in their movies the sweetsand bitters of ordinary people and attach more importance to feelings in their creation,earning a title of the civic director. The paper attempted to analyze the similarities anddifferences of the popular cultures of China and Japan by doing a research on the artisticfeatures of the two directors. It first introduces the similarities and differences of thesetwo directors from two different social systems, then points out the similarities anddifferences of the popular movie art, and finally summarizes the differences of thepopular culture between China and Japan.The paper consists of four parts. Part one gives an introduction to the popularculture in China and Japan and the characteristics of movies by Feng Xiaogang andYamada Youji. Parts two and three review the social backgrounds when the twodirectors’ movie styles formed, and present their differences and similarities in terms oftheme, characterization and aestheticism. Finally a summary is made of the guiding ideology and creation approaches so as to expound the differences and similarities ofthe movie culture in China and Japan.