Ne Zha [Nezha zhi motong jiangshi] (2019) – Movie Review

Writer-director Yu Yang [Jiaozi]’s striking 2019 Chinese animated fantasy adventure Ne Zha [Nezha zhi motong jiangshi] is bright, lively, entertaining, sometimes impressive and sometimes just amiably silly. Some of the animation design looks very good indeed and some of the characters are compelling, though not consistently.

But Ne Zha is hampered by the PG certificate family-friendly tone and daft, crowd-pleasing humour, and a much better, more adult movie is trying to get out. There are flashes of this all through, but particularly at the climax, though not consistently.

However, frustratingly, grandeur and the highest quality escape Ne Zha, and it is finally just lightweight escapist fantasy entertainment, playing riffs on Chinese legends, a lack of knowledge of which makes it tricky to follow fully for Western audiences, made more difficult by the speed of the sub-titles. Best just to go with the flow, and take it for what you think it is, what you can make of it, what you can enjoy and what you can get out of it. And that might be considerable enough.

The story by Yunyun Wei derives from the 16th-century Chinese novel Investiture of the Gods [Fengshen yanyi], which tells stories of Chinese gods of thousands of years before, and is based on Chinese folk legends.

The unusual hero Ne Zha is a young boy born with unique fire powers and a short time to live, who is a bit of a worry for his parents, and is recruited to fight demons. His paradoxical inescapable fate, it turns out, is to be able to fight his fate.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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