Yi Liu

The rapid rise of LinaBell has been a carnival driven by online user participation. It not only reflects the active agency and creative initiative of audiences in participatory culture but also advances the development of participatory texts, transforming the relationship between producers and recipients from opposition to collaboration. Throughout this process, both parties benefit and fulfill their respective needs. Creators generate higher commercial value with lower production costs, while recipients experience immersive and interactive aesthetic enjoyment through their engagement. The success of LinaBell popularity is also related to the unique form of fan culture in China. Furthermore, it ingeniously addresses the long-standing copyright issues that have hindered user participation in creative processes. However, it is important to acknowledge that this type of storyless intellectual property (IP) has both advantages and limitations.

For a long time, Chinese audiences have not had a high opinion of hybrid Chinese and Western movies. However, the unanimous praise for Turning Red in China se ems to have reversed this situation. In order to verify whether the attitudinal behavior of Chinese audiences toward the film’s hybridization of Chinese and Western cultures has changed, this study collected textual materials reflecting the Chinese audience’s receptive attitudes toward the film: Douban reviews, short reviews, questionnaires and Mtime.com reviews. Through a grounded study of 664,312 words, a total of 16 initial categories and four main categories were obtained. Finally, a cognitive–emotional–attitudinal mechanism model was formed to explain the audience’s receptive behavior process. The study found that Chinese audiences’ positive reception of Turning Red comes more from the fact that the film touches on personal emotions and focuses on a series of issues such as growing up, family, and gender, with intergenerational conflict as the core. The audience achieves self-projection and empathy while watching the film, rather than recognizing the Chinese culture presented therein. On this basis, the research further found that the internal structure of the current cultural hybridity has not changed greatly. The reason audiences do not give a high evaluation of cultural hybridity films lies in the lack of conscious distinction between the hybridity culture and the local culture. At the same time, in terms of cross-cultural creation, we should abandon the blind pursuit of cultural symbols, take root in cultural soil and then pay attention to more specific problems. This study reveals that the key factor affecting the audience’s receptive behavior toward cultural hybridity films is not necessarily the performance of local culture, which is of great significance for establishing new evaluation criteria.