Andrew Osmond crosses over to Chinese animation this week, to consider ‘Ne Zha 2,’ the highest grossing animated film in the world.
As with my 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 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’s province), then here’s a recap.opened in China on January 29, the first day of the Chinese New Year.
Inside three weeks, its world box-office surpassed Pixar’s , making 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 live-action, in the world, earning more than US$2 billion.
is its next film to beat if it’s going to rise higher in the charts, and it might do it.In London, ’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 (sic) from 1979.Here’s a trailer for that earlier version, whose full title is .I encountered the earlier – 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, 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 .
“While contemporary Japanese cartoons were minimizing motion in fight scenes for budget reasons, resulting in the rigid poses homaged in 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 mostly eschews.” The 1979 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 , its 2023 sequel, and a cyberpunk version, 2021’s (trailer), that’s available on Netflix.
None of these should be confused with the world-conquering , or the film that it sequels, 2019’s .It’s worth highlighting that the first – 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 , 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, (see my anime column last week).Here’s the trailer.A Shrek-style underdog My own thought on watching the 2019 – 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, 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 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 .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 .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 in later scenes than you’d find in a or … but honestly.it’s not far from them.
So much for the first .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 is an insanely complex, bewildering film.
No, it isn’t, you’ve seen the first .It’s just that, as a sequel, 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 story and characters and spectacle – especially spectacle! - on top of that.As an animated sequel, mirrors , down to its runtime – is 143 minutes, near the sequel’s 140.
Of course, it’s plausible the character relationships in are less confusing for Chinese viewers than for foreigners.Many of those characters are based on Chinese myths that the local audience will have grown up with.But even that parallels , where much of the American audience will be acquainted with the Spider-Man cast from other films, TV or comics.
Indeed, many of ’s gags assume just that.I suspect quite a few Anglophone reviewers of 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, plays like or much of the time.But 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 , especially when that film reached the Spider-Society and went crazy.
It just feels weird seeing this scope applied to a close relative of .Kids don’t die in , do they? In the old 1979 , there’s a scene where a little girl gets taken by a sea monster and she 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 , the same girl and her family briefly return… for the film’s cruelest scene.I don’t think is as good as .
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, and worthy of celebration.After all, there’ve been far worse previous incumbents of the Top-Grossing Animated Feature, whether their studio them animation or not.
Anime and a (mostly) American panda Is 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 and – here’s one random skirmish from a film.There’s the use of impossibly beautiful boys, which becomes a standing joke in 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, .I’m keener though, to point up the film’s likely debt to the franchise.
Critics may fume about national stereotyping and cultural imperialism, but the films were in China.The first film took $26 million in the territory, only to be dwarfed by which took $92 million and , which took $154 million.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, was huge.But then a few months later the same year (2016), China’s 2D animated fantasy took $85 million domestically, before the first soared over £ million in 2019.More recent local hits in China have ranged from multiple episodes of the comedy franchise to the visually boggling fantasy and the historical epic both in 2023.
is a new capstone to that trend.It’s notable the Chinese takings of last year’s 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 and comparing it to the very different CG s now, I think a fair bit of what changed in the interim came from America, from DreamWorks, from and especially from Po.Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
