Wild Child: NE ZHA 2

The bright and bouncy animated adventure sequel Ne Zha 2 is far and away the biggest movie of the year so far at the worldwide box office. It’s gotten nearly $2 billion to date, and shows little sign of slowing down. It’s a global crowd-pleaser, with a likable lead character and epic cartoony action that nonetheless knows how to pause to bring down the hammer of emotion. By the time you get to an emotional peak of the climax and find the title character, a little demon boy with a heart of gold, embracing his mother tightly, both of them weeping as they face certain doom in the fiery pit of the villain’s evil plot, it’d be tough to be unmoved. Yet you probably wouldn’t know much about this movie if you relied on the usual American mass media. Aside from some nods from showbiz reporters tallying up the grosses, this hit has gone largely unreviewed. Metacritic logs just two reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes has only aggregated six. That the movie’s nonetheless accumulated nearly $20 million thus far from American multiplexes is a sign that the word is getting out. And yet that it has done so to near silence from the usual sources of English-language criticism is an astonishing example of the provincial timidity of our media as it consolidates its coverage, contracts its scope, and nervously narrows its aims. It’s what Jonathan Rosenbaum was complaining about thirty years ago, the synergistic, parasitic demands of thoroughly corporate studios, media, and exhibitors artificially putting limits on the audience’s interests.

So here’s Ne Zha 2, a delight from beginning to end despite its 144-minute run time. It continues the story of the first picture, which introduced audiences to little Ne Zha, a scamp who looks like the British Dennis the Menace and acts like an anime hero filtered through Moana’s rounded sentimentality and Dreamworks' spiky silliness. He’s fighting his fate, trying desperately to battle the bad and uplift the good. It’s a story settled firmly in a loosely retold cinematic universe of Chinese mythology, and to a typical Western audience it’ll be occasionally baffling. (Try imagining getting dropped into a dense Hercules riff with no prior knowledge of Greek myth.) But writer-director Yang Yu has crafted a movie that moves like Hollywood blockbuster, even as it is so deeply informed by its cultural perspective. There are wars between immortal gods and trickster figures, jade palaces in the clouds, villages endangered by supernatural forces, gurus training students, martial arts, dragons, comic relief, and massive armies preparing for showdowns. It has the peaks and valleys, and twists and catharsis, a movie on this scale should deliver to its popcorn matinee audiences.

It’s satisfying, and easy to want more from its mythology unfurling as a backdrop to a lovable character just trying his best to be his best. The world is imagined well, with colorful complications and elaborate staging. The characters are vividly drawn and immediately appealing—from little Ne Zha to his roly-poly master, his noble parents, his ice-blue dragon-brother, and a big babyfaced deity. The writing is heart-felt and well-crafted to a sturdy family adventure formula, from escalating tension to kiddie humor asides. The action is well-choreographed, and takes advantage of the careening velocity and precision in framing that only a computer-animated sequence can pull off. Watching it, I got the feeling of being a foreigner looking in on something huge on which I’m almost missing out. This must be what international audiences feel watching blockbusters from us. It’s no more a work of Chinese propaganda than Hollywood blockbusters are visions of American hegemony. If you can believe only New York’s superheroes can stop international supervillains, or only a United States-led coalition can stop an alien invasion, you can hang with some Eastern mythology as it's rendered in vivid colors, appealing characters, and agreeable spectacle.