Last week, animation aficionados and moviegoers in general, were surprised by the news that Ne Zha 2 had grossed more than US$1.69 billion at the box office, according to the Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan. By doing so, Ne Zha 2 surpassed Inside Out 2, becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time and the eighth-highest-grossing motion picture ever released.
The speed at which the Chinese toon reached those milestones is quite impressive, and the numbers keep growing. It has just earned US$1.9 billion worldwide (US$1.87 billion in China alone) in an incredible span of twenty-six days. The animated sequel opened in North America the weekend before last, pulling in US$12.8 million last friday. Produced on a budget of US$80 million, the movie is expected to gross US$2 billion in a week or so. In the face of these superlative numbers, we cannot avoid the question: what makes Ne Zha 2 such a big hit?
Explaining what makes something successful is both an easy and a difficult task at the same time. It’s easy because you can point to some areas of excellence—well-crafted storytelling, strong performances from the cast, or masterful direction, when talking about a movie, for example.
However, the task is also challenging because success isn’t a straightforward formula that you can apply to a film over and over again. If it were that easy, there wouldn’t be so many flops. It’s even harder to explain why Ne Zha 2 is a box office phenomenon because it’s a non-Hollywood animated feature that is primarily a megahit in its home country, China. However, when you watch the first film and Ne Zha 2, you realize that the franchise has strong appeal to foreign audiences.
So, I must say that the movie is awesome in many ways. I’d like to highlight the five most important features of Ne Zha 2 that make it so special—and that might explain its tremendous success:
1. The Ne Zha franchise blends tradition and modernity. The films are loosely based on Investiture of the Gods, a 16th-century novel attributed to Xu Zhonglin. So we have a mythological story from Chinese folk religion adapted into a feature with high-end animation.
2. Breathtaking action sequences. The characters perform beautifully choreographed and insanely complex battle sequences, for example.
3. Engaging storytelling seasoned with well-placed gags. The movie strikes a good balance between thrilling and funny moments.
4. Stunning visuals. The character design in the Chinese film is outstanding, and the animation is both fluid and amazing.
5. The quirky protagonist. It’s great that Ne Zha’s moral qualities are clear, but not too obvious. As a demon child, he’s a maverick, having a nonconformist personality—usually angry—but he’s far from being an evil person.
About this last point, I think that not only Ne Zha’s personality traits are interesting, but his physical appearance as well. They nailed it by designing him with a kooky look, leaning toward the cartoonish, in contrast to Ao Bing, who is handsome and kind of the opposite of Ne Zha, like yin and yang characters.
I could easily add many other aspects that make Ne Zha a brilliant franchise, but the ones mentioned above are a good start, and we’re talking about just the movie itself, not things like promo, distribution, etc. Only a local phenomenon? I’m not sure if Ne Zha 2 will perform as well worldwide, but in the US, despite the limited theatrical release, the sequel is not doing that badly for an animated movie.
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