<\/p>\n
Those of us who habitually check box office charts the way normies pore over sports franchise rankings have been seeing a Chinese title perched immovably atop the \u201cWorldwide\u201d tab for most of 2025. The animated epic \u201cNe Zha II\u201d isn\u2019t merely the year\u2019s most blockbustin\u2019 blockbuster, leaving also-ran family flicks such as the \u201cLilo & Stitch<\/a>\u201d remake and \u201cA Minecraft Movie<\/a>\u201d in its dust by a margin of $900 million. It\u2019s also the highest-grossing movie in both the animated and non-English-language categories \u2014 in history<\/i>.<\/p>\n And now it\u2019s in English.<\/p>\n Some $21 million of this juggernaut\u2019s roughly $2 billion global take came from the limited U.S. release its subtitled version got last winter. The newly dubbed version getting a wide U.S. rollout marks American distributor A24\u2019s bid to further boost what is already the fifth-highest-grossing movie ever \u2014 in any language, live-action or animated. \u201cNe Zha II\u201d was reportedly made for a thrifty $80 million or so, which is to say that anything more it earns stateside will be what Criterion Channel-subscribing, Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma-reading sophisticates call gravy.<\/i><\/p>\n Think of it as a sort of cultural imperialism in reverse. It wasn\u2019t even a decade ago that American studios were increasingly tailoring Transformers and Fast & Furious sequels for Asian markets, where new entries in these long-running PG-13 franchises reliably bested their U.S. grosses by a hefty margin. To audiences unfamiliar with its roots in Chinese mythology, \u201cNe Zha II\u201d plays like a mash-up of the fairy-tales-and-fart-jokes Shrek franchise and James Cameron\u2019s retina-searing Avatar movies, wherein the human characters play second fiddle to various otherworldly creatures: aliens, ogres, wisecracking donkeys, etc. Or, in the case of \u201cNe Zha II,\u201d gods and demons.<\/p>\n The brief spoken narration that opens this sequel won\u2019t be enough to orient anyone who missed 2019\u2019s \u201cNe Zha,\u201d which played only 135 theaters in the United States but is available on most streaming platforms. Screenwriter-director Jiao Zi adapted both \u201cNe Zha\u201d films from a 16th-century Chinese novel whose title has been translated as \u201cThe Investiture of the Gods.\u201d<\/p>\n As the sequel opens, an attempt to create new earthly vessels for disembodied spirits Ne Zha and his best pal, Ao Bing \u2014 a demon boy and a dragon, respectively, who lost their physical forms at the climax of the previous film \u2014 goes awry, forcing Ne Zha to carry Ao Bing\u2019s consciousness along with his own in his still-settling new body. While the two characters are sharing the same set of organs and limbs, they must complete three demon-hunting trials to attain immortality. (Yes, Ne Zha is a demon who hunts demons, the way Marvel\u2019s Blade is a vampire who slays vampires.) If they\u2019re successful, they won\u2019t just earn Ao Bing a body of his own; they\u2019ll also \u2026 prevent his father from dispatching an army of dragons to destroy Ne Zha\u2019s hometown of Chentang Pass, I think?<\/p>\n I\u2019ll just say it: I was confounded from the opening moments, and only sporadically did I ever find my footing. Admittedly, I could fit everything I know about ancient Chinese legends into a Bluesky post with characters to spare, but I\u2019ve read Joseph Campbell\u2019s mythological survey \u201cThe Hero With a Thousand Faces.\u201d Certainly I recognized, as most viewers will, tropes and themes that have found their way into a couple of centuries\u2019 worth of Western stories that have been exported around the world. The new English-language voice cast, which includes Crystal Lee and Griffin Puatu as Ne Zha and Aleks Le as Ao Bing, is performing in the same outsize key we expect from American cartoons. Michelle Yeoh, who plays Ne Zha\u2019s human mother, Lady Yin, is probably the cast member most familiar to U.S. filmgoers, but the Oscar-winner is in the movie for only a few minutes.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t get many other handholds. A hundred minutes into this 143-minute odyssey, Jiao Zi is still introducing new characters, who get bilingual, documentary-style chyrons with their names as we meet them. By that point, I had long since surrendered my campaign to track the dense latticework of allegiances, reversals and reveals, instead resolving to just let his film\u2019s vibrant, imaginative world wash over me. (That spell was frequently broken by a surfeit of scatological humor, the lingua franca of kiddie-flick hilarity. An extended bit about a wizard and his guests accidentally being served urine to drink was the least disgusting of these. At the packed-with-families screening I attended, these gags absolutely killed<\/i>.)<\/p>\n There\u2019s no denying \u201cNe Zha II\u201d is as visually stunning as it is narratively opaque. The character and environmental designs are both otherworldly in their originality and astonishingly lifelike, even when we\u2019re looking at, say, a military-officer octopus brandishing a sword in each tentacle. The digital oceans? So convincing you practically smell saltwater. And the way Jiao Zi and his animators re-create the photographic peculiarities of different types of lenses fully seals the illusion that his movie was shot<\/i> rather than conjured from lines of code.<\/p>\n Alas, \u201cNe Zha II\u201d runs about 45 minutes longer than a typical Pixar release, so even that go-with-the-flow posture eventually left me squirming. Your trans-Pacific mileage may vary.<\/p>\n Unrated. <\/b>At area theaters. Contains intense but not gory fantasy battle sequences and potty humor. 143 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Those of us who habitually check box office charts the way normies pore over sports franchise rankings have been seeing a Chinese title perched immovably atop the \u201cWorldwide\u201d tab for most of 2025. The animated epic \u201cNe Zha II\u201d isn\u2019t merely the year\u2019s most blockbustin\u2019 blockbuster, leaving also-ran family flicks such as the \u201cLilo & […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1946120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[351121,350034],"class_list":["post-1972053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-jiao-zi","tag-ne-zha"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Lloyd-native-nominated-for-6-IBMA-awards.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1972053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1946120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1972053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1972053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1972053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}