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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 ?
Every country's entertainment sub-industries will naturally have variations. Most Japanese live-action acting performances are unwatchable to me. I find the Korean music scene (and I'm not just talking about K-pop here) to be a barren wasteland ranging from awful to uninspired. On the other hand, Japanese rock is my favorite genre of music right now and Korean movies are frequently among my favorites.
I would also just add a possible contributing factor from my experience studying multiple languages: I find that Mandarin translates particularly poorly to other languages. None of the East Asian languages translate well to European ones, but works translated from Chinese feel especially uncanny valley to the point I can sometimes recognize them as such just by reading them in English. It feels like a language where a comparatively smaller proportion of meaning is expressed literally, such that connotations don't carry over properly. The structure of the language also means that these things get packed quite densely, so you can either try to awkwardly unpack them and become overly verbose or stay succinct and lose the meaning.
It’s hard (for me, in my limited experience) to imagine a language that translates worse to European languages than Japanese. Similar to what you said about Chinese, it’s heavily context-dependent and relies on a dense web of Japanese cultural associations to express meaning. And yet Japanese media is enthusiastically enjoyed in translation by westerners and people around the world (sometimes with appreciable liberties taken by translators; although I do think it’s basically always possible to find an acceptable translation that respects the original intent of the work).
I know almost nothing about Chinese, so if you’ve studied both Chinese and Japanese and you think Chinese translates even worse to English, I’d be very interested in hearing your perspective.
I think some of it is familiarity. Anime has been available in America since the 1990s for most people, so there’s a bit of exposure to Japanese idiom simply from watching those shows. This makes it somewhat easier both for translators who have had enough source material translated to know how best to approach the language and translate it into English, but because the audience itself is used to Japanese stories, they can pick up enough of the subtext to follow even if they aren’t directly translated. Everyone has seen the 10000 year old child, the demons and demon slayers, the school stories, and so Theres a common thematic vocabulary between Japanese and American fans that doesn’t exist for other countries. If I were to take an Israeli language cartoon and translate it, you don’t know the context and even a good translation would suffer because things the authors expect people to just get are not known in America.
Chinese culture isn’t well known.
Japanese culture wasn't well known in Sweden when me and my non-nerd friends started reading manga and watching anime in the 90s, the stories translated perfectly fine anyway. If anything, the cultural norms and peculiarities were novelties that made the stories stand out. Cultural familiarity has made the stories less attractive not more and to the extent there are cultural products of interests from China its because they are so different (see webnovels). Figuring out things like politeness levels and idioms is trivial and is mostly done in as little as a manga chapter. To the uninformed it mostly just comes off as a well realised fantasy setting.
There is something different going on with China, either it's much harder to translate or the output is just much worse. I would lean towards the latter especially seeing as there are good Chinese works, and sincerely hope they can improve.
The chinese government was heavily censorious for a long time, maybe it still is. It doesn't necessarily have an effect on quality but in practice it does. Look at US cultural output, ever since the creative milieu has gone censorious, as a grass roots effort, the quality of its production has fallen off a cliff.
I would say that they still are and it's pretty obvious, though I suppose some of it is probably self enforced, especially in larger projects through the typical group think dynamics. It doesn't completely kill creativity/quality but it's like a massive wet blanket over everything.
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