Ne Zha was a proper great film from last year. A Chinese animated flick that set records within the Chinese film industry, a highly entertaining piece of mythology on film, and a feature that I saw on official detail for FilmInk and was quite impressed with. So you can imagine how excited I was to learn that Beijing Enlight Pictures seems to be preparing for a shot at a cinematic universe, with today’s film being set up by Ne Zha’s post-credits scene and taking place within the same world. And honestly, even with how much I liked Ne Zha, I think I like this film just that little bit more.
The animation isn’t being handled by Jiaozi’s Chengdu Coco Cartoon studio this time around, and honestly, it kinda shows. It doesn’t have that breathtaking grandeur and eye-popping fidelity that made Ne Zha as impressive as it was. However, what Coloroom et al. provide here is more than adequate, providing a quite gargantuan scope to the story, the locales and pretty much every living thing within them. Like, to the point where the flowers have more personality than a lot of animated films I tend to cover on here. The action scenes are positively delightful in just how energetic they are, the character designs employ a lot of angular composition to give the film its own identity, and holy shit, the Nine-Tailed Fox is legitimately creepy, looking like the furrier version of something Eldritch.
As for the literal personalities we follow throughout, the story (much like Ne Zha) is adapted from Xu Zhonglin’s Investiture Of The Gods, where the titular Jiang Ziya has been banished from Heaven after he failed to kill a Nine-Tailed Fox demon that had been waging war against the gods. Jiang himself could’ve been a god, but not until he lets go of what everyone keeps insisting was an erroneous vision that made him spare the Fox. And ten years later, he and his bodyguard Shen Gongbao question what good he’s doing by holding onto the mortal realm. That is, until Jiang encounters that very vision in the flesh, in the form of Xiao Jiu, a young girl who is bonded to the Fox.
Yeah, a lot of the story is built on the back of Chinese folklore, and while I can forgive Western audiences for not entirely getting what’s going on here… have to admit, a lot of what’s in this thing appealed to my Taoist sensibilities. Jiang himself is a popular Taoist character in Chinese literature, and this certainly makes a good case for why that is. A man who preferred truth and knowledge over a place amongst gods, the notion of mortal concerns holding men back from achieving the divine is a recurring one within a lot of Chinese philosophies, and when paired with the amnesiac and seemingly cursed Xiao Jiu, the two form a certain yin-yang buddy dynamic, serving as the more contemplative sibling of Ne Zha. I mean, there is literally one instance of a character pissing into something in this film and nowhere else, just for comparison.
Where the narrative gets interesting is, weirdly enough, where it starts to overlap with quite a few other Chinese flicks I’ve covered on this blog before like Zhong Kui and Journey To The West. It’s yet another showing of the divide, and even warfare, between the realms of Heaven, Hell, and Earth, where no one side is shown as entirely good or evil. On the godly side of things, the film almost laughs at how easy it is for mortal men to be deified and turned into gods, a fact that makes the later plot developments that much murkier to process. And on the demonic side of things, much like it is with Judeo-Christian theology, ‘evil’ tends to be a matter of convenience, a way of uniting people if only to turn against the same enemy.
And Jiang Ziya, over the course of the film, rejects both of those ideas. He rejects this simplistic all-or-nothing approach to morality and that some beings intrinsically have more worth than others. This itself speaks to one of the fundamental aspects of Taoism: That all things, from the source that all matter originates from, to the forms that matter takes, to the state it enters when energy abandons it, are one and the same. It is all Tao, and everything from the highest decree of Heaven to the smallest motes of dust operates in rhythm with that source. And as highlighted in this film, beings are no different. With gods, demons, and mankind at war with each other, Jiang Ziya rejects the idea that any one of those three are more worthy of salvation than the others. All are equal, all deserve their peace, and all deserve to be free from divine intrusion.
As much as I could extoll how great the visuals are, how vibrant the voice acting is, or just how adorable Four-Alike, Jiang’s pet familiar, is, it’s the film’s spiritual content that affected me the most. It’s the same kind of heaven-shaking awe of Ne Zha, but refined through a more mature tone and essentially serving as the opposite side of that film’s coin. Ne Zha was all about the idea of inherent evil and fate and just how unreliable those concepts ultimately are, whereas this is about inherent good and ascendence and whether godliness can be attained with clean hands. It’s the kind of soul-enriching experience that I wouldn’t trade anything for, and it felt like a step I needed to take on my road to understanding Tao. Divinity, adieu.
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