哪吒暑期动画电影

“There’s more than just production craftsmanship behind this record-breaking Chinese animation. There’s also a strong faith in the traditional Chinese culture and a creative way of expression.” These are the words that Chinese State agency Xinhua used to describe the recent box office phenomenon, Nezha. “It has completely out-performed the big American production The Lion King, both in market and critical reception,” the report continued, hammering home the point.

Nezha is ultimately based on two figures from Hindu mythology. Nezha has frequently appeared in Chinese mythology and ancient Chinese literature and the most commonly known Nezha story is one of those tales as old as time — any attempt to summarize it will be made at high risk of sounding absurd. So here we go: Nezha is a little boy who fought evil dragons and killed himself as a statement to his parents, then later was brought back to life by his deity mentor and was reborn from a lotus flower with three heads and six arms, eventually becoming a deity himself. This summer’s animated blockbuster is an adaptation from this story.

Invested and distributed by entertainment giant Enlight Pictures, Nezha took five years to complete production, with a crew of 1,600 animators. But those efforts appear to have paid off spectacularly. The rating for the film on Douban, a user review site known for its hard-to-please membership, is as high as 8.6 out of 10. Audience and media reviews are predominantly positive. And the film has been called “the glorious light of domestic anime”by netizens and media — though this is a term that emerges every time a domestic anime production hits screens, reflecting how the market is usually dominated by animation from the US or Japan.

The high production values of the film especially shine through in its elaborate action scenes. “I wasn’t expecting to see an animated Chinese film operating at this tech level — it’s really astonishing,” says Ruby, a 29-year-old Taiwanese 3D animator. “The animation is heavily influenced by gaming culture, from overall art direction to how the fighting scenes are done, but this is one of the reasons the Chinese animation industry has developed so fast.