Ne Zha (2019)
Chinese animated children's movie. The sequel recently made headlines for being the highest grossing animated movie in history... which by itself isn't saying very much, China has a lot of people, a lot of which, in this day and age, can afford to regularly see movies. Nevertheless, I took it as an opportunity to check out the first movie from 2019.
Ne Zha is loosely based on a Chinese myth. After vanquishing a demon, a taoist deity seperates its essence into its demonic and its pure aspect. He sends both of these aspects to earth to be reincarnated. However, due to an evil plot by his treasonous servant Shen Gongbao, the demonic aspect ends up reincarnated as the titular Ne Zha the son of a couple of noble human warriors while the pure aspect is reincarnated as Ao Bing, the offspring of the banished dragon king. Ne Zha is a mischievous kid, ostracized by the people of his town because of his demonic heritage. The gods bumbling servant Taiyi instructs him in the martial and mystical arts until the day he has to face off with Ao Bing.
There has been quite a surge of Chinese media recently and if I had to describe it bluntly, it regularly seems to present an attempt to find a middle ground between Japanese and Western style of writing, often but not always grounded by Chinese folklore. Accordingly, Ne Zha is effectively the middle ground between a shonen anime and a Dreamworks animated comedy. It doesn't to a bad job at being either of those, truth be told. Aspects of it reminded me a bit of the original Dragon Ball (unsurprisingly, I suppose, considering its inspirations) but all things considered it's very much its own beast.
It has the fancy over the top fight scenes and it has the low brow slapstick jokes. And it mostly does well with both of them. In terms of making Wuxia palatable for a globald audience it's not quite as good as an Avatar the Last Airbender but a decent bit better than Raya and the Last Dragon, for what it's worth. It's quite nice to look at, particularly the environments and action scenes. Some of the characters outside of the main cast look a bit stiff. But from a technical perspective, it's a well produced movie.
There is not much for me to say against this. It looks nice. The jokes are mostly funny, the emotional moments are mostly emotional, the characters are entertaining and memorable. I actually think Ne Zha is a very fun protagonist. It's nice to get a movie like that from the perspective of a bratty, precocious child. The morals are as good as you can expect from a kids movie
Between their film, literature, animation and video game industry, there seems to be a genuine push by Chinese artists and the studios backing them to reach out beyond their own borders and create media for a global audience. As someone who believes that there is no such thing as too great a diversity in artistic expression, I'm all in a favour of that.
I don't think Ne Zha is a masterpiece in animation, but neither does it fall short of the average of studios like Disney or Dreamworks. It's a fun and well made animated family action comedy that might introduce children all over the world to a culture and mythology they might otherwise never have learned about and is quite entertaining to boot. It makes a fine argument for animation produced outside the english speaking world and I do find that appreciable.
