By Thomas William Whyke

The opening episode of Yao-Chinese Folktales (Season 2), titled How to Become Three Dragons (2026), arrives carrying both the weight of expectation and the conceptual continuity of its predecessor. Directed by Yang Mu, who also helmed the Season 1 episode She Wolf (2023), the short episode is a deceptively simple parable about three snakes who dream of ascending the celestial bureaucracy by impersonating dragon deities at a parched village shrine.

Figure 1: The three snakes in How to Become Three Dragons (2026)

The premise is straightforward: drought grips a farming village whose people pray fruitlessly to the local dragon god. Three snakes seize the opportunity, posing as deities in exchange for incense and offerings. To sustain the ruse, the fattest brother gulps from an underground spring and spits the water out atop the mountain. Crops recover, the villagers prosper, and the snakes themselves begin to sprout small limbs; earnest service, not divine pedigree, is reshaping them. The legitimate dragon god, infuriated to find a yaoguai (strange/supernatural creature) receiving worship meant for him, scorches the village. The snakes’ first instinct is to flee, but it quickly becomes a decision to act: one realizes his new limbs are for something, climbs the highest peak, and pleads. Lightning answers. The mountain cracks, water gushes down to quench the fires, and all three brothers are reduced to charred husks of snakeskin. A small girl who has known the snakes from the start spots their remains floating in the floodwater. “Father, what are they?” she asks. “What do they look like to you?” “Deities,” she answers. The village rebuilds, a new temple is raised, and a passing traveler asks why their dragons have no horns.

For viewers who arrived at Season 1 expecting traditional retellings of zhiguai (records of the strange)—a genre originating in the Warring States era and flourishing during the Six Dynasties[1]—this episode is something subtly different. Where the infamous episode Goose Mountain from Season 1 reinterpreted Wu Jun’s The Scholar from Yangxian through visual metonymy and metaphor,[2] Yang Mu’s contribution invents an original folktale that nonetheless feels archetypal. The Shanghai Animation Film Studio’s broader rejuvenation of Chinese animation, which began with Season 1’s debut on Bilibili in January 2023—where it gathered 65.24 million views in two weeks[3]—has clearly emboldened experimentation.

The episode’s animation foregrounds a watercolor-meets-line-drawing aesthetic that maintains the minzu/national style at the heart of the Chinese School of Animation.[4] Crucially, this is not simply heritage cosplay. As Huang cautions, treating the Chinese School purely as a repository of inherited motifs reduces a living tradition to a brand.[5] Yang Mu instead deploys this visual vocabulary—misty mountains, ink-washed villages, calligraphic creature design, the deliberate use of negative space, and the “aesthetic of absence” that Du identifies as central to Chinese ink-painting animation—as a stage for distinctly contemporary anxieties.[6] The result performs the transformative role that “revitalizes ancient traditions to resonate with today’s viewership,”[7] becoming neither relic nor pastiche. The snakes’ designs in particular hover between yaoguai iconography and something looser and more cartoonish: an aesthetic choice that lets them be both ancient figures and recognizable working stiffs.

What that contemporary content is, exactly, becomes the most interesting question. Film critic Wuhe Zhiye reads the episode as the spiritual sequel to Nobody (Goose Mountain Little Demons, 2025), arguing that both works carry out a “people’s narrative” conspicuously absent from the Nezha blockbusters.[8] The Nezha (2019/2025) series, for all its “I am the master of my fate, not Heaven” defiance, ultimately stages identity-claiming as a privilege of exceptional individuals—a male-coded fantasy of escaping one’s station. The Goose Mountain piglet in Nobody and the snakes here, by contrast, are not exceptional. They are gig workers of the supernatural economy: small, fraudulent, ambitious, and gradually transformed by the labor of helping people. They dig, they fertilize, and they haul water by night. Their bodies change because their lives do.

This is why the dragon god’s fury matters. Authority here is not interested in outcomes—the village is, after all, finally watered—but in jurisdiction. The “Hundred Demon Tomb” glimpsed earlier in the episode, a graveyard of petrified yao who were doing good when struck down, makes the political reading inescapable. The episode asks who gets to define divinity. Is it bestowed from above, performed through ritual, or earned in mud? The little girl’s answer—“They look like deities”—is the quiet thesis. Recognition flows upward from those who were helped, not downward from those who guard the title.

It is here that the episode borrows tonally from the Nezha discourse while inverting it. The snakes’ sacrifice carries the resonance of Lu Xun’s line that those who carry fuel to fight fires for the masses must not be left to die in the snow. Yet where Nezha lives to inherit heaven, the snakes die so a child can name them. The final, jarring detail—villagers raising a new temple while a traveler notes the missing horns and real snakes slither out from beneath the altar—suggests the cycle is already starting again. Worship has memory, but it is short. Whether the new dragons will deserve their incense remains an open question.

As Season 2 opens, this is a confident, melancholy piece of work. Where Season 1 anxiously interrogated tradition through visual rhetoric, Season 2 begins by asking who tradition is for.

[1] Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996); Kenneth J. DeWoskin, “The Six Dynasties Chih-kuai and the Birth of Fiction,” in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 21–52.

[2] Aiqing Wang and Thomas William Whyke, “From Ancient Zhiguai Tales to Contemporary Animation: A Study of Visual Rhetoric in ‘Yao-Chinese Folktales’ (2023),” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19, no. 1 (2024): 58–75.

[3] “Yao-Chinese Folktales (Zhongguo Qi Tan),” Bilibili, accessed [August 5, 2026], https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/media/md28235401; Li Y., “The Director of Goose Mountain: Displaying the Beauty of ‘Chinese Zhiguai,’” Huaxi Daily, January 15, 2023.

[4] Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s–1970s (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019); Yin Y., “The Chinese School Animation,” Dangdai Dianying [Contemporary Film], no. 6 (1988): 71–79.

[5] Jifeng Huang, “A View of the Definition, Origination and Development of the Term ‘Chinese School of Animation,’” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 17, no. 3 (2022): 318–33.

[6] Du, Animated Encounters, 131.

[7] Wang and Whyke, “From Ancient Zhiguai Tales,” 58.

[8] Wuhe Zhiye 乌合之野, “How to Become Three Dragons: I Salute the Flower beneath the Hooves of Ten Thousand Horses,” Zhihu, 2025, https://www.zhihu.com/question/1989644237545943096/answer/1990266693428220283.

Bio:

Thomas William Whyke is Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.