By Mihaela Mihailova

Since its US release in February 2025, the Chinese computer-generated feature Ne Zha 2 (Yu Yang, aka Jiaozi, 2025) has continued to fascinate and confound the Anglophone entertainment press. Popular animation blog Cartoon Brew has been obsessively tracking the film’s impressive box office run and chronicling the various profit records it has shattered on its way to achieving its current $2 billion gross.[i] Hollywood news site Deadline has attempted to explain “how it happened” and speculated on the film’s implications for both the American and Chinese animation industries.[ii] Ne Zha 2’s success appears to have taken the majority of US entertainment news outlets by surprise, prompting some to openly wonder how “a sequel that you have likely never heard of” has grossed so much.[iii] These reactions are entirely predictable, as the entertainment blogosphere’s persistent and willful ignorance of global animation remains largely unchecked. Never mind that the original Ne Zha (Yu Yang, 2019) is available to stream on various subscription services and that its box office popularity was covered, with the same incredulous tone, by the very same sources back in 2019.[iv]

To those of us who have followed recent trends in Chinese CG animation, the film’s success did not come as a surprise.[v]I teach White Snake (Amp Wong and Ji Zhao, 2019) as a case study of contemporary digital animation in my “Global History of Animation” course at San Francisco State University. I’ve been singing the original Ne Zha’s praises to anyone interested in looking beyond Hollywood for visually ambitious, fast-paced commercial animation. As a scholar and teacher of digital animation, I am constantly looking for – and always thrilled to find – international animated features which affirm an understanding of digital animation as a rich and diverse global medium with a wide range of aesthetic possibilities, rather than an artform and visual style synonymous with Disney/Pixar or DreamWorks.

First, a note on this review’s focus and its limitations: I cannot speak to Ne Zha 2’s qualities as an adaptation project. For me, a Bulgarian academic educated in the USA, the majority of this film’s extensive literary, mythological, and spiritual references are unfamiliar. This is probably going to be the case for most international viewers, as the feature’s storytelling does not go out of its way to cater to the culturally uninitiated. This is not to say that the plot is difficult to follow, especially for fans of the first film. The story is, in fact, equal parts epic and entertaining, solidifying the franchise’s place in the contemporary blockbuster animation canon. However, there is a layer of references and jokes, likely easily legible to Chinese and diasporic audiences, that was inaccessible to me upon first viewing – an issue exacerbated by the unexpectedly subpar English subtitles accompanying the feature’s original-language release at my local San Francisco theater.

What I can speak to is Ne Zha 2’s epic scope and ambition as a work of digital spectacle. Expanding on its predecessor’s mythology and ramping up the intensity and complexity of that film’s extravagantly lavish digital animation, this sequel is the definition of big-screen entertainment. It is a maximalist project that swings big in every conceivable way, delivering on every item of the blockbuster checklist: monumental scale, non-stop hyperkinetic action, intricate worldbuilding, and technological bravado.

From the standpoint of CG showmanship, Ne Zha 2’s animation is a technical achievement. The textures are vivid and detailed, while the lighting expressively conveys the unique flavor and atmosphere of the film’s numerous fantasy settings. The visual effects are elaborate and convincing, from the various fluid simulation shots (water environments in particular) to the eye-catching particle and atmospheric effects. The art direction is bold and assured, with a flair for the monumental and the ornamental. Ne Zha 2’s digital worlds are vivid, imaginative, sumptuously rendered, and flamboyant in their grandeur. The landscape and environmental design in particular are ostentatious in scale and meticulous in their attention to detail. The dreamlike and majestic Yuxu Palace, for example, exudes divinity with its pristine, symmetrical jade structures and its ethereal lighting and weather effects. On the other side of the tonal spectrum, a shockingly somber sequence offers a chilling reminder of the cost of warfare, as a previously vibrant cityscape is reduced to ashes, the charred remains of its inhabitants a macabre outline against the darkened sky.

The cinematography enhances the spectacle further, with its lingering surveys of the film’s astonishing vistas and its obsessive tracking of the dizzying action. The fight choreography is energetic and inventive, both in the massive army-on-army crowd animation scenes and in one-on-one martial arts duels. As the characters remain in near-constant motion, the complexity and scale of the battle sequences varies from the relatively limited scope of grounded terrestrial scuffles to the sweeping vastness of enormous aerial clashes between factions so large they strain one’s field of vision. In such scenes, the film’s desire to astonish sometimes yields awe-inspiring visual compositions that temporarily arrest the plot progression, foregrounding their animation purely for animation’s sake. For instance, at one point, an army arranges itself in the sky to form a gargantuan glowing tree so stunning it elicited audible gasps in the theater. Such self-indulgence might be grating to some, but Ne Zha 2’s digital artistry has more than earned the right to insist on itself.

The film’s ambitious scope extends to the number and variety of characters it features. From creatures primarily serving as comic relief (the fat-cheeked marmot bandit clan, for instance) to Ao Guang, whose bearing exudes majesty and gravitas both in dragon and human form, Ne Zha 2 is populated with all manner of body shapes and textures. Perhaps due to its expansive cast of heroic and/or supernatural beings, the feature’s character design sensibilities fluctuate widely, particularly when it comes to the human(oid) characters. The fact that a large number of different animation studios lent their labor to this film is especially apparent here, as there is no consistent design philosophy. Instead, the film offers a range of disparate aesthetic choices, from stylized cartoonish designs bordering on the grotesque (such as the titular character himself) to conventionally attractive looks that wouldn’t feel out of place in a C-pop tie-in (such as – spoiler alert – the titular character’s evolved form). Elsewhere, nearly photorealistic CG fur shares the frame with perfectly smooth, filtered-looking human skin, creating distracting visual incongruities. Still, Ne Zha 2 showcases a number of eye-catching fantasy character designs, especially in rendering its numerous hybrid and shape-shifting creatures, including a large army of aquatic and amphibian warriors whose dynamic fight moves make for some spectacular martial arts sequences. The dragons are notable, too, as their distinct color schemes and shape language accents give each of them a unique look, while their shared overall design aesthetic successfully conveys their kinship.

If there is one area in which Ne Zha 2’s maximalism notably backfires, it is the pacing. The film’s runtime of two hours and twenty-three minutes (plus a lengthy mid-credits scene) is unusually bloated for an animated feature and reflects a need for a tighter screenplay. In its desire to show off its visual splendor and ensure that its breathtaking action set pieces will linger in the audience’s mind, the film periodically forgets to rein itself in. A few sequences could have been cut, and others shortened, to avoid overwhelming the viewer with visual and narrative excess. The protracted finale, in particular, can test a viewer’s patience and attention span. The film’s storytelling also stumbles in its bizarre and abrupt tonal shifts. At various points, emotionally resonant or intensely high-stakes scenes are inexplicably followed (or even interrupted) by lowbrow humor and juvenile gross-out gags. One egregiously drawn-out sequence revolves around vomit (and the threat of having to drink said substance), while another one unfortunately delivers on the promise of drinking urine. These scenes’ infantile comedy is incompatible with the film’s overall mood and its adult themes (political power struggles, the weight of fate and duty, and the challenge of finding oneself, among others), and feels irritatingly out of place.

Ultimately, though, these shortcomings do not overshadow Ne Zha 2’s visual grandeur and technical prowess. Even at its most overwhelming and unrestrained, the film is a welcome reminder of the mesmerizing qualities of spectacle-driven digital animation and the promise of global CG aesthetics unburdened by the established formulae of mainstream Hollywood. With this feature, Chinese 3D animation has thrown down the gauntlet; it is now up to producers of commercial digital features worldwide to rise to the challenge.

[i] Amid Amidi, “Ne Zha 2 Hits $2 Billion Milestone,” Cartoon Brew, March 7, 2025, https://www.cartoonbrew.com/box-office-report/ne-zha-2-hits-2-billion-milestone-246351.html

[ii] Nancy Tartaglione, “Ne Zha 2’s $2B+ Box Office Run: How it Happened and What Does Blockbuster Behemoth Mean for China and Hollywood Ahead,” Deadline, March 13, 2025, https://deadline.com/2025/03/ne-zha-2-box-office-china-hollywood-analysis-1236324438/

[iii] Sam Warner, “An Animated Sequel You Haven’t Heard of Is now one of the Biggest Movies Ever,” Digital Spy, February 14, 2025, https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a63797958/ne-zha-2-one-biggest-movies-ever/

[iv] Patrick Brzeski, “How Chinese Animation Film ‘Ne Zha’ Became a Surprise $400M-Plus Hit,” The Hollywood Reporter, August 8, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/how-chinese-animation-film-ne-zha-became-a-surprise-400m-hit-1230167/

[v] Carlos Aguilar, “White Snake Film Review: Epic Saga Heralds New Wave of Chinese Animation,” The Wrap, November 14, 2019, https://www.thewrap.com/white-snake-film-review-china-animation/

Bio:

Mihaela Mihailova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), winner of the Norman McLaren/Evelyn Lambart Award for Best Edited Collection in Animation. She has published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, [in]Transition, Flow, and Kino Kultura. She has also contributed chapters to Animating Film Theory (with John MacKay), Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function, The Animation Studies Reader, and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema. Dr. Mihailova serves as editor of the open-access journal Animation Studies (https://journal.animationstudies.org/) and as president of the Society for Animation Studies. Her current book project, Synthetic Creativity: Deepfakes in Contemporary Media, was recently awarded an NEH grant.