The Secrets of ‘Ne Zha 2,’ the Highest-Grossing Animated Film of All Time

The oddest part about Ne Zha 2 hitting fifth on the all-time worldwide box office leaderboard after last weekend, having inched past Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that on paper, nothing about it seems all that remarkable. Though based on the 16th century Chinese novel Investiture of the Gods, there’s shades of big name anime like Dragon Ball and Naruto, utilizing the epic godly combat and juvenile humor of the former with the core narrative hook of the latter–the titular Ne Zha has the heart of a demon, complicating his relationships with everyone around him, providing a dark yet heartwarming subtext. But then, big box-office animated films don’t generally take after anime. Or at least, not the parts of it that themselves derive from centuries-old Chinese novels.

After the success of Inside Out 2 last year (ninth on the overall leaderboard), predictions of the imminent demise of American animated film seemed premature. Animated film in particular tends to travel better internationally because it’s usually dubbed. Ne Zha 2 represents an unusual challenge to the hegemony of American animated film in that it looks and feels completely different from its main competition. It has no self-referential humor but does have entirely sincere stakes. There are also fart jokes. This eclectic combination is the end result of a very ambitious, very long term project that started with the first Ne Zha movie. Incidentally, it’s free to watch on the Roku Channel, and if you really want to know what all the hubbub is  about, the English voices are pretty good.

Ne Zha was no slouch itself at the Chinese box office, earning seven hundred million dollars in 2019. This isn’t quite the two billion dollars managed by Ne Zha 2, but it does offer the first hint as to how the sequel became such a big hit. While Ne Zha is a great film in its own right, it was also an untested concept. The director Jiaozi had minimal formal experience in animation, with his main proof to concept being Through It, a 15-minute film that did well on the international festival circuit but which, like most fifteen minute films on the festival circuit, didn’t have much future beyond that.

But it was enough to impress Yi Qiao, the CEO of Colorful Dream Studio, who gave Jiaozi five years to come up with something truly great. Jiaozi decided his adaptation of Investiture of the Gods would unite two contrasting tones to create a surprisingly serious meditation on death, personal sacrifice, and body horror. What makes the Ne Zha films so appealing to kids, and incidentally to everyone else, is that they embrace the farce of life. There’s no whiplash mainly because there aren’t any gratuitous quips to break the sense of immersion. Events in the script don’t emerge from  the hero’s journey, but the desires of the characters themselves, which often interact in terms of bewildering personality clash.

The movies can focus on tone, rather than scripting, mainly because Investiture of the Gods already has a fairly solid narrative. Ne Zha 2 quite literally picks up right where the first film left off, and while it’s certainly still watchable without knowing the first movie’s callbacks, these function in terms of identifying how far the characters have come since the first part of the story. Investiture of the Gods is not an episodic narrative- these aren’t stock characters. Ne Zha himself is dark, rebellious, and doesn’t clearly map onto any archetype. Appropriately, much of the conflict in Ne Zha is about what the title character chooses to become. The story does not presume that he must become something in particular, even if the will of the heavens is clearly expecting a certain outcome.

These distinctions are quite nuanced, so it’s little surprise that most writing about Ne Zha 2 has avoided talking about the actual stories these movies are telling compared to discussing the scale of investment. But money isn’t everything. While earlier parts of Ne Zha’s production considered outsourcing animation to top Hollywood studios, ultimately, the quality just wasn’t good enough. The issue had as much to do with cultural context and a desire to make something genuinely new as with the quality of the work Hollywood puts out these days. This philosophy, to do the very best possible, to go big or go home, is how the action climax of Ne Zha 2 reaches straight up otherworldly levels.

Having gone through the whole filmmaking process once and noting the feedback, Ne Zha 2 was quite literally able to build on the foundations of Ne Zha much as subsequent chapters of Investiture of the Gods can build upon previous ones. The post-credits scenes of the Ne Zha films serve a very different function compared to the Marvel films that invented the trend. You could go read the next chapter of Investiture of the Gods right now and see exactly what’s going to happen next. These aren’t teases–it’s a preview.

This whole philosophy is anathemic to the way Hollywood is currently producing films, animated or otherwise. The industry has become notorious for producers simply failing to realize that reshooting is much, much more cost-intensive in animation compared to live action. At one point Disney actually put out a documentary explaining how they made Frozen 2 in an incredibly stupid way. When companies salivate at the prospect of AI domination, it’s worth noting that this is mainly because AI theoretically makes it possible to do arbitrary last-minute changes, without ever once questioning whether this is something they should even be trying to do in the first place.

Something else that’s been very easy to forget in the wake of artificial intelligence hype is that good stories are more than just their quick concept. They have to speak to some deeper anxiety about the world. It’s easy to see how Jiaozi could identify so strongly with Ne Zha, a boy who seems doomed for reasons beyond his control who’s only able to find a new path through collaborative trial and error, with no guarantee that any choice he makes won’t have potentially horrific consequences.

That right there is a tale of modernity, despite the age of the source material. Indeed, it’s so on the nose that I think a better question than how China was able to make a movie like Ne Zha 2 is why the United States can’t. The U.S. has  undergone massive cultural changes just like China has in the last couple of decades. Yet Hollywood still overwhelmingly relies on a Marvel formula that quite literally predates Obama, and, not coincidentally, seems to take for granted the fact that we should accept that the world is hopelessly dysfunctional and not ask too many questions about why our authority figures aren’t terribly interested in fixing it.

Quality alone wouldn’t have gotten Ne Zha 2 far without the domestic Chinese market. The big headline about Ne Zha 2 has been that China doesn’t need the United States to compete at a global scale, but that’s looking at the situation backwards. One funny subtext of the whole Ne Zha 2 story is that the film broke a record for Chinese films at the American box office…by earning over 10 million dollars in limited release.

If Ne Zha 2 has the distribution in the United States that Inside Out 2 did in China, there’s a good chance this would be the highest grossing movie of all  time, not just the best-performing animated film. Hollywood has been coasting on the handicap of its existing distribution advantages, believing that their preeminence is a matter of destiny. Well, as Ne Zha 2 has just shown us all, destiny can be changed.