Andrew Osmond crosses over to Chinese animation this week, to consider ‘Ne Zha 2,’ the highest grossing animated film in the world.
'Ne Zha 2.'
As with my Castlevania column some weeks ago, I’m stepping outside my usual lane as a writer on anime. This week I’m writing about Chinese animation, though I’ll make anime comparisons later on. Of course, I’m prompted by the big story in cinema animation at the moment, the meteor that’s the Chinese boy demon Ne Zha.
If you haven’t kept up with the feats of the film, produced by the Chengdu Coco Cartoon studio (Chengdu is a city in China’s Sichuan province), then here’s a recap. Ne Zha 2 opened in China on January 29, the first day of the Chinese New Year. Inside three weeks, its world box-office surpassed Pixar’s Inside Out 2, making Ne Zha 2 the highest-grossing animated film of all time. But it’s still going. As of the writing, it’s the fifth highest-grossing film, animated or live-action, in the world, earning more than US$2 billion. Titanic is its next film to beat if it’s going to rise higher in the charts, and it might do it.
In London, Ne Zha 2’s playing at multiple mainstream cinemas – I saw it at the BFI IMAX, Britain’s biggest cinema screen, where it’s playing in both 2D and 3D formats. (I chose 2D.) My reactions to it are, obviously, a foreigner’s. However, I’ve seen some other animated features from mainland China, including an influential hand-drawn Nezha (sic) from 1979. Here’s a trailer for that earlier version, whose full title is Nezha Conquers the Dragon King.
I encountered the earlier Nezha – and yes, its hero is based on the same deity as the one in the new film, despite the difference in how the name is written – when I was assembling my book, 100 Animated Feature Films. To quote my entry on the 1979 film (in both the original and updated editions):
“A mere infant, Nezha fights demonic dragons which eat children and scourge the land with floods and thunder. Rather than bloodshed, the battles play out through flying dances and gyring acrobatics… Watched today, Nezha looks like a precursor to the French films of Michel Ocelot, with their radiant colors and delicately balanced compositions… The aesthetic is set by the fabulous overture, in which the dragons emerge from a funneling ocean, writhe through the heavens and rain hail and brimstone on the land. The landscapes, tsunamis and storm-clouds are ripples on ripples on ripples, delighting the eye.”
While I did bring up anime, it was to contrast it with Nezha.
“While contemporary Japanese cartoons were minimizing motion in fight scenes for budget reasons, resulting in the rigid poses homaged in The Matrix, Nezha stylizes its battles into flowing dances that Westerners could recognize from the Beijing (or Peking) Opera. Any rotoscoping is absorbed into the flow of sometimes extraordinary movements. During the last undersea battle, Nezha is swallowed by a whale, only to puncture it from inside with his spear. He rides two golden rings like celestial roller-skates, and wields a whirling gymnast’s sash, crimson for the bloodshed Nezha mostly eschews.”
The 1979 Nezha was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and became, says Google, “a source of national pride,” inspiring a “Google Doodle” 35 years later. Another version of Nezha featured in a 2003-4 Chinese TV cartoon – the action imagery in its trailer seems to purposely hark back to the 1979 film. There have also been multiple CG versions of the story in the last decade, including 2016’s I am Nezha, its 2023 sequel, and a cyberpunk version, 2021’s New Gods: Nezha Reborn (trailer), that’s available on Netflix.
None of these should be confused with the world-conquering Ne Zha 2, or the film that it sequels, 2019’s Ne Zha. It’s worth highlighting that the first Ne Zha – available on Blu-ray and Prime Video in America – was a record-breaking blockbuster too, if not on the scale of its sequel. Made for a reported $22 million, it earned around $725 million, almost all of that in China. Until its sequel, it was the highest-grossing animated feature made outside America, far beyond the $507 taken by its closest anime competitor, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (see my anime column last week). Here’s the trailer.
A Shrek-style underdog
My own thought on watching the 2019 Ne Zha – and I should stress this was as a foreigner - was that it’s plainly analogous to some DreamWorks films. That’s not obvious from the above trailer, which opts to play up the blood-and-thunder action. Even in the trailer, though, Shrek fans might notice the stress on Ne Zha being an underdog outcast, unfairly cursed by heaven and fate.
Imbued with demonic powers before birth, Ne Zha’s tremendous strength and speed terrifies humans, turning him into a bitter delinquent. Fundamentally, though, he longs to be loved and accepted. He is loved by his human parents, super-warriors in their own right, but they can’t be with him for much of the film for story reasons. The first film’s heart is Nezha’s accidental meeting with a beautiful youth called Ao Bing, who has powers like Nezha’s that he wields heroically. Naturally, Nezha and Ao Bing’s fates are cosmically entwined.
This is all very different from the 1979 film. In the older version, Nezha is a beautiful child, sturdy and self-confident. Ao Bing is an evil adversary (his human form is an ugly man), but he’s short-lived; Ne Zha slays him swiftly. In the CG version, Ne Zha is said to be ugly – it’s an extended gag in the sequel – but he’s more like a cheeky tyke brother to Sarah Silverman’s Vanellope in Disney’s Wreck-it-Ralph. As with Vanellope, terrible secrets are kept from Ne Zha, leading to a cataclysmic finale where betrayals are revealed and reversed, and Ne Zha and Ao Bing merge as ying and yang.
Much of the 2019 film is comedic, including gags that could have been easily from a DreamWorks film. When Ne Zha first emerges in his fiery glory, nearby musicians helpfully play… the theme from Terminator. A burly male villager is given the mannerisms of a squealing teenage girl. Arguably, the story has more complications than you’d find in a Hollywood CG animated film, such as the film’s adversaries, the dragon kings, being motivated by a centuries-old grievance against Heaven. There’s also more extended anguish in later scenes than you’d find in a Shrek or Kung Fu Panda… but honestly. it’s not far from them.
So much for the first Ne Zha. Here’s some useful information on the sequel from Bloomberg Television, including an observation about how Ne Zha’s parents are shown in the new version, as unconditionally loving. (In the 1979 film, the main parental presence was Nezha’s father, who’s stern to the point of almost executing his son.)
A maximalist sequel
I’d add that the main misconception being spread by some Anglophone critics is that Ne Zha 2 is an insanely complex, bewildering film. No, it isn’t, if you’ve seen the first Ne Zha. It’s just that, as a sequel, Ne Zha 2 truly makes no allowances for newcomers (tying in somewhat to my thoughts on anime TV tie-ins last week), The audience is assumed to be up to speed on who people are and how they relate to each other… and then the film pours in lots more story and characters and spectacle – especially spectacle! - on top of that. As an animated sequel, Ne Zha 2 mirrors Across the Spider-Verse, down to its runtime – Ne Zha 2 is 143 minutes, near the Spider-Verse sequel’s 140.
I suspect quite a few Anglophone reviewers of Ne Zha 2 couldn’t see the first film, which explains the baffled tone of some of the coverage. But it’s also a genre thing. We expect superhero films to get convoluted and intense, for their heroes to suffer terrible losses. In contrast, Ne Zha 2 still plays like Shrek or Kung Fu Panda much of the time. But then it has an extraordinary case of mood whiplash midway through the film. That’s when terrible things happen to Ne Zha and the people he cares about; a few of these things get taken back, but most are apparently for keeps, There are still broad jokes, but now they alternate with Peter Jackson-scaled wars in heaven and rebellions in hell. The spectacle overtakes comedy and goes conclusively beyond anything in the first film.
That’s little different from the maximalism of Across the Spider-Verse, especially when that film reached the Spider-Society and went crazy. It just feels weird seeing this scope applied to a close relative of Kung Fu Panda. Kids don’t die in Panda, do they? In the old 1979 Nezha, there’s a scene where a little girl gets taken by a sea monster and she doesn’t survive the encounter. I was startled by that, though the moment’s not dwelt on. In the 2019 film, there’s a similar scene that may be a reference to its predecessor, though the girl’s saved in the new version. In Ne Zha 2, the same girl and her family briefly return… for the film’s cruelest scene.
I don’t think Ne Zha 2 is as good as Across the Spider-Verse. But I was surprised by it, and impressed, and sometimes moved, and sometimes staggered by the climactic visuals that present combatants in a heavenly battle as droplets in a raging ocean, or blossoms on a great tree. The film ends up as a phenomenon, and worthy of celebration. After all, there’ve been far worse previous incumbents of the Top-Grossing Animated Feature, whether their studio called them animation or not.
Anime and a (mostly) American panda
Is Ne Zha 2 influenced by anime? I’d be amazed if it wasn’t, though it’s not a point I’d labor. The film’s overblown fantasy battles could be likened to countless fights in franchises such as Dragon Ball and Bleach – here’s one random skirmish from a Bleach film. There’s the use of impossibly beautiful boys, which becomes a standing joke in Ne Zha 2 when Ao Bing possesses Ne Zha’s body and makes him an immaculate blue-eyed angel. There’s a heartrending flashback montage focused on one particular character – hardly anime-only, but anime made it a true trope. There’s also some imagery near the end, involving a giant tree and a collapsing flying structure, which reminds me strongly of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 film, Laputa: The Flying Island.
I’m keener though, to point up the film’s very likely debt to the Kung Fu Panda franchise. Critics may fume about national stereotyping and cultural imperialism, but the Panda films were huge in China. The first film took $26 million in the territory, only to be dwarfed by Kung Fu Panda 2 which took $92 million and 3, which took $154 million. Kung Fu Panda 3 was an official US-Chinese co-production, though AWN commentator Kevin Geiger expressed skepticism with that label – I’m guessing because the film continued an established franchise whose main creative calls were in Hollywood.
Hollywood or not, Panda was huge. But then a few months later the same year (2016), China’s 2D animated fantasy Big Fish & Begonia took $85 million domestically, before the first Ne Zha soared over £700 million in 2019. More recent local hits in China have ranged from multiple episodes of the Boonie Bears comedy franchise to the visually boggling fantasy Deep Sea and the historical epic Chang’An, both in 2023.
Ne Zha 2 is a new capstone to that trend. It’s notable the Chinese takings of last year’s Kung Fu Panda 4 were down to a “mere” $51 million – still impressive, but well below any of the other films in the last paragraph. Perhaps Po finally looks passé to Chinese viewers. Or perhaps pride in their local product has spurred them to be patriots in their ticket choices, as recent news reports suggest. But looking back to the 1979 Nezha and comparing it to the very different CG Ne Zhas now, I think a fair bit of what changed in the interim came from America, from DreamWorks, from Shrek and especially from Po.
