Maxance Vincent
If you only focus on Hollywood box-office trends, you’re likely trying to figure out how much money Captain America: Brave New World will make and not paying attention to the juggernaut that is Ne Zha 2. The chances of you having heard of the latter are low, but you should be aware of it. Not only is it on track to become the highest-grossing animated film of all time, but it is so far the only movie to have made $1 billion in a single country, beating a $936 million record previously held by Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the United States. As of this writing, Ne Zha 2 is on track to make over $2 billion at the worldwide box office and has reached its first milestone in 11 days during the Chinese New Year holiday period, at the same time when Wuershan’s Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force continued to visualize the animated film’s titular character in live-action.
Adaptations of the Investiture of the Gods and Journey to the West aren’t new in mainland China and Hong Kong (Chang Cheh took many liberties with his Ne Cha the Great in 1974, for example). Still, the Jiaozi-directed animated transposition of Ne Zha in 2019 was a remarkable high point in visualizing the character in ways that hadn’t been previously thought possible, utilizing 3D animation to create a sprawling epic that opened the floodgates for an eventual expansion through various feature films exploring one of the most potent mythological stories in Chinese history. In 2023, Wuershan gave Ne Zha the definitive live-action treatment with Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms, but he is not the main character of this planned trilogy and is relegated as a sidekick, even if an action sequence that showcases his powers is one of the film’s very best.
The 2019 animated movie was so commercially successful that a (dull) spinoff set in the same universe, focusing on Jiang Ziya, was released the following year. Several knockoff animated efforts unrelated to the 2019 film attempted to recapture the same success of Jiaozi’s movie but failed to instill any sort of perennity within audiences in its home country and abroad. When I saw the first Ne Zha in IMAX 3D in 2019 as a Westerner, I enjoyed its show-stopping visuals and the great message at the heart of the movie that encouraged children to be who they are and accept their individuality as a gift and not a curse. However, the character’s significance in China remained a mystery until I saw Wuershan’s adaptation of Xu Zhonglin’s Investiture of the Gods a few years later and realized his importance in Chinese mythology.
That’s why I was slightly shocked that, not even a minute after IMAX tickets were on sale for a one-night-only Early Access screening, the entire auditorium sold out for the sequel and is now outpacing Captain America’s ticket sales at my local venue in record time. Having enjoyed the first film without much caring for its spinoff, I couldn’t imagine how this sequel would blow it out of the water, despite the massive amount of money it’s currently making in Chinese cinemas and, finally, abroad.
Curiosity got the better of me, and here I was, sitting in a sold-out theater on a Saturday afternoon, about to witness what will become the highest-grossing animated film in history in just a few days. After seeing it, not only does Ne Zha 2 massively improve upon the original’s flaws, notably regarding its protagonist, but its animation is so staggeringly jaw-dropping that it may as well be positioned as one of the medium’s greatest-ever technical achievements, with visuals so potent it will take any audience member’s breath away.
Picking up right after the first installment left off, Ne Zha (Lü Yanting) and Ao Bing (Han Mo) are about to have their bodies restored by Master Taiyi (Jiaming Zhhang). But when Ao Bing’s body destroys itself before his soul can fully inhabit it, the master tells him that he should share Ne Zha’s body for a period of seven days if they complete Master Wuliang’s (Deshun Wang) ascension trials. Should they be successful, they will have their bodies fully restored and gain immortality.
For some time, Ne Zha 2 treads in simplicity as the titular character completes the different trials Wuliang has set out for him. Occasionally bathing in gross-out juvenile humor, the movie loses momentum whenever any joke overstays its welcome, such as one action setpiece set around Ne Zha gaining strength by…drinking his own vomit and proceeding to throw up some more. It’s an acquired taste, but the small kids in the packed auditorium did laugh out loud. I didn’t think it was particularly funny or creative, but that was a frequent issue with the first installment, too. It was, at times, too juvenile, while a few years later, Wuershan found the perfect balance between humanism and childishness with his take on Ne Zha in Creation of the Gods. However, Ne Zha accidentally mixing his urine with Wuliang’s holy water was very funny. No one is impervious to the contagious energy – and childish humor – emanating from this picture. If one joke doesn’t get you, the other one most definitely will.
What makes the first half of Ne Zha 2 so compelling, however, isn’t necessarily its protagonist, who doesn’t evolve much from the first movie to the sequel (up until a pivotal turn), but how each trial utilizes a bevy of powers that will all eventually coalesce during its thrilling climax, all differently treated through various generic conventions. The first trial is more comedic in nature, and its action scene has way more slapstick than the others (serving the small kids in the audience, it seems). The second trial has heightened stakes and is more martial arts-coded than the third, a final battle to end all final battles, unashamedly blowing the portals scene from Avengers: Endgame, where the movie’s dramatic crux reaches its emotional apex.
All of them are thrillingly designed, with a sense of scale so huge it can virtually put every single Hollywood animated motion picture to shame. Each action scene tops the last, with colors and depth-of-field so stark it almost feels unreal that such a production could ever produce images of this nature. Of course, as with Wuershan’s Creation of the Gods, each modern iteration of the Investiture of the Gods tips the hat to large-scale epics such as The Lord of the Rings. Ne Zha 2’s opening battle that sets the story up in motion does feel eerily similar to the Helm’s Deep siege from The Two Towers, though with more otherworldly characters and mythologically-charged imagery.
It’s only when the 144-minute-long film reaches its final confrontation between the multiple heroes and antagonists that it becomes way more emotional and intimate than its first part led on, with a twist repurposing the entirety of the story and making its stakes feel way more personal than they already were. Without spoiling a single thing, the emotional textures Jiaozi gives to the animation (shifting from computer-generated 3D to 2D during a pivotal moment) will make you gasp in excitement, unable to process how historical this picture is for the medium and how it’s evolving animated cinema forward in ways that some of its strongest supporters dreamed of seeing. It’ll then be hard to hold back tears when Ne Zha’s parents, Lady Yin (Qi Lü) and Li Jing (Hao Chen), join in on the fight and do something that makes the protagonist feel his humanity so deeply that he’ll never forget it.
One could even hear sniffles in every corner of the room, where, at a critical turn, the large-scale canvas of its animation suddenly diminishes, and a real sense of proximity is felt with the characters, who are all given the right emotional tonalities by its main cast. When Ne Zha’s transformation is complete and he – finally — reveals his full self to the audience, what happens next can’t be described in words but begs to be experienced on your own. The work of transposing such an ambitious world through animation deserves the praise it has been getting, and perhaps even more than what critics have been lauding for the past few weeks in China. Simply put, Ne Zha 2 contains some of the most wondrously astonishing visuals of any modern animated offering, and maybe ever.
What Jiaozi puts on screen is so ambitiously epic and emotionally soul-stirring that, regardless of whether you have difficulty attaching yourself to a story that’s steeped heavily in mythmaking, you’re ultimately won over by how each emotional note is fed through its animation. There isn’t a single stone left unturned in attempting to make this the most beautiful animated movie ever made, whether in its death-defying action, colorful characters, or comedy, which retains the juvenile spirit of the titular protagonist in smaller hit-or-miss doses than the first. Perhaps Western audiences who aren’t familiar with the Investiture of the Gods may be lost in its introduction of side characters via text (who are never seen again), and how it lays the foundation of many fragmented moving parts that will undoubtedly have a role in a planned third installment, but it never feels convoluted, or overcomplicated for the uninitiated to dismiss it.
As expected, Ne Zha 2’s end credits tell us to remain seated for a fairly long stinger, teasing that his adventures are far from over and will likely continue for years to come. If a $2 billion worldwide box office cume is any indicator, we may get fifteen more of these, either focusing on the character itself or on different figures from the Investiture of the Gods. Because Zhonglin’s text is so dense and contains a thousand different thematic underpinnings and storylines you can extract from each individual player, the possibilities are endless. Whatever they have in store, this franchise could go down in history as one that pushed animation in corners no one imagined and breathed new life in a medium frequently labeled as “children’s entertainment.” If anything, Ne Zha 2 is an excellent reminder to anyone that animation is cinema – and for everyone.
SCORE: ★★★1/2
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