The Transmutation Of SunWukong’s Image On Screen

The monkey king is not only a treasure,but also a symbol of important elements of Chinese traditional culture.With the changing times, the screen image of the monkey king was constantly given new meaning and vitality.The development and transmutation of Sun Wukong’s image is not only reflection of social and cultural trends and also the mark of the development of film art, what is more, it is the embodiment of creative personality and artistic innovation.Based on the author’s statistics, the first appearance of Sun Wukong’s image on the screen was 1926. There are 63 films about the image of Sun Wukong appeared from1926 to the present. In the China movie history, the image of Sun Wukong on screen is unfading. At the same time, it also have some development at different levels in Japan,South Korea and other neighboring countries, even adopted by Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States in the film and television works. Nowadays, the theme of Story of a Journey to the West become a hot spot again. During 2013 to 2015, the movie about Story of a Journey to the West get total box office revenue of 3 billion 300 million.In the present paper, taking more than 60 films(containing a small amount of film of Sun Wukong in Japan and South Korea) as the research object, and analysing the transmutation of Sun Wukong’s image and its causes. The first part, discussing the establishment of origin image of Sun Wukong and its formation, and analyzing the intrinsic image and external image of Sun Wukong in Wu Chengen’s novels. The second part, studying Sun Wukong’s image and its historical transmutation on the Chinese screen, analyzing the internal and external image transmutation of Sun Wukong on screen in the past 90 years. During 1926-1966, Sun Wukong perform as a heroic orrevolutionary hero of the education; from 1976 to 1990, performing as a "humanized" transition; from 1995 to 2010, taking the movie called “A Chinese Odyssey” as a sign,performing subversion and rebellion in the form and personality. In recent years,with the rapid development of China’s film industry, the image of Sun Wukong in Several box office hits movies shows a wide range of characteristics. The third part, the development of the image of Sun Wukong on foreign screen were supplied; taking the image of Sun Wukong in Japanese and Korean films as an example, analyzing the characteristics of transmutation. The fourth part, studying the causes of transmutation of Sun Wukong’s image and get some enlightenment. The reasons for the transmutation of Sun Wukong’s image at home and abroad are summarized in three aspects: the social and cultural factors, the factors of the film noumenon and the creative personality of the Creator respectively.Finally, the paper comes to three enlightenment,the first is the plasticity feature of image of Sun Wukong on screen in the past few decades, the second is Sun Wukong’s image has a lot of innovative space in the future of film and television creation,and the last one is as a classic art, Sun Wukong’s image is very attractive.