Ne Zha 2 (2025)

The wild thing about Ne Zha 2 is that it’s one of the highest grossing films ever, and nobody outside of China has heard about it. This film had a huge budget, and it seems that most it went towards the animation (and a massive domestic advertising campaign). And it paid off: this film was visually spectacular! Unfortunately, for me the animation couldn’t make up for an annoying protagonist, shaky plot, and rather long run time.

Like its predecessor, there were some nice, moving moments, which were immediately offset by the excessive amounts of unnecessary gross-out humour. And when the humour wasn’t gross, it was reusing the same punchlines as the first film. This guy is fat and an alcoholic… and that’s pretty much all.

For the most part, i was impressed with the animation. Everything is vivid and rendered with detail. There’s a lot of flying and magic effects to really show off how advanced the technology is these days. The one downside was that the scale of the final battle was so large that it was almost entirely shown with the individual fighters only a pixel high each, which took away from the scale of the proceedings.

The plot was mostly a generic battle between good and evil and sort-of good and sort-of evil, and this was made clear throughout, but it always felt somewhat surface level. I think that there was a lot of room for deeper exploration of these themes, but it just never really landed.

And in a recurring theme, which maybe means that i’m the problem here, the protagonist was still kind of annoying. There are very likeable annoying little child protagonists, but Ne Zha is not one of them. Ao Bing is great, but he has to share the screen with the titular character, and i just wish he didn’t.

Although this film is incredibly popular within china, it didn’t quite do it for me.