Nezha 2 is a phenomenal animation work, it is an animation epic that speaks out against the disease of literature and art, it is a deicide uprising against cultural emasculation, it is an oriental fable that smashes colonialism, and it is a collective manifesto of the Chinese animation industry, just as Wandering Planet 2 is for Chinese sci-fi movies, and it will be written in the annals of Chinese cinema.
An animation epic that painfully reveals the disease of literature and art.
Nezha 2 is like a sharp sword, pointing directly at the current disease of artistic and literary creation, the disease of evasion of reality, the fear of depth, the inertia of innovation, the perfunctory treatment of the audience, the subservience to capital, and the knee-jerk worship of the West. Its success is a slap in the face of the entire industry and a deafening enlightenment.
Escape from reality
While the literary world was still using the fairy-fighting formula, Nezha 2 used the myth to criticize education, welfare and ethnic discrimination.
While young people are being crushed by 996 and domesticated by the scrolls, literary works are paralyzing the audience with the Buddhist system of lying down. Nezha2 has chosen a more difficult path. It doesn’t offer cheap consolation, but burns reality with the fire of resistance. If Heaven is against me, I will turn the world upside down… My destiny is my own, not God’s…” This is a pointer to the collective anxiety of the times.
At a time when too many creators are obsessed with safe zones, copying Hollywood routines or replacing thinking with slogans, Nezha’s rebellion in Nezha 2 is sobering. Nezha doesn’t establish a new order in the end, but he tears apart the hypocrisy of the old one and gives the audience hope for a change. This unfinished rebellion is a faithful reflection of reality.
Truly great works of literature and art are never an anesthetic for social pain, but rather a lancet for healing the bones.
Fear of Depth
While some directors are still whitewashing contradictions with happy endings, Nezha 2 dares to sacrifice Nezha’s mother, make the people of Chentang Pass cannon fodder in a game of power, and even expose the fangs of corruption in the Immortal Faction, the embodiment of justice, which is the rarest of all qualities in the world of art and literature.
While some movies rely on vulgarity to build up a sense of fecundity and joy, and use Internet clichés and physical hilarity to put off the audience in the name of connecting with the local community, Ne Zha 2 integrates absurdity into the narrative texture, and this kind of narrative with its mix of laughs and tears is precisely the kind of higher-than-life storytelling that the literary world desperately needs.
While fifth-generation filmmakers are still selling images of rural China, and while the new generation of creators is indulging in the traumatic literature of Little Bourgeois, Nezha 2 focuses on a more essential proposition: How can an individual remain courageous in the face of violence?
Inertia towards innovation
At a time when the industry is obsessed with big data for casting IP safety cards, this bone-crunching demonic child has proved at the box office that audiences are not looking for nipple music, but a sharp blade that can pierce through the fog. Practitioners who complain about the aesthetic inferiority of the audience are merely covering up the impotence of their own creativity.
While some domestic movies complain about technical deficiencies and spend money on celebrities and marketing gimmicks, Nezha 2 proves that real hard power never needs to be bluffed, and that the eyes of the audience are always open.
When Nezha 2 topped China’s movie history, those creators who used the excuse of a hostile environment were, in fact, domesticated cultural beasts. They were kneeling down not because of the heavy shackles, but because they had long forgotten the instinct to stand up.
Perfunctionality to the audience
Audiences have never rejected profundity, the market has never rejected criticism, and capital has never stifled innovation, as long as the work is sincere and courageous.
When the second part of the God of Enlightenment met its Waterloo due to its westernized adaptation, and when some IP films are still repeating the old formula of flow and special effects, Nezha 2 proves that only by taking root in local culture and respecting the laws of creativity and building up an industrial system can it win the audience’s lasting recognition.
While the entire industry kneels before the altar of traffic, capital and safe narratives, Nezha’s mixed silk is strangling the throat of contemporary literature and art, forcing it to spit out its domesticated soul.
Kneeling to the West
When the aesthetics of recognizing one’s father is so prevalent in the literary world, Nezha’s phrase “My life is in the hands of God, not my father” is a declaration of war against the entire production chain. True freedom of creativity requires that the spiritual umbilical cord in the name of the lighthouse be severed.
When Nezha burned down the list of the Gods with his threefold fire, what he burned down was more than a scroll of heavenly destiny. It was the security of creating on one’s knees, and the calculation of pleasing the market.
While some directors use orientalist aesthetics to curry favor with international film festivals or use Hollywood templates to create pseudo-blockbusters, Nezha 2 chooses a more difficult path. It uses three heads and six arms to deconstruct traditional myths, and uses steampunk to reshape classical imagery, ultimately constructing a postmodern narrative that belongs to the East.
The disease in the literary world is never caused by external forces, but by endogenous cowardice and speculation. Only by breaking the stereotype can literature and art be truly reborn.
When we rebuild the temple on the ruins of culture, we will recall the prophecy of this magical child If literature and art are destined to bow down to power and capital, I would rather it die with a bang.
II The Deicide Uprising Against Cultural Emasculation
In the name of the Mandate of Heaven, the demon race was integrated into the hierarchical order, and in the name of merit, those who resisted were made into institutional thugs, and in the name of predestination, the legitimacy of individual freedom was eroded.
This is a true reflection of contemporary literary creation, when capital domesticates creators by the laws of the market, censorship castrates imagination by the correct orientation, and the audience is reduced to the livestock of cultural consumption through algorithmic feeding.
When creation is reduced to a data game, when the audience is alienated into a flow battery, art becomes a sacrifice to the alchemy of capital.
While the literary world is still using the spirit of Nezha to package chicken-soup comebacks, Nezha 2 has already transformed the protagonist from rebel to martyr. Instead of defeating Heaven, Nezha ultimately chooses to expose the evils of the Heavenly system through self-destruction, which completely dissolves the hypocrisy of the traditional hero’s narrative.
The Collective Declaration of China’s Animation Industry
The success of Ne Zha 2 has become a landmark in the rise of China’s animation industry. From technological development to narrative innovation, from capital infusion to audience recognition, behind this film stands the collective will of the entire Chinese animation industry. We have transformed from a lone warrior into a multitude of actors working together.
The production of Nezha 2 is a parade for China’s animation industry. The particle effects in the Dragon Palace scene simulate the refraction of a real body of water, the rendering of the jade material in the Jade Palace achieves nanometer precision, and the cluster algorithm that accommodates 200 million characters in a single frame is the first of its kind in the world. Behind these technological breakthroughs is the synergy of domestic companies Some people specialize in fluid dynamics simulation, some people plowing facial micro-expression capture, some people break through the bottleneck of large-scale dynamic rendering. This industrialized production mode of division of labor and collaboration has completely broken the plight of Chinese animation, which has long relied on workshop-style creation.
What is more praiseworthy is that the film puts technology at the service of aesthetics. The visual hedge between the fury of Samadhi fire and the coldness of Ao Beng’s frost and the oppression of power under the holy appearance of the Jade Palace are conveyed through the highly saturated white color, and this trinity of technological aesthetics and narration signifies that China’s animation has stepped from the age of show-offs into the stage of artistic self-awareness. As director Dumpling said, the special effects team is no longer a tool, but a co-creator.
Yang Jian of Chasing Light Animation tries his hand at cyberpunk mythology, while Jiang Ziya of Colorful House explores existentialist narrative, and together with Nezha 2, they build a multifaceted universe of Chinese mythological cinema.
The film builds an ecological closed loop through crowdfunding for derivatives, open-source virtual production technology, and an incubation program for animation talents. According to statistics, more than 30 small and medium-sized animation companies have upgraded their technology by participating in the Nezha 2 project.
According to statistics, more than 30 small and medium-sized animation companies have realized technological upgrading by participating in the Nezha 2 project. This development mode of the head leading the waist is changing the industrial pattern of Chinese animation. As Tian Xiaopeng, director of Great Sage Returns, said, the success of Nezha 2 is not a coincidence, but proves that the capital, technology, and talent pool of Chinese animation has formed a positive cycle.
The upgrading of “My Fate is Mine but Not Heaven’s” to “My Fate is Mine but Not Others’” not only continues the young group’s pursuit of individual value, but also touches on the emotional pain points of middle-aged viewers through the intergenerational conflict between the father and son of the Dragon King and the anxiety of the Shen Gongbao family’s class transition. This all-age narrative design breaks the stereotype of animated films as being young.
What’s more interesting is the audience’s spontaneous creative ecology. The O-Ping makeup video on B-station has had over 100 million views, the Nezha 2 political metaphor topic on Zhihu has generated 100,000 discussions, and the Xiaohongshu Magic Child parenting notes have become the bible of the parents’ community. Such multidimensional cultural breakthroughs prove that Chinese animation has the ability to build super cultural symbols.
The 2025 industry white paper released by the China Animation Association points out that the Nezha2 phenomenon marks the entry of Chinese animation into the era of 30, from 0 OEM imitation to 0 individual breakthroughs to 30 systematic battles. On this journey, there are head companies such as Chasing Light and Colorful Strip House leading the way, hundreds of small and medium-sized teams ready to go, and countless audiences voting at the box office, which is perhaps the most moving picture of Chinese animation for all walks of life.
The value of Nezha 2 lies in the fact that it allows the entire industry to see that when capital is no longer short-sighted, when technology is no longer flashy, and when creativity returns to the heart, the starry sea of Chinese animation is by no means illusory. For those practitioners who are still complaining that audiences don’t understand art and that the environment isn’t tolerant enough, it’s time to let go of their arrogance and prejudice. After all, behind the box office stands 1.4 billion people who are awakening to their cultural self-confidence.
Smashing the colonialist fable of the East
The blindingly white columns of the Jade Palace are a mirror image of the white-domed building in Washington, DC. This center of theocracy, which boasts of orthodoxy, monopolizes the resources of immortal cultivation through the system of the list of deities, just as the United States, which claims to be a beacon of democracy, builds a hierarchical order with the SWIFT system, military alliances, and intellectual property barriers.
The white-headed eagle with its wings lifted on the Green Immortal Registration Card obtained by Ao Beng is a bitter mockery of the myth of American immigration. The so-called admission ticket to the land of opportunities is actually a talent harvester for absorbing elites from all over the world and consolidating the hegemony.
The symbol of the US Dollar appears on the surface of the Heavenly Yuan Tripod, which suppresses the Dragon Race, and its operation mechanism is a perfect replica of the monetary hegemony of the Federal Reserve. The Immense Immortal Weng manipulates the Tianyuan Tripod to absorb the aura of the four seas, just like the US dollar plundering the dividends of the global economy through the oil-bound debt trap and quantitative easing.
The Demon Catching Team dispatched by the Jade Void Palace, dressed in standard armor, searches the world for illegal Immortal Cultivators, whose behavioral logic is strikingly similar to the narrative of NATO’s Eastward Expansion and the Middle East’s War on Terrorism. The groundhog spirit’s worn-out rice bowl overlaps with the image of Afghan children picking up the leftovers of American troops.
The stigmatization of the Shen Gongbao family as terrorists in the demon world is a magical reflection of the untried prisoners at Guantanamo.
The film’s deliberate use of lofty terms such as purification and upholding the way of heaven by the demon hunters exposes the linguistic corruption of hegemonic legitimization of violence, just as the U.S. military uses the export of democracy to package regime subversion, and counterterrorism to legitimize drone killings.
The light vessel held by Ao Beng casts distorted shadows at the bottom of the sea, alluding to the universal lie of American values. When this self-proclaimed lighthouse keeper is eventually turned into a hegemonic henchman, the audience outside the screen has already understood how many countries have been plunged into darkness under the light of freedom, from the Color Revolution to the Chip War.
The Dragon King’s line, “My people have been exploiting underwater veins for thousands of years, but why are we slaves forever?” has revealed the century-long blood tears of the global South, in which the resources of the country have been plundered and the right to development has been stifled. The film sets up the dragons as a group of marginalized people who have mastered the core technology of making clouds and rain, accurately mapping the technological siege suffered by Huawei, DJI and other Chinese technology companies.
When the Dragon King of the East China Sea leads his people to smash the Tian Yuan Ding, what happens on the screen is not only a spark of special effects, but also an echo of the history of the BRICS countries’ promotion of local currency settlement and the Middle East oil-producing countries’ struggle to break away from the petro-dollar.
The epic scene in which Nezha allies with the dragons to break the Tianyuan Tripod is a metaphorical expression of the Belt and Road Initiative Unlike the zero-sum game of hegemony, this kind of resistance based on equality and mutual benefit is reshaping the new paradigm of South-South cooperation. When the people of Chentangguan no longer fear the threat of the demon world, and instead show their solidarity with the dragons, the wisdom of the Global Security Initiative (GSI) in the real world has already appeared on the screen. Security is indivisible, and destiny must be shared.
Nezha’s establishment of a new heavenly court, which ends in a rebirth amidst the ruins, is the most elegant way to counter the Chinese threat. Unlike Hollywood heroes, who always replace old hegemonies with new ones, Nezha 2 presents a more Eastern vision of order. Nezha cuts through the oppressive system of gods and goddesses rather than destroying all the rules, and he preserves the ruins of the Jade Palace rather than transforming it into a new one, hinting at a respect for the diversity of civilizations.
This philosophy of “break, not build” is in stark contrast to some countries that are keen to export their systems and push for the expansion of their values. As the film ends with the line “If there is no road ahead, I will make my own road”, China is proving that the road to modernization is not a one-way street, through the rise of civilized nations.
The West may still be waiting for its own Godslayer, but the East has long since realized that true freedom is never achieved by taking over the torch of the greatest power, but by lighting its own threefold flame.
While Disney uses fairy tales to gloss over imperial violence, and Hollywood uses superheroes to promote universal values, Nezha 2 uses the retelling of myths as a blade to slice open the flesh of the contemporary international order, a spiritual uprising against neo-colonialism. It uses the white walls of the Palace of Jade and Void as a canvas, burns the hegemony of the US dollar with the fire of samadhi, and turns the roar of the dragons of the East China Sea into the awakening declaration of the Third World.
Images are from the internet, please contact to delete if there is any infringement.
The world is unpredictable, please add the author’s private WeChat in case of any mishaps
Tap the star on the watch Support Mouse Mom!
Leave a Reply