Unless you are a major Sinophile or one of those wayward souls who monitor box office receipts like day traders monitor the Japanese futures market (ahem), you likely haven’t heard of the highest-grossing animated film of all time.
Ne Zha 2, an animated partial retelling of the 16th-century Chinese folk novel Investiture of the Gods, is the first non-English-language film to gross more than $2 billion, the fifth-highest-grossing movie of all time, and the highest-grossing film in a single box office territory ever. The United States’s top entry on the same list is Star Wars: The Force Awakens with $936 million domestic, and it is illustrative that its Chinese counterpart is a nationalistic folk tale while our blockbuster champion stems from the imagination of a froggy man from Modesto who at one point thought it was a hoot to name a character “Elan Sleazebaggano.”
The film very loosely adapts one tale from the lore of the titular Chinese protection deity, an eccentric-looking boy warrior of mystical, demonic birth. Like Alfred Hitchcock, or Pikachu, Ne Zha satisfies the visual axiom that an iconic character should be instantly recognizable in silhouette; his slouching, lumpen figure and distinct buns of hair recall some strange combination of Mickey Mouse and Tommy Pickles from the 1990s children’s series Rugrats.
Without any specialized contextual knowledge (or, full critical disclosure, having seen the first Ne Zha), it is very easy to understand why this film was such a phenomenon in its home country and less so in the U.S., where it’s grossed less than $20 million as of this writing after a late-summer rerelease. It is gargantuan in scale, featuring battle scenes that put the Lord of the Rings trilogy to shame in their seemingly endless number of rendered participants, the digestive, IMAX-bassy sound effects that punctuate America’s Transformers-style blockbusters, and the insistent, smarmy humor that serves as a global lingua franca for the faux-worldly wise. In other words, just as they’ve surpassed America when it comes to the gleaming, modernist skyscraper, high-speed transit, and digital surveillance, the Chinese can do the galactic-scale summer blockbuster just as well as we can, if not better, and they’re right to be proud of it.
Whether or not Ne Zha 2 is any good, of course, is an entirely different question.
The film opens just as its predecessor ended, with a handy recap explaining how Ne Zha and his angelic counterpart, Ao Bing, ended up in need of bodily reincarnation. One of the few genuinely funny moments in the film follows, as Ne Zha attempts to fashion his own new body, the result resembling a sort of 3D-printed homunculus of the glowering little hero. After much sound and fury, the central premise of the film is established: Ne Zha and Ao Bing must share the former’s body, completing a series of heroic trials in enough time to revive the latter’s, and, of course, stave off a looming demonic invasion.
The first half of the film’s overstuffed 144-minute runtime is dedicated to this relatively straightforward premise, and it goes down easily enough, notwithstanding scenes of extremely convoluted exposition and no-brow scatological humor. A picaresque like this often lives or dies by how convincingly enchanting its foreign lands are. Here, Ne Zha 2 succeeds wildly; locales such as a heavenly city made entirely of jade and a towering, bamboo-verdant waterfall are rendered with genuinely beautiful texture and detail.
These adventures are punctuated by, presumably, the film’s main draw, and what accounts for a good chunk of its bloated running length: endless, meticulously choreographed fight scenes between the diminutive Ne Zha and his stately, martial opponents. These recall in their length Sturm und Drang and their high quotient of masculine grunting the seminal Japanese animated series Dragon Ball Z (itself a loose adaptation of a Chinese folk tale). The viewer’s mileage may vary when it comes to watching Ne Zha beat the stuffing out of various mystical overlords, but their enjoyment of the film will largely depend on it.
There are scenes of strange, often violent pathos that punctuate the potty humor and punch-throwing. While Ne Zha’s home of Chentang Pass is being obliterated, we’re shown a grim, apocalyptic tableau of mass death that features a family with a young child frozen in ash. One cloyingly adorable character is unceremoniously killed off largely as a plot device. Ne Zha’s mother is transmogrified into a magical pill at the hands of the story’s villainous mastermind, the immortal Wuliang.
Ne Zha 2’s lengthy final act depicts Wuliang attempting to enact his grand scheme of entrapping our heroes and a horde of menacing yet undeniably silly demons in a giant golden cauldron, where they will somehow be transformed into pills that turn those who consume them into mindless sentinels of his celestial army. Following?
It should be noted here that, inevitably, some viewers have tried to map an explicitly ideological message onto this messy mythological drama, characterizing Wuliang and his all-powerful army as symbolic of Western global hegemony or, as some critics from the other direction have alleged, the Chinese Communist Party’s oppressive rule. It would be an understatement to say these viewers are reading too much into what is ultimately just a straightforward nationalist folk tale. Slate’s Jenny Zhang put it best: “It may shock some Americans to learn that many Chinese people, on many days, don’t even have the thought of America cross their minds.”
Rather than any veiled polemic, the showdown between Ne Zha and the villainous Wuliang is more of an extended video game cutscene, complete with Matrix-style slowdown, abrupt changes of animation style, and a shrieking orchestral crescendo that memorably incorporates traditional Chinese instruments like the suona. Having weathered so many punches heretofore, the viewer is more likely to be numb than moved. I found myself checking my watch, although it should be said that the under-10-year-olds who largely populated my Brooklyn screening were on the edge of their seats.
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In its content, if not its megaton cultural relevance in its homeland, Ne Zha 2’s thunder and bombast recall less the hegemonic flexibility of a figure like Mickey Mouse, as one observer audaciously suggested, and more cultural phenomena of previous generations like Transformers or Pokémon, whose dialed-up-to-10 visual tenor thrills the faithful but perplexes anyone on the outside looking in.
Full of sound and fury, signifying… something largely inscrutable to those outside its original context, Ne Zha 2 achieves, ironically, a quintessentially American end: a “what” without a “why,” a behemoth, cutting-edge, record-breaking entertainment with little to recommend beyond the spectacle itself.
Derek Robertson is a writer in Brooklyn.