A few years ago, a Finnish app took the mobile gaming world by storm. Its set-up was simple and its premise absurd: Angry Birds was little more than a shooting game, with birds instead of bullets and green pigs in place of targets.

几年前，一款来自芬兰的应用席卷手机游戏领域。这款游戏设置简单、故事背景还有点荒谬：《愤怒的小鸟》跟其他射击游戏并没有太大区别，就是用小鸟代替了子弹，用绿猪代替了靶子。

It led the way for a slew of other equally silly, equally addictive games to invade cell phones everywhere. Shortly after Angry Birds took off, audiences found a new distraction in Fruit Ninja, a game where the object was to chop falling produce. Then there was Candy Crush, where players could save a candy kingdom by matching like-colored bonbons.

《愤怒的小鸟》引领了一大波傻乎乎却又让人上瘾的游戏，它们占据了全世界的手机。在《愤怒的小鸟》火了没多久，大家很快就发现了新的消遣工具——《水果忍者》，游戏任务就是切开掉落的物品。之后又有了《糖果粉碎传奇》，玩家们通过匹配消除相同颜色的糖果，来拯救糖果王国。

Never mind that these games made absolutely no sense from a narrative standpoint. That was their charm, after all: They were knowingly absurd, a foray into mindless amusement. In games like Angry Birds, players found an escape from reality. All they had to do is resign themselves to the logic of the game, a world of simple cause-and-effect: Slingshot a bird, kill a pig, score points.

从讲故事的角度来看，这些游戏绝对是没啥意思。但是不要在意这些细节，这才是它们的魅力所在：故意做得很荒谬，也是对于这类不需要动脑筋的娱乐活动的初步尝试。在类似《愤怒的小鸟》这样的游戏里，玩家们可以远离现实。他们唯一要做的就是全心投入游戏的逻辑之中，一个简单的因果世界：弹射小鸟，消灭绿猪，赢得分数。

Fast forward to 2016, and there’s now an Angry Birds movie, here to fill you in on all the details you never wished to know. The birds have been given personalities, motives and back-stories, and so have the villainous green pigs.

快进到2016年，《愤怒的小鸟》大电影来了，填补一切你压根没想到要了解的细节。小鸟们有了个性、目的以及背景故事，当然反派邪恶的绿猪也一样。

The movie comes full of puns and bathroom humor – exactly the kind of raucous good time you’d expect from Hollywood animation. But while the film preserves the quirky tone of the original game, one has to wonder if some of the whimsy gets lost in translation. A film needs a plot, so the game’s nonsense had to be made sense of. Logic replaced absurdity.

这部电影充满了双关语以及低俗幽默——就是人们预期中的那种好莱坞动画，为你带来喧闹的快乐时光。但是，当电影保留了原作游戏的怪异基调时，我们也在想，在电影解读原作时会不会遗落了某些东西。电影需要情节，所以游戏里那些没什么道理的地方需要被改正，（电影中）逻辑取代了荒谬。

Angry Birds is not alone in having its gray areas sketched in for the big screen. Hollywood has made an industry of answering the questions no one ever thought to ask; to the point of even giving a brand of toy blocks its own story in 2014’s The Lego Movie. Countless secondary characters have also been plucked from the sidelines and given their own franchises. That includes the forgetful blue fish Dory from 2003’s Finding Nemo, whose spin-off premieres this summer.

《愤怒的小鸟》并不是唯一一个在大屏幕上面临灰色地带的作品。好莱坞开创了一个产业，回答了这些从来没人想过的问题，比如2014年《乐高大电影》，他们就给玩具品牌编了一段故事，数不胜数的次要角色也被拉了进来，并且有了属于自己的情节。这就包括2003年《海底总动员》中的蓝色小鱼Dory，今年夏天以他为主角的电影要上映了。

In its efforts to feed the audience’s curiosity, Hollywood may in fact be stifling it. Viewers no longer have the luxury of imagining back-stories for their favorite characters, or debating the open-ended questions in a film’s source materials: An endless flow of prequels, sequels and spin-offs fill in those blanks for them.

看上去好莱坞在努力满足观众的好奇心，但实际上他们的做法可能反而会扼杀好奇心。观众不再有充足的空间去想象他们最爱角色的背景故事，也不会再根据影片的原始素材去讨论开放性结局：因为无穷尽的前传、后传以及番外会填补这些空白。

When children today play Angry Birds, they won’t wonder why the birds are so grumpy. They’ll know. Everything will be determined for them: According to the movie, the main bird Red gets picked on for his bushy eyebrows, and that leaves him feeling isolated and, well, angry.

如今的孩子们玩儿《愤怒的小鸟》，他们不会再去想为什么小鸟们会如此暴躁，他们会知道原因。每件事都已经有了定论：按照电影里的说法，主角胖红因为眉毛被嘲笑，让他感到被孤立，当然也倍感愤怒。

In some ways, Hollywood has taken on the role of fan fiction writers, by expanding and exploring every corner of its fictional universes. But when these universes expand too widely, what will be left to imagine?

某种角度来看，好莱坞扮演了同人小说作家的角色，扩展挖掘其虚构宇宙的各个角落。但是，当这些宇宙扩展得太宽泛时，还有什么可以留给想象力呢？