Apocalypse of Nezha’s Devil Children Naughting the Sea

Since its release on the first day of the New Year, Nezha’s Devil Boy Naughties the Sea (hereinafter referred to as Nezha 2) has been making great strides at the box office. By 12: 00 on February 9, the box office had exceeded 7.5 billion yuan, making it the first film in the global single market with a box office exceeding 1 billion dollars. This happened at the time node of the 120th anniversary of the birth of China film and the 130th anniversary of the birth of the world film, which greatly boosted the confidence of the industry, showed the vitality of film art iteration, and enhanced the cultural confidence of Chinese people. During the Spring Festival holiday, "Nezha 2" is contested by many people, which not only shows that it has become a cultural phenomenon, but also means that it should be brought into the research field of vision, and the reasons for its success should be analyzed, which will bring more inspiration to China’s film creation and the development of new mass literature and art..

Nezha 2 marks the arrival of a new stage of China Animation School. In the last century, represented by a series of classic works by Shanghai Animation Film Studio, China Animation School was loved by Chinese people and attracted worldwide attention. However, the mode of creation and production at that time could not adapt to the development speed of contemporary film industry and meet the needs of contemporary film audiences, and it encountered bottlenecks after its glory. Entering a new era, with the deepening of the reform of China’s film industry, thanks to China’s economic and social development, scientific and technological progress, the prosperity of the cultural market and the accumulation of film talents, China’s animation industry has gained new resources and strength and ushered in new development opportunities. A group of young filmmakers and new film companies who love animation have emerged, and a large number of animation audiences in China responded enthusiastically.

Nezha 2 makes us realize that Chinese culture has a very long, rich and heavy ideological resources. In the film, the enchanted beast inspired by Sanxingdui civilization, the gigantic Tianyuan tripod and the bronze mirror ornamentation on the case of the stone maiden take the audience back to the bronze age in China’s history, which was a fierce, gluttonous, primitive, naive and simple human childhood. In the plot, the mixed pearl is divided into two parts, and the magic pill and the spirit pearl grow up separately, which leads to a series of stories. This basic setting is in the same strain as the fable in Zhuangzi that chaos was artificially cut open and died. The battle scene between the fairy and the devil in the film continues the awakening theme of the classic cartoon "What makes the sea" in 1979.

As for the multiple clues of the plot, the beauty and ugliness of the modeling design, and the harmony of the characters, it seems to be too much and too messy. However, if we look back at the Yuan Zaju and the popular novels of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, we will realize that the romance and power of the secular torrent are enough to push the narrative forward. The film continues this secular aesthetic that people like to see and hear, and integrates it with innovation, tempering and recreating. In fact, we can also find some influences of western animation and Japanese animation from Nezha 2. The western culture that has entered China since modern times has been used in the construction of contemporary culture in China, which is one of the cultural stories in the process of Chinese modernization.

"Nezha 2" makes us notice that the growth of China New Force filmmakers has entered a new stage of cultural and ecological development. On the one hand, the strength of the new generation of literary and art workers lies in their profound experience and understanding of China’s reality, society and life, and finally transformed into a new artistic language. Many young viewers found their own shadows in Nezha 2. They regarded Taiyi as a desperate programmer, regarded Nezha’s hard thorn as a past pain, regarded Mrs. Yin’s embrace as a redemption brought by great love, and regarded Qi Xin’s struggle to break the cauldron as a struggle to create the future … … So there was a deep empathy and resonance. It can be seen that if the myths and fantasies that seem to be unconstrained, if you want to convince and love the audience, you can’t leave the down-to-earth realistic spirit and the realistic feelings of empathy.

On the other hand, the filmmakers of New Power consciously carry out the practice of art cross-border, media integration, technology upgrading and mutual learning of civilizations, and show a systematic trend. In "Nezha 2", the fragment of the battle between the soil and fat slope and the woodchuck, and the colorful wonders rendered by the ink particle technology are all supported by peers. Force Digital Technology, a well-known company in the industry, even "stopped" its own projects to ensure the completion of part of its work on Nezha 2. The belief that "unity is strength" has increasingly become the consensus of China film industry. Whether it is the individual creator, studio or enterprise, they have gone through the stage of individual combat and individual camp, and consciously moved towards a benign ecology of cooperation, resource sharing, industry expansion and overall win-win.

Nezha 2 tells a good story, and the birth and popularity of Nezha 2 is also a good story. The former belongs to the creator, and it is a creative individual; The latter belongs to China’s animation, movies, science and technology, etc. They constitute a larger subject, that is, new popular literature and art and new cultural atmosphere. "Debate over Six Qi" is not small; "Take advantage of the right of heaven and earth", the big one will be bigger. The distant place of China culture, the future of China films, will be held in Wan Li. (Author: Zuo Heng, director and researcher of film culture research department of China Film Archive)

People’s Daily (20th edition, February 11th, 2025)