Recently, the Montrose Playhouse treated us to a Chinese documentary-film. “The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru” came to town via an extremely unusual, refreshingly distinctive, and certainly direct route: someone involved with the U.K. distribution of the film walked through the doors one quiet, mid-week morning to ask, “Would you be willing to show this?” “Yes.” The one-off event which followed this brilliantly effective strategy was well-attended and, according to the Playhouse team, received a very warm reception.
China is back with a vengeance. “Ne Zha 2” (Chinese Legend Movie/China Film Administration), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is a very unusual action-animation movie which takes a lot to parse. Maybe it would be easiest to first describe what it is not.
Hollywood animation, most particularly of the distinctive style of Pixar Studios, has exploded the available options for filmgoers over the last 30 years, perhaps especially so for families with young children. Pixar’s first film was “Toy Story” (1995), only ever possible because of that most Californian of inventions, computer-generated imaging (CGI); technology later expanded widely beyond animation. “Ne Zha 2” is nothing like “Toy Story,” or for that matter “Inside Out 2,” which ran for weeks at the Playhouse last summer. It is rather over-stuffed with characters and as a consequence suffers from a somewhat unwieldy plot. It is not tightly drawn. It does not follow the usual 90-minute rule for animation (it is nearly 2 1/2 hours long). It is not sweet, cuddly, full of “ahhhhh” moments. It is not for children to watch alone (carrying the more restrictive 12A-certificate). It is, however, the highest-grossing animation movie, and, for that matter, non-English movie, of all time.
Based upon a 16th-century book and mythological character, the film is in Mandarin with English subtitles. The dialog is brisk and, in order to follow it all, I found myself having to pay careful attention as the words flashed onto the screen. A large number of major characters are introduced in quick succession towards the beginning. As well as the human(oid)s, devils and angels, warriors and samurais, we are presented with talking animals and fish (including an octopus that seems fond of eating its own tentacles). And, to complete the veritable cafeteria, talking rocks, a talking mirror, monsters of all formations, sprites, huge flocks of green birds, shapeshifters and even cuddly little robots.
The film’s design, established early and maintained throughout, goes like this. A frantic sequence lasting only a handful of seconds, no more than a minute, usually with more than one thing happening on the screen at the same time, accompanied by orchestral music that crescendos quickly to a flourish, at which point the screen freezes, suspending the action for a full second or two. It’s almost as if someone clicked their fingers, everything stopped, then clicked their fingers again: the music reverts to low volume, the scene shifts to somewhere or something else and we are back to the pattern again. It is a more than a touch hyperactive. There is jumping and kicking, whirling and unraveling, terraforming and demolishing, smashing and exploding, screaming and crying, frying and foaming, chopping and dicing, urinating and vomiting, ball-forming and root-forming, splitting and fragmenting, spinning and curling, locking and disintegrating, and a whole lot of flying. Perhaps by now it is obvious that it is just a bit violent.
There are a number of aspects of the film which I really enjoyed. Many lovely sequences of bold, meandering colours, converging into different shapes, moving smoothly across the entire screen. Sometimes a lotus-flower appears, a moment of peace amongst all the frenetic action. I especially liked the flying pig (with excellent knife skills) which carries the characters about, the idea of being born of a “pure water element,” the fat queen (“fatty”) asking her mirror who is the fairest of them all, the evil cauldron, and the images of purgatory with molten lava and boiling rocks. I mentioned that the characters are hardly the cuddly types that hang around the Pixar design studio. Take Ne Zha. She scowls, shouts, and does an amazing job of bearing her teeth while furrowing her eyebrows. The strangest, and maybe most unwise, line in the translation was “Pills, pills, I need pills!” It is impossible or me to judge how accurately the translation matches the original – occasionally the syntax is a bit clumsy; the lyrics to the closing song are downright terrible!
There is one funny moment just before the closing credits roll: the line, “Any bonus scene … Let’s see!” (There is, it’s short, and involves a stone with face-recognition technology.) The credits, when they come, are composed almost entirely of Chinese characters, and there are many Chinese production-companies listed.
Some of the dialog in the coda perhaps implies a moral conclusion from the fable: a discussion of how titles like “demons” or “immortals” are used by the established-order to marginalise and control those who are different; and the Hollywood nonsense of living life “my way.” However to over-egg this in a review of the film would be to grasp for a geopolitical meaning which isn’t there (after all the story was written 500 years ago).
It is as refreshing as a swim off Montrose Beach in January (very popular, by the way!) to have Chinese movies in town, all the more because “Ne Zha 2” has been so successful at the global box-office. For audiences in the U.K., I would say that patience and a beginner’s mind are definitely prerequisites to enjoy them. Hollywood would doubtless consider that this usurper is gatecrashing their animation-party: a self-satisfied (but evidently premature) celebration of a genre which they thought they had sewn-up.
Adam Poole
11 April 2025
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
