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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'm late but I finally saw it and here are my two cents:
The movie is being mentioned in the same breath as Black Myth: Wukong for a reason - to anyone who's seen it at all, the quality is so obvious that it's difficult to smear it. Of course, this has its own problems, like the movie being used as a canard to beat the nationalism drum inside and outside China.
It's not perfect. The scatological humor causes whiplash with some of the more dramatic, somber and darker sequences. It's too long and the third act emotional high points are dragged out too much. But on a visuals and animation perspective this matches, or even clears, the already high bar in animated features set these last couple of years by studios not owned by the Mouse.
Someone more technically minded than me can probably explain it more accurately, but there are high benchmarks for water, fire, chains, all kinds of effects and lighting playing off each other in the same sequences, nearly all of them highly dynamic action ones with wuxia sfx married to high-octane kung-fu choreography. There are also multiple instances of what I've taken to calling 'animator's animation sequences' in this, where a sequence was clearly boarded and done in animatic and the animation team were so pleased with the animatic that they didn't want to cut any of it (The Wild Robot has multiple of these sequences).
Oh, and on a writing standpoint I have zero clue how a western audience will react to this. The cosmology and worldview is distinctly Chinese; everyone in the movie understands the will to power, and in the hierarchy of heavenly bureaucracy and tiers shit rolls downhill. It is the fate of those who are below others to suffer at the whims of those above them, and the only way is to attain power yourself. Those who are below die horrible deaths, or worse, so striving for higher and greater by any means necessary is considered normal.
Final note: the movie's director ('Jiaozi' or 'Dumpling') has one of the most crazy origin stories to the point where I almost wonder if it's made up propaganda. He got a degree in pharma, then a job in marketing, and then threw it all away to do nothing but study animation for 3 years after his dad died and his mom was jobless, subsisting on his mother's 1000RMB a month retirement pension. As of last week, the guy became the highest grossing film director of all time in China, which is hilarious.
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