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Is NeZha 2 any good ?
NeZha2 is China's first big blockbuster. It's being heralded as a 'Deepseek moment' for Chinese cinema and I'm confused.
I saw NeZha 1 with my Chinese roommates and I didn't like it. The animation was expensive, but had a stock footage-ness to all of it. The jokes were Minions-esque slapstick and the core story was straight out a children's book. The movie felt miles behind nuanced works like InsideOut or Up. Ghibli is on a whole another planet. Minions is probably the analogy I would go for. Note - I saw it in Mandarin with subtitles, with a PRC Chinese person explaining any nuance I might've lost.
Now, the Minions movies made a ton of money and the west's block busters have been especially bad post-covid. I get it, it's kettle calling the pot black. Normies have terrible taste, so I'm going to avoid equating commercial success with quality. My comment is from the perspective of taste.
And I am a China optimist. My best friends are PRC Chinese and they're smart. I don't doubt that Chinese companies can compete in global entertainment or automobile markets. But why is everything that comes out of PRC China so tasteless ? There is clear absence of nuance, craft and love in every industrialized piece of crap that comes out of there. Deepseek is special because it feels inspired. DJI & Nothing also have a spark within them. But elsewhere it feels competently executed but empty. Nezha is no different. Great execution, no soul.
Is this hype organic ? Am I just a hater ?
I have nothing useful to add, since I hadn't heard of the franchise till about 4 hours ago, when someone was lauding it as a resurgence in Chinese soft power in my Twitter feed.
That being said, it gives me hope that I'll see some proper high-budget Xianxia adaptations, and soon-ish. Hopefully adaptations of the good novels!
which xianxia would you consider one of the good ones? My faves are anything from Er Gen unironically.
I still don't know if people say Er Gen is good unironically or not, though your comment updates me towards the former.
I would say Reverend Insanity, even in its unfinished state, is a 10/10 novel. Contender for best novel I've ever read in fact. I'm trying to hold off re-reading it until my memory fades enough for it to feel fresh again.
Forty Millenniums of Cultivation is a good one, an 8/10 IMO. It was good enough for me to get frustrated reading awful MTL and then track down raws and translate them with modern SOTA LLMs that do a better job.
I never got very far into Lord of the Mysteries, but by all accounts it's supposed to be very good.
Maybe I should have mentioned what I have read so maybe we can get some wilder recommendations from everyone. My top tier list was pretty much mentioned by others but I'll put it here:
Er Gen was my gateway xianxia so his writing and tropes are very dear to me personally. Also I think he does world-building descriptions so much better than other authors and the semi-philosophical discussions just hits the sweet spot for me. I would rank his works Pursuit of Truth (or Beseech the Devil) >= Renegade Immortal > I Shall Seal the Heavens > the others.
I think the best power systems are from Cuttlefish Loves Diving, and that Embers Ad Infinitum is a way more complete work than LotM. But I think LotM moments are way more hype and satisfy more of the power-fantasy.
I think the best Xianxia's I've read is without a doubt either Tales of Herding Gods or Ze Tian Ji. I felt like I was becoming a better person reading those two works. Maybe the most contemplative is Pivot of the Sky though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Some other good ones are like World of Cultivation or Top Tier Providence.
I actually don't like I-Eat-Tomatoes works, I think they're too repetitive.
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