What if we told you that the biggest box office gross at the cinema this year is from a film you probably haven’t heard of? Not an American blockbuster, but a Chinese one. What’s more: animated! It’s called “Ne Zha 2” and now also arrives in Italy from November 6th with Minerva Pictures in collaboration with FilmClub Distribuzione, which however has changed its name to “Ne Zha – Rise of the Fire Warrior”. It is in fact a sequel to Ne Zha, released in 2019 and which has never been distributed in Italy – hence the need to bring it to theaters as if it were a chapter in itself, which from a narrative point of view it more or less is.

The record-breaking film

But it is necessary to give the dimension of the phenomenon. So let’s look at the numbers. Ne Zha 2 was released in China on Chinese New Year, January 29, 2025. As of March 9, in the span of just over a month, the film had grossed $2 billion at the box office. An already enormous figure, among the highest ever even if not the highest, which nevertheless indicates other interesting ones within it.

On February 8th it becomes the highest cinema gross in a single territory, a record previously held by the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the United States in 2015, however taking only 11 days against the 165 of Star Wars and settling its run, at the Chinese box office, at 1.8 billion. Figures that also made it the greatest success for an animated work – a record that until then belonged to Inside Out 2 with 1.66 billion and achieved in 2024 – and above all: the non-English language film with the greatest economic return ever.

What Ne Zha – Rise of the Fire Warrior is about

How to explain such a triumph? With a mix of a lot of epics, a huge production effort (at an exchange rate of around 80 million dollars, the most expensive Chinese animated film) and above all an editorial plan based on the strength of identity and culture. Ne Zha – The Rise of the Fire Warrior, written and directed by the animator Jiaozi who made his debut with the previous chapter, is in fact part of a larger film project, the Fengshen Cinematic Universe.

Do you know shared narrative universes like those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Well, now translate the concept into one of the best-known works of Chinese literature, the Fengshen Yanyi, which can be translated as “The canonization of the gods”. A 16th century vernacular novel about gods, demons and immortal beings, divided into one hundred chapters where elements of Chinese mythology, folklore and religious beliefs are mixed. Ne Zha – Rise of the Fire Warrior is the third chapter in the genre, after Ne Zha and a less successful film, Jiang Zi Ya, from 2020.

What are they specifically about? The story of the first Ne Zha tells of a primordial Pearl of chaos that begins to consume the energies of the Earth and is therefore divided into two distinct entities by Yuanshi Tianzun, the supreme deity of Heaven. Thus the Pearl of the Spirit and the Sphere of the Demon originate, which are reincarnated in two children: Ne Zha, son of the protector god Li Jing, and Ao Bing, son of the dragon king. The two were destined to oppose each other, but instead they become friends, shaking up the order of things. After the destruction of their bodies, in Ne Zha – The Rise of the Fire Warrior the spirits of the two boys must be brought back into physical form by the master Taiyi Zhenren, setting in motion a series of events that destabilize a world in which the will of the gods and the destiny of humans are intertwined.

But how is the film?

Inside Ne Zha – Rise of the Fire Warrior you need to enter like a blank sheet of paper. Because it is a story that unseats our (typically Italian) conceptions of what an animated film is and can be. A categorization based on preconceptions that is often qualitative and not based on style. Something thought, mistakenly, as intended only for childhood, for education. Even more, it undermines the concept of what an animated film designed for mass consumption is, i.e. if not reassuring works at least softened in their implications and cruder representations.

Jiaozi’s work indeed has many souls within it. It is full of twists, with continuous and unexpected reversals, full of characters and situations that intertwine, evolve and turn upside down, shifting the boundaries of a story with a mobile character from time to time. It places good and evil in comparison, in continuous conflict and endurance. Yin and Yang. The two parts of the same existence that are the foundation of Chinese philosophy and Taoism, one in necessity of the other.

And it is to this principle that the double soul of Ne Zha – The rise of the fire warrior responds. It’s bloody, there’s blood and tangible harshness. Some sequences of ferocious representations of extermination also appear (you certainly won’t find similar things in today’s Disney and Pixar). All this in contrast to a libertine attitude built on the childish and cheeky figure of Ne Zha, who is not spared gags involving urination and vomiting. Very low, venal and even vulgar registers, which in the time of a scene turn the page and flow into very profound dramatic surges, discarding themselves in pitched clashes with hundreds of characters on the screen and with a dizzying visual density.

We are not used to associating such peaks of tone with works designed to gross a lot. Films like this do us a good job of reminding us that out there, just behind the wall of our beliefs, there are immense countries and cultural horizons. And therefore immense markets with their own tastes, icons and social trends – after all, in this world everything boils down to the size of the markets, right? Of which we often know very little and of which we get even less. There is therefore something to take advantage of, to learn and be influenced, but also entertained by something different from the usual.

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