Director – Yang Yu aka Jiaozi – 2025 – China – Cert. 12a – 143m
***1/2
Two supernatural, child warriors battle a plethora of marmots, dragons and immortals – action-packed, animated, spectacular, Chinese box office juggernaut is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, March 21st
All but destroyed by the events in Ne Zha (Yang Yu, 2019), supernatural, child warriors Ne Zha (voice: Lu Yanting) and his companion Ao Bing (voice: Han Mo) are reconstituted thanks to the giant lotus of deity Taiyi Zhenren (voice: Zhang Jiaming). Their new bodies, however, are unstable.
Mistakenly believing Ao Bing dead, his father Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the East Sea (one of four dragon monarchs for each of the seas of the four compass points who live in a vast underground cavern) gives demon Shen Gongbao (voice: Yang Wei) a severed dragon’s claw capable of ripping the sky, and sends him off to the town of Chentang Pass to slash the heavens and cause them to leak lava upon it. A fiery battle ensues.
Meanwhile, after a series of adventures elsewhere including a fight with a hoard of marmots, Ne Zha goes to help heavenly immortal Wuliang (voice: Wang Deshun) as he traps Shen’s forces in a giant cauldron at what is left of Chengtang Pass. Ne Zha’s parents Li Jing (voice: Chen Hao) and Lady Yin (voice: Lu Qi) also arrive with Ao Bing. All of them have, however, reckoned without the treachery of the duplicitous Wuliang… The finale features the transformation of Ne Zha from child to teenager (voice: Joseph Cao).
The film has already earned itself a place in animation box office history as the biggest grossing animated film ever on the strength of its performance in the huge, domestic territory of China alone (and it’s also among the top ten biggest grossing international movies of all time). The storytelling may, perhaps, work well enough for a Mandarin-speaking audience familiar with the mythology from which it’s derived, but Westerners more familiar with Greek mythology and epic Bible stories may find themselves lost since writer-director Yang takes an awful lot for granted and frequently fails to adequately explain who’s who.
Audiences entering the franchise at the start of Ne Zha 2 who haven’t seen its predecessor aren’t given much help to catch up either, so here’s a helpful summation of the first film. A Chaos Pearl is split into its twin components – the Spirit Pearl and the Demon Orb. The former finds its way into the hands of dragons and births Ao Bing (Ao is the surname of all the dragons), while the latter is reincarnated via human parents Li Jing and Lady Yin in the town of Chentang Pass as their demon offspring Ne Zha, whose true nature they keep from him, raising him as a demon hunter. After a series of adventures in which the two child warriors are enemies, Ne Zha and Ao Bing join forces against an outpouring of wrath from heaven, and are all but destroyed.
To be fair, with the two leads being reconstituted out of almost nothing at the start of Ne Zha 2, you don’t really lose that much by not knowing the first film’s finer story points. That said, the prominence in the plot of Chentang Pass is likely to be something of a mystery if you’re unaware it’s Ne Zha’s birthplace.
Some further background: Ne Zha is a popular character from Chinese mythology. He first appeared in the live action silent Birth of Ne Zha (1927 or 1928), while Shanghai Animation Film Studio’s classic Ne Zha Conquers the Dragon King (Wang Shuchen, Yan Dingxian, Xu Jingda, 1979) and Creation of the Gods I (Wuershan, 2023) are undeniable highlights of the twenty-odd films or TV series built around or featuring the character.
The narrative, at least to an English-speaker relying on subtitles – perhaps it works better if you’re fluent in Mandarin and you can pick up more of the subtleties, perhaps not – boasts a plethora of characters and proves hard to follow in places. Both Ne Zha Conquers the Dragon King and Creation of the Gods I do a far better job of explaining their complex networks of characters and intrigues.
Ne Zha 2 trades in spectacle and scale rather than originality. To take the most obvious example: the character of Ne Zha himself, once he turns into a teenager, sports strange, upright black hair which stands on end like tongues of flame, not unlike the central character of long-running anime Dragon Ball Z (TV series, 1989-1996).
Indeed, what the film lacks in places in terms of comprehensible plot it strives to make up for in spectacular visuals and heart-pounding action, with knockabout humour introduced at various points to lighten the tone and make the whole thing more watchable. The dragons are fantastic, and set pieces such as the sky being ripped open by a dragon claw and the imprisoning of dragons in a gigantic cauldron are genuinely breathtaking on an IMAX screen.
Overall, the piece feels like the Chinese mythological equivalent of Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise – lots of technically innovative, intricately detailed and stunningly choreographed action sequences of big monsters fighting one another which look incredible on the big screen, particularly if you’re lucky enough to see them in IMAX. Yet, you don’t really care about the characters beyond the most superficial level.
Ne Zha 2is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday, March 21st.
Trailer: