The Karate Kid Film Trailer Analysis

           

    The Karate Kid is an action drama and was produced in 2010 and is a remake of the 1984 version. It was considered a huge success as its budget was $40 million and it grossed $359 million. One reason for its success could have been that Jackie Chan was in it and so was Jaden Smith who was already well known to be Will Smiths son but this was his firs independent movie.
    The trailer starts off on an aeroplane and has some non-diegetic sound in the background. This is already trying to set the scene whereby the plane connoting that this movie is going to be set in china as the name of the aeroplane company is Air China. the camera zooms into the logo to emphasize where they are going and the soundtrack in the background can be associated with the orient.
     The trailer tries its best to make Trey (Jaden) look out of place as much as it can. This can be shown by how he is always shown to be alone but this does give him the majority of prevelence and so it's easy to see who is the main character within the movie. A movie trailer such as grown ups on the hand is difficult to identify whose a main character as the camera time was shared between all actors and it had a voice-over so nobody had the majority of the prevalence.
     The drama section of the genre is introduced first when Trey says that he just wants to go home and gives the audience a sense that he is experiencing a struggle and this is when you start to first gain an idea of the storyline. The action section is then introduced with Jackie Chan defends Jaden from the bullies and the camera looks up to him also giving him prevalence and power. During this action segment, the music suddenly changes to a much more up tempo beat with quick camera movements.
     The sound is really interesting in this trailer and really tells the narrative itself. There is non-diegetic music in the background for pretty much the entire trailer but it feels as if the tempo changes really emphasises the trailer as a whole. When Trey says that he just wants to go home, the music in the background makes the audience feel sorry for him and when Jackie Chan tells his speech, the sound in the background is very motivating and it makes the speech feel even more motivating. They also use writing to tell the narrative such as when it says "A stranger in a new World," you get that he is moving away from home and it's written in bold writing with a black background giving extra emphasis on the writing. This also is a couple of seconds after the Air China logo so it re-enforces the audience that he is moving away from home and it gives more confidence about the storyline to the audience.
     One of the unique selling points are the star studied actors but there is also another (USP) which is the additional sub-genre of Martial Arts which are very rarely made in Hollywood. Despite this, some of them have proven to be a huge success such as the Karate Kid Movies of 1984 and thus identifying that there was a demand for for Martial Arts movies. This was a huge factor to the success of the movie and is really shunned out through the trailer as there are clips shared around the trailer of Martial Arts action.
      The target audience is rather mixed in this movie as the majority of the characters are young teenagers and so this tells me that the target audience is going to be of a young age but the action makes the target audience widen out much more. The target audience is mainly met through the action scenes that are shown within this trailer.
  
     This trailer in particular follows Todorov's theory of narrative structure.
1) Trey and his family fly off to China for a new start in their lives. This is the state of equilibrium.
2) The character who is seen as evil (the bully) attacks Trey. This is the disruption of the equilibrium.
3) Jackie Chan defends Trey. He recognised the disruption.
4) Jackie Chan then trains Trey. This is the attempt to repair the disruption.
 The only thing thing that isn't seen is the reinstatement of the equilibrium yet other trailers that I have analysed don't even go this far in terms of following Todorov's theory whereby the Karate Kid has included 4 of the 5 steps. 

     Overall, I have learnt that this movie was so successful because there was a demand in a niche market which The Karate Kid exploited and thus made it less of a risk. This trailer really tells me how to shun out a unique selling point and also how background sound can dictate the entire trailer and thus how useful of a tool sound actually can be in telling the story of a trailer. This tells me that I must get the sound right in my trailer to ensure the success of it. There are a lot of similarities offered between this trailer and the trailer that we are going to produce. This is because there are similarities in the genre of sports/ drama. Despite this or trailers are aimed at a different market and so this trailer hasn't really taught me a lot on how to appeal to my target market but it does show me how to dictate the pace of of a sports trailer and how sound is helpful to dictate the pace of the trailer. This is also helpful for us as it helps us know what type of music we should include in our trailer which we are in the process of producing ourselves.