Is China Better At Cartoons Now?
Peeking outside our thick cloud of complacency and self-loathing.
Turns out, China wants to have its own popular culture. Indistinguishable Marvel Product, Parts #1-#573 weren't enough for them. They wanted art that was by them, for them, reflecting their own values and relying on their own cultural figures.
Not a surprise, I suppose.
When the video game Black Myth: Wukong came out last year, it woke a lot of people up. Made in China, about Chinese culture. First-rate production values. Played well. Has its fair share of playfulness and good ideas.
And now their animated film Ne Zha 2 is the highest earning animated film ever. It beat out Inside Out 2, which was already a powerhouse.
I am a lifelong animation fan, so this really caught my attention. My daughter has been studying Mandarin for 3 years, and she really wanted to check this stuff out, so we dove in.
You Should Watch Ne Zha
The first movie, Ne Zha, came out in 2019 and was a huge hit. You can see it now, without pirating (with ads), for free! It’s here!
The dub job is good, but the subtitles seem closer to the original culture. Either works.
It's quite good. The animation is ok. The action scenes are great. The humor was funny. The whole thing is a lot of fun. It really reminded me of Shrek, but with Chinese folklore.
It is based (veeeery loosely) on folk tales most Chinese people learn as kids. (If I get any of this wrong, yell at me in the comments.) I really like watching foreign films, made by people in a different culture for themselves. What I lose in not understanding references, I gain in being a fly on the wall for someone else's culture.
The movie is about ... Wow. Tough one. There's this fire demon kid called Ne Zha. And his brother/friend is an water angel dragon kid named Ao Bing. Ne Zha wants to be good, and Ao Bing sometimes serves evil, but they are always in balance, and at one point in Ne Zha 2 someone complains about how the Taoists are causing trouble again, and there's a demon army, and ... I'm not 100% sure. It's not my culture. But again, that's part of the fun!
Just watch it, OK? It's really entertaining.
Western Animation Is Cooked, Man
Here is the most important thing about Ne Zha, the thing that really surprised me: It's FUN. Like, all that looseness and anarchy of old animation? That got pressure cooked out of it in this joyless, self-hating, crushingly-controlled century? The Chinese have all that now.
Ne Zha is all alternating comedy scenes and action. It's full of toilet humor, casual violence, jokes about modern technology (which land surprisingly well), drunkenness, fast-paced havoc, and occasional over-the-top grossness.
In my complacency, I still saw western animation as the wild fun stuff and eastern animation as, Miyazaki aside, inferior imitations.
Of course, I had no actual reason to believe this was true. For the last several decades, I went to foreign movies all the time. Chinese cartoons didn’t get distribution, so I never them and unthinkingly assumed they weren't that great. Were they? I still don't know.
Even if Chinese cartoons were bad before, a lot can change in ten years.
(Important note: I am only talking about big-budget moviemaking here. The sort of movies that want to suck in families, make giant fortunes, and become part of the culture. There are a billion animated TV shows. Some of them are excellent. All of them are niche. Not what I'm on about today.)
Disney Is a Joyless Mess (And So Are Its Competitors)
(I'm mostly focusing on Disney, though its competitors have the same problems. For example, here's the thing about Minions. They are quite funny when they're allowed to engage in Looney Tunes hijinks and shoot rockets at each other. But then humans always come in with their mopey neurotic nonsense and RUIN EVERYTHING.)
When we saw Ne Zha 2 in the theaters last weekend, there were three previews: Two lame looking live action remakes of fun movies from decades ago. Also, Elio, a new Pixar movie about aliens that seems like a Frankenstein mix of parts we've already seen a thousand times.
Meanwhile, in actual release, the new Snow White remake was playing in three empty rooms, stinkin' up the joint. So that's where we're at now. Over a billion dollars and combined budgets, with zero good ideas and minimal hope of success.
How Did We Get Here?
For starters, I feel bad for Disney. They can't take three steps without everyone screaming at them from all directions. (Including from inside their own heads.) Everything they do is done from a defensive crouch. This is death of the spontaneous joy and anarchy that is the heart of good animation. (Or game design.)
And what did we get? Soul, a grim slog about a guy who likes jazz and dies early. Luca, about how your family sucks and you can only be happy by fleeing them. Encanto and Coco, about the same thing. (Fun fact: Most kids love their families and find them a source of safety and comfort.) And Inside Out 2 was good, yeah, but it was still about a hopeless, miserable basket case having a nervous breakdown. Everything else since Moana was just mediocre.
(Look, I DID like Inside Out 2. But if that movie was made when I was a kid, it would be about a girl who was passionate about hockey and worked really hard and overcame obstacles and, in the end, succeeded. In 2024, it has to be about how being passionate and working hard is mental illness. Give up.)
Want some of the spirit of the old films? Sure! Have a terrible live-action remake! (It's certainly the only way Disney has any chance of making a movie where a boy and a girl like each other.) But don't worry. They'll drain all the energy out of it and replace it with dancing, uncanny valley nightmares.
In Ne Zha, One Of The Good Guys Likes To Get Drunk
It's true. I apologize if your monocle just fell into your tea. I'll give you a moment to flush it out.
In western popular entertainment, there is a small box of things you can do and joke about. The box only ever gets smaller. Watching Ne Zha was kind of shocking because it has so many things our cartoons can't have anymore.
And don't worry. I won't get into any tiresome woke/antiwoke culture war slogs. I don't have to. Modern animation's idea of what is acceptable for children has become so restrictive and eliminated so much of the wildness that made the old classics into classics. This is a bipartisan self-inflicted wound.
Yeah, this good immortal guy in Ne Zha drinks all the time. It's pretty funny. If Dreamworks made a movie with that today, imagine the screaming. Yet, characters used to get drunk in Disney movies ALL THE TIME.
(A good example was in Dumbo. Note it makes it look fun and scary at the same time. It can be part of your life, but it can be dangerous. In art, even for children, especially art for children, honesty is always the best option.)
Why are there no good Bugs Bunny cartoons anymore? Because, much as so many current buildings couldn't be rebuilt because of recent zoning laws, much of the things that made them so good wouldn't be allowed anymore.
Again, I don't need to get into a politics thing. I will simply give one guideline: Until Elmer Fudd is allowed to shoot Daffy Duck with a shotgun again, there is a ceiling on how good our cartoons can be.
There is a demand for this. If we don't meet that need, someone else will. We're just leaving that sweet Blow-Up-Yosemite-Sam-With-A-Cannon money on the table.
End result: Disney explores whole new universes of how much cash a movie can lose, and China cleans up with kids movies with farting, barfing, serious violence, and funny drunk dudes. I know where I just spent my money.
Note that I am saying absolutely nothing about good or bad qualities of the Chinese government. I'm just talking about movies. They use movies to sell their culture. We use movies to sell ours. My culture was winning in this arena for a long time, but with Ne Zha 2? The tide, it has turned.
I Saw Ne Zha 2 Last Weekend
I was quite looking forward to it. I'd heard it was cool, and it is now the highest earning animated feature ever, which is definitely an accomplishment.
(Though, speaking as a movie nerd, a movie earnings leaderboard only counts if it's adjusted for inflation. In which case, the winner is, and will probably always be, the original Snow White.)
Despite its success and quality, Ne Zha 2 got a really patchy US release. In Seattle, historically a town that really loves its movies, it was only at a few theaters and playing at weird times.
That’s a shame, because this is a movie that begs to be seen on a big screen. It is GORGEOUS. The animation in Ne Zha was fine but not great. Ne Zha 2 is a total spectacle, full of one awesome set piece after another.
It's a real more-is-more movie. The battles are massive. The comedy bits are funny. The culture is weird. At 2 hours, 20 minutes, it's kind of exhausting, but it's great fun. Even the after credits sequence is like 10 minutes long. (Mainly because of an extended riff on facial recognition software that I quite enjoyed.)
Again, I liked Inside Out 2. But Ne Zha 2 outdid it. China came to play, and they left it all on the field. Recommended.
I wonder how western animation studios will react to having actual serious competition now. However, this would involve looking at their own self-inflicted limits and humbly thinking about whether they were wise. I don't see this happening.
A Final Recommendation
Of course, if there is, in fact, a problem, it can be solved.
America is loaded with creative talent. Indie animation is doing great things right now. (I recommend Amazing Digital Circus for starters. Give more recommendations in the comments!) We have the talent, the infrastructure, and the motivation. Take some geniuses, give them a pile of money and the freedom to make cool Skunk Works projects, find a way to get their good ideas past 87 layers of bureaucracy, and awesome things can happen.
Need inspiration? Go back and watch The Emperor's New Groove, one of the last gasps of old-school fun Disney.
There are several Disney movies I could pick from a generation ago that were full of a spirit of pure, chaotic fun, but I'll always go back to Emperor’s New Groove because it's just so GOOD.
And it did badly in its theatrical release. It was considered a disappointment! It only made money in the long tail, coasting on its comedic perfection. Disney would gain so much if they could get back the looseness and freedom and mischievous spirit necessary to make a movie like that again. (Tangled and Moana are also worth a visit.)
I think one creative idea, properly executed, could right the ship and lead the way. Let's hope.
Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. You can still late-back the Kickstarter for our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory.
For anyone who is curious about the book behind, you can read it here with some knowledge of Mandarin:
https://www.99csw.com/book/5743/201773.htm
It is probably one of the weirdest "cult" pop novel back in the Ming Dynasty. Like all ancient Chinese pop novels, the source could be tracked to the Song Dynasty. The story was loosely based on the late Shang Dynasty but it involved a lot of characters based on people from other dynasties. Pretty much everyone knows some magic, has magical beasts or weapons.
I remember I read it from front to back quite a few times. It is very entertaining, probably the most entertaining one with a lot of BS.
China may very well overtake the US, but that isn't saying much, since both are minnows in the craft of animation compared to Japan. The US never really developed a market beyond children's cartoons due to religious zealots and moral crusaders, and China is too heavily censored (also why Korea lags behind Japan despite their studios being a vital part of the anime industry).