Since it began screening in late January during the Spring Festival holiday, the Chinese animated blockbuster “Ne Zha 2” has smashed box office records, becoming the highest-grossing animated film in history, as well as one of the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time. The animated feature is rich in lore, mining such Chinese classics as “Investiture of the Gods” and “Journey to the West” as it recounts the quest by boy-hero Ne Zha and his sidekick Ao Bing to find an elixir to restore their physical forms (which they sacrificed at the end of the 2019 film “Ne Zha.”)
A festive Spring Festival promotional poster for “Ne Zha 2” features many of the animated film’s characters.
The engaging story, painstaking animation, and box-office success of “Ne Zha 2” have inspired a great deal of pride among the Chinese movie-going public, not to mention birthing a plethora of memes, trends, and social-media hashtags. But this surge of pride has also resulted in the suppression of critical takes on the film and the buzz around it: some critical articles have been deleted from social media platforms, and Chinese bloggers and reviewers have reported being criticized or attacked online for expressing dissenting views. CDT Chinese editors have archived 15 articles and essays about the film, at least six of which have been deleted by either the original authors or by platform censors.
Some on social media have also repurposed catchphrases from the film, using them to satirize various social issues or economic woes. One netizen, riffing on the line “My fate is in my own hands,” recalled China’s now-defunct “zero-COVID” policy: “My fate is in my own hands, except when it comes to queuing up for nucleic-acid tests.” A WeChat blogger wrote a long essay comparing the fate of the film’s sea-dragons (who were slaughtered and made into an elixir of immortality) to the fate of writers of online gay erotica for the fan-fiction website Haitang, who have been targeted with fines and imprisonment by Anhui authorities operating across provincial lines: “The Haitang writers exploited by ‘deep-sea fishing’ expeditions are very similar to the creatures in ‘Ne Zha 2’ who were turned into the elixir of immortality.” A now-censored article titled “Why Do Groundhogs Always Imagine That They’re Ne Zha?” from WeChat account “District 526” used the film’s hapless population of groundhogs as a metaphor for the downtrodden who unwisely equate their lot with those of the political or economic elites. One Weibo reviewer described how they related to various characters in the film—protagonist Ne Zha, martial-arts disciple Shen Gongbao, and the ill-fated groundhogs: “Before watching the movie, I thought I was Ne Zha. While watching it, I put myself in the shoes of Shen Gongbao. But by the time the movie was over, I realized I was just one of those pathetic groundhogs.”
Two stills from the film show Ne Zha interacting with a crowd of anthropomorphized groundhogs.
A WeChat article by seasoned journalist and columnist Song Zhibiao argued that, unlike previous government-led campaigns to support nationalistic films such as “The Battle of Lake Changjin,” the tide of public support for “Ne Zha 2” is more of a grassroots phenomenon, a relatively spontaneous outpouring of patriotism and national pride:
The film’s visual effects, its plot, and what it’s trying to say—none of these things matter. What matters is that it creates a Chinese-style box-office miracle and shatters a global box-office record, thus leaving a Chinese imprint on a list long dominated by American films. The more American films it can push down that list, the more it will fuel Chinese cultural pride.
The battle for “Ne Zha 2” box-office success has coalesced into a short-term cause that unites the Chinese public. Those watching the same screening of the film are not so much fellow audience members but comrades-in-arms, and their weapons of choice are movie tickets. After watching the movie, they eagerly check the latest box-office figures, because although they’ll never see a penny of the box-office profits, they’re brimming with lofty sentiment and utterly dedicated to the cause.
When examining this phenomenon of extreme support—which goes well beyond the movie’s fundamentals—we need to understand that this is no mere patriotic marketing campaign, because other contemporaneous “positive-energy” films received nowhere near the same level of popular support. Rather, it is best understood as a sort of spontaneous mass emotional catharsis. The overwhelming love and support for “Ne Zha 2” is an indicator of where mainstream sentiment lies.
This astonishing mass-support movement, which exhibits both highly dispersed and highly concentrated patterns of consumer behavior, proves the simple fact that nationalist sentiment plays a key role in helping Chinese-made products succeed in a broadening range of consumer-goods sectors. From [the footwear and sportswear brand] HongXing Erke to made-in-China electric vehicles to “Ne Zha 2,” popular patriotism is displacing government policy as a driver of consumption. [Chinese]
A now-censored article written by 牛角 (Niǔjiǎo, “Ox horn”) for the WeChat account Glacier Think Tank analyzed why so many Chinese citizens feel the need to support “Ne Zha 2”—both at the box-office and online—and why it is becoming almost unacceptable to criticize the film on Chinese social media spaces:
The current box-office figures for "Ne Zha 2" can only be described as “terrifying.”
[…] It is hard to imagine that screenings in a normal film market could yield such numbers. “Ne Zha 2’s” terrifying box-office haul is the product of the government and the general public “banding together in support of a righteous cause.”
This sense of communal support for the cause is reflected not only in the film’s skyrocketing box-office haul, but also in the arena of public opinion, where people are closing ranks, united by “hatred of our common enemy.”
First of all, it’s becoming unacceptable to criticize "Ne Zha 2.”
At least during the Spring Festival, there was no problem with expressing misgivings or criticisms about the film, and those who refuted such criticisms tended to base their rebuttals on their personal opinions and viewing preferences.
But more recently, many articles critical of "Ne Zha 2" have met with backlash that has nothing to do with the content of the criticism and everything to do with so-called "national interests.”
Zi Ge, one film critic who came under attack, said on Douban that someone scolded him: "It’s fine to criticize, but you have to be able to read the room. Would it kill you to hold your criticism until after the [box-office] record is broken? If you decide to jump in and trash the film now, at this critical moment, then you’re just being obtuse and could ruin the whole thing."
Zi Ge’s readers are relatively rational, so at least they don’t accuse him of being biased against China, destroying national unity, or “passing the knife” [providing ammunition to hostile foreign forces].
To many people, “Ne Zha 2” isn’t just a movie: it’s been burdened with the responsibility of winning glory for the nation. “Ne Zha 2” gives them the same sense of pride they felt when Xu Haifeng won China its first Olympic gold medal [in the free pistol competition at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics]. You really think they’re going to let others rain on their parade?
And they’re not just complaining about articles critical of the film. Weirder still, they’re complaining that some cities aren’t generating enough box-office revenue for it.
As essayist Wei Zhou wrote, “So far, the film is dominating the box office in every province in the country, with the exception of Shanghai. This has earned mockery such as: "Shanghainese turn their noses up at domestic films" and "They like foreign films with their coffee.”
In the end, even the Shanghai Observer felt compelled to weigh in: “Loving one’s own country, one’s own people, and one’s own culture is a simple emotion. It is for this reason that we are so enamored of ‘Ne Zha 2,’ and are eagerly looking forward to it making a mark internationally, and are wholeheartedly rooting for it to break the 10 billion yuan mark at the box office. While the emotion may be simple, it is in no way equivalent to blind conceit or parochialism.”
Clearly, people’s expectations for "Ne Zha 2" have expanded far beyond the realm of entertainment and art, and have veered into identity politics. This is too great a burden for a cartoon to bear.
Now I’m a bit worried for the film’s director Jiaozi [Yu Yang]]. If at some point in the future, he happens to “stray out of line,” he’ll probably be eaten alive by the very same audience that “supported” him at the box office.
[…] The obsession with "Ne Zha 2" topping the box-office charts is no different from our obsession with Olympic gold-medal counts back in the day. It just goes to show that, over the course of four decades, many people’s mentalities and mindsets haven’t changed one bit. [Chinese]
