Ne Zha 2 – Highest Grossing Animated Film of All Time – Review
It was difficult to know what to expect from Ne Zha 2. In one of the biggest stories in animation this year, the Chinese feature has become far and away the highest grossing animated film of all time, achieving the milestone before releasing widely in the west. The fizzling curiosity surrounding the film was worth tempering. Being the highest grossing animated film of all time is not always a sign of quality with Ne Zha 2’s predecessors being a soulless remake and a middling sequel, both courtesy of the Disney corporation. But becoming the first animated movie to ever break the $2 billion mark means audiences keep returning to Ne Zha 2, and it proves to boil down to one simple reason – this film is pure cinematic spectacle.
© Trinity CineAsia
What can be said other than the stock phrases journalists wheel out to express a sense of scale and wonder unexplainable without the shorthand attached to “jaw-dropping” and “awe-inspiring?” From its opening act, Ne Zha 2 is throwing out imagery you simply haven’t seen put onto a screen before, as the skies are infested by dragons weaving through waterfalls of lava which spill from the heavens onto the land of Chentang Pass. It culminates in a version of the battle scenes we’re used to from Lord of the Rings movies and Avengers: Endgame, but with a scale that surpasses them both so wholly that the only way it can be depicted is as two groups of particles floating into one another.
The first installment in the Ne Zha franchise was decent, showing promise of something greater. The 2019 effort is a serviceable origin story for Ne Zha, a character imbued with a demonic force at birth who learns to control his darker impulses and unite with his angelic counterpart, Ao Bing. Through the rushed story and poor jokes, it was the action which made Ne Zha stand out, something director Jiaozi clearly has a keen eye for.
Ne Zha 2 is a significant leap in quality in all these areas. The plot is sprawling and twisty (with flaws but still more engaging than the first), the humour works a bit more (other than the fatphobic treatment of the Master Taiyi character) and the already great action is put into overdrive. Ne Zha 2 is able to find a unique identity with its depiction of magical martial arts, not only in the moments of unimaginable scale, but in the way more grounded battles are cut and shot. There’s a great understanding of when action should be fast and almost unintelligible and when to slow it down, with Ne Zha doing the Zack Snyder thing better than he ever could, using the camera in constantly interesting ways, whether with harsh zooms or sprawling oners.
This is enabled by Ne Zha being a CG franchise, one whose first installment made sacrifices in the character design and overall visual splendour in order to take advantage of what you can do with a camera in CG. The technological leap to Ne Zha 2 is palpable, textures are more tactile, skin has more detail and environments are pushed to more creative extremes.
© Trinity CineAsia
As much as this sequel improves over the original, there is still some shakiness in the storytelling. This comes naturally from expanding the scope of the story, with Ne Zha having to travel to a heavenly realm and undergo a series of challenges in order to obtain an elixir powerful enough to form a new body for Ao Bing, who begins the movie in spirit form. There are big swings in the multiple twists the story takes, some are genuinely shocking, some feel incredibly obvious and some just don’t sit right in the moment. This isn’t helped by the way the film is translated into English subtitles, which are riddled with grammatical errors, meaning it’s possible that I misinterpreted some key scenes.
The film also has an attempt at a message, one about the relationship between humans, immortals and demons mapping onto class structures in the real world, but those elements in this fantasy reality don’t feel fleshed out enough for that to have any weight. We have no sense of how or why these prejudices are propagated, making this commentary come off quite feeble, even if it isn’t one of the main goals of the movie.
Ne Zha 2 achieves almost everything it sets its sights on, exhibiting action on the largest scale we’ve seen from animated movies in a long time. In that sense, Ne Zha 2 offers something that rarely comes from Hollywood animation. Other than the Spider-Verse movies, which can do more than go toe-to-toe with what Ne Zha 2 has on display, big action spectacle is saved for live-action, and animation, the medium with more possibilities, is expected to trade in light and whimsey rather than blood and thunder. Ne Zha 2 is yet another taste of what animation is capable of.
Ne Zha 2 is out in UK and Irish cinemas from 21st March 2025.