Peking Opera seems far away from the interest of children, while cartoons are indispensable to children. And how do they come together?
A strip cartoon New Peking Opera Story, a combination of cartoon and Peking Opera, recently has appeared.
Hou Ming, the creator of the book, said that having lived abroad for many years, she lacked knowledge of traditional Chinese culture. She found it embarrassing for her as Chinese to be unable to answer questions about Chinese culture. After many years research on children’s education, she found traditional culture is very important to children’s overall development, so she decided to compile a series of book to help children learn traditional culture. At last, she focused on Peking Opera because it is quintessentially Chinese and can be adapted to be understood and liked by children.
At the beginning, Hou and her colleagues still were afraid that such a book could not attract today’s children, so they brought one copy to a nursery school and told the stories in the book to the children. To their surprise, a lot of children crowded around and one of them even referred to one page and cried “Luzhisheng (a character’s name), wonderful!”
In fact, most Peking Opera stories are interesting and instructive, disdaining wealth and position and pursuing kindness. Some of them are very humorous.
The book selected 20 classic Peking Opera stories and related them with simple pictures, simplifying character’s face-paintings and costumes, in order to make it easier for children to understand.
The pictures were painted by a young artist named Lan Feng. He first drew the outlines, and then scanned them into a computer. At last, he used the computer to fill the colors. By this means, the pictures are vivid and the stories seem contemporary.
(CIIC by Feng Yikun 08/24/2001)
