If you’re keyed into movie news, you might have heard about a Chinese animated film breaking box-office records. That feature is Ne Zha 2, a sequel to 2019’s Ne Zha by director Jiaozi (the professional name of animator Yang Yu) that follows an ostracized demon child who must challenge prophecy and choose between good and evil. As of this writing, it’s made $1.89 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing animated film, the highest-grossing Chinese film and the highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time. Now, it’s getting a U.S. theatrical re-release from A24.
Ne Zha 2
3.5
/5
- Release Date
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January 29, 2025
- Runtime
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144 minutes
- Director
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Yang Yu
- Writers
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Yang Yu
- Producers
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Liu Wenzhang
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Lü Yanting
Young Nezha (voice)
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Joseph
Youth Nezha/Jie Jie Shou Zuo (voice)
This sequel expands from Ne Zha’s journey of self-growth into something that’s beyond his control, and that of his friend Ao Bing. The abundance of plot in Ne Zha 2 requires too much specificity for any one review, but suffice to say that it involves Ne Zha trying to return his friend’s soul to his body before it dies, trying to attain immortality and win a potion that will help them on this journey, trying to stop his home from being destroyed by enemies and — perhaps most grave — trying to survive a face-off with immortals who are comfortable killing as long as it keeps them in power.
Think of it as a CG-based shōnen arc in feature film form, complete with the stakes being exponentially raised from the first film and obvious telegraphing for another sequel. Characters from the first film get the expected power-ups, as well as individual action scenes designed to show off their fight styles. We know the beats, but we can marvel at the way Jiaozi renders these sequences and their apocalyptic scale. Most of the action, presumably inspired as much by the wuxia genre as contemporary superhero movies, has such a fluidity that it’s hard not to get lost in just how beautiful and dynamic it can be. That said, even though it occasionally succumbs to a sludge-y sameness when thousands of bodies fill the screen, the sheer scale of the picture proves impressive.
Ne Zha 2 is a work of pure spectacle, which only makes all its worst features more glaring. The mid-2000s Dreamworks comic sensibilities of the first movie are still here – get ready for more fart jokes and fat jokes – but are blessedly less prevalent, due to having to maintain the weight of a more serious plot. These frivolous moments, including an excruciatingly long mid-credits scene, bring the film to a halt and run counter to the heavy drama. The actual playfulness pops up in the fight scenes, as when Ne Zha and Ao Bing play with transformations and mimic their rivals.
The series rather loosely draws on a number of Chinese mythological characters and the 16th-century Chinese novel The Investiture of the Gods, which makes it all the more amusing when Ne Zha 2 floods the screen with these characters as
borderline anonymous villains. Even funnier is that the names of these gods and demons are plastered on the screen when they’re introduced, likely to audiences who have no sense of the weight any of those names hold in mythology. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a charming bit of cultural specificity being lost in translation. But the sheer volume of immortals that the film introduces and subsequently ignores does emphasize just how willing it is to sacrifice intimacy for scale.
A24’s English dub – which is the version coming to theaters and IMAX this month, after an initial release in its original language early in 2025 – is competent enough, allowing for American audiences that don’t want to be burdened by reading to experience Ne Zha 2. This voice acting is all as serviceable as the film’s plotting, which is effective in spite of sometimes being obvious and manipulative. Practically all the film’s pleasure comes from its animation, on both a minute scale (Ne Zha’s delightful comic-y expressions) and a massive one (the detail in the designs of the dragons and sea creatures). Some of the human designs are rendered in a generic style seen in a lot of contemporary animation, but there’s enough originality surrounding them that it’s not a fatal flaw.
Everything about this sequel feels like an upgrade to the original. By leaning into denser themes than just “good versus evil” and introducing narrative arcs beyond the protagonist’s, Jiaozi has successfully turned this into a more mature experience than Ne Zha. Think of Ne Zha 2 as the young-adult continuation of a kids’ movie. Though that may sound dismissive, it’s not. No matter how predictable it can be narratively, Ne Zha 2 is a genuinely engaging piece of blockbuster animation designed to get lost in, if only for two and a half hours.
Ne Zha 2 opens in wide release in the United States on August 22, 2025, from A24.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
