Mar 19 2025, 12:30 PM, updated 9 months ago
Readers might recall the moment in the mid-2010s when Hollywood blockbusters suddenly seemed a lot less, well, American. The big-budget movies of the 1980s and 1990s were often so alluring to young Brits because of the exotic domestic details to be found in the cracks. (All that unfamiliar branded fast food!)
But in the early 21st century, as globalisation powered on, and China’s cinema market opened up to western produce, a memo went round the business: no more knobbly cultural specificities that might alienate that potentially enormous audience, or rile the censors guarding the gates.
Now that China’s own state-supervised cinema industry has ramped itself up to a Hollywood-rivalling scale, one can’t help but be a little hurt by the fact that the favour has absolutely not been reciprocated.
Ne Zha 2 – a $2 billion smash in its home country, and as of two weeks ago, the most successful animated film ever made anywhere – is, for the international viewer (or this one, anyway), an absolute headache to sit through. By turns frantic, gaudy and puerile, it’s supremely hard to latch onto emotionally, despite the scads of roared exposition that break up the otherwise relentless fight scenes in the second half.
Like its 2019 predecessor, its plot comes from a fantastical Ming Dynasty novel that’s apparently roughly equivalent to Britain’s King Arthur legends. I can’t say I’ve personally read it, though I’d be interested to hear from scholars if the source text features quite as many incidents of a pig loudly flatulating in a blind man’s face (two), supporting characters unwittingly drinking Ne Zha’s urine (three), or Ne Zha beating up a tribe of marmots after vomiting in their soup (once, though frankly once is enough).
In my two decades as a critic, I’ve almost never felt so strongly that a film wasn’t made for me. But cultural relativism as an excuse only gets you so far. I’m not sure deeper knowledge of 16th century eastern literature would have made me feel the character design here was anything other than charmless, or the allegedly groundbreaking animation much better than a video-game cutscene.
The film’s deadening quality stems in no small part from its battles, which unfold at an alienatingly vast scale that has human-sized characters resembling particles of dust getting blown around a car park. As a display of raw processing power it’s certainly a flex. As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/ne-aha-...E69seIAJNQdPYKg
UK reviewer don’t know why Nezha 2 so successful, Gave 1 star review only
Quote
it's china's own population
0.0378sec
1.01
5 queries
GZIP Disabled