Can Ne Zha 2 break through the wall between China and the West?

In 2014, I went on a two-week family trip to China. For a twenty-something who had only just left Europe, you can imagine what an experience it was to encounter firsthand a country, a culture and a way of life that was so different from what I knew, both from life in southern Europe and from the kind of culture and entertainment I consumed and still consume. That trip deeply affected my interest in Asia and Eastern culture in general, which I have since visited three more times, but you quickly realize that for a European without cultural or family roots, it is difficult to approach this way of looking at life.

How they eat, how they sleep, how they live, think, feel, interact, work, store, love and die. So, with all these concepts broadly describing a person’s life, China almost seemed like another planet to me more than a decade ago. And those barriers have shifted very little in that time, although lately I am beginning to feel cracks in the East-West wall.

And why exactly do I come here to talk about this? Well, because those cracks are not coming from a wave of media coverage, nor from politics, nor even from economics (at least not at first). The rift can only be bridged by finding common ground at the cultural level, in entertainment. Yes, we have social networks where we do the same funny dances or watch the same content on video platforms. Maybe we try to imitate each other in the way we dress or do our hair, but still miss certain elements, such as the way we approach topics like spirituality. We consume in a similar way, but our entertainment products are absolutely alien from one side of the fence to the other. And this is where the issue of money comes in.

Ne Zha 2, the coup of Chinese animation on the table

This week we witnessed a remarkable global phenomenon, with Ne Zha 2 being crowned the most profitable animated film in history. If you are reading this from the Chinese site Gamereactor, chances are I don’t need to tell you what Ne Zha is (other than the fact that you would have known about it before it was made into an animated film), because it is one of the most famous stories in the Chinese animation tradition: Xu Zhonglin’s Investiture of the Gods. For those of us unfamiliar with the work before this week, Ne Zha 1 (a 2019 animated film) tells the story of a sphere of immense power, the Chaos Pearl, which begins to devour all kinds of life and matter in the world. But an immortal manages to separate the sphere into two parts (an obvious allusion to the dual nature of all things, the main basis of Taoism) and from each of them a special being will be born. On the one hand, the reincarnation of the Dragon King (initially friendly) in Ao Bing, and on the other, that of the Demon Orb, whose essence will be transmitted to the newborn NeZha. The child, marked as a demon and with a curse that will kill him within three years, tries by all means to defy his fate.

The animated adaptation broadly tells that we all have the power to change our destiny within ourselves, even if the world is against us. It’s a good message, and that first 2019 film seems to have resonated well with Chinese audiences: $729 million at the box office, making it the most profitable non-English animated film of all time, and the second most profitable film of all time in China.

Six years and a reasonably successful, locally distributed spin-off, Ne Zha 2 arrives, and then the collective frenzy begins. The whole country flocks to theaters to see the animated film, and in just one month it has broken the $2 billion mark at the global box office, although there is a bit of a trick to this figure: less than $40 million of that $2 billion comes from distribution outside China. And so the question arises: how can the most profitable animated film in history be completely unknown in the West?

The answer is easy to write, but difficult to explain: an invisible wall between East and West. The distribution of entertainment and cultural products in the Asian country must be thoroughly controlled by the authorities, in addition to ruthless censorship and an unattractive model for foreign companies to invest there. Outside the borders, the situation is imposed not by deliberate censorship, but by unwritten market laws in which Chinese products are seen as having nothing implications for Western thought or interests, and if there is no business, they are never discovered by the general public.

There is no doubt that the story of Ne Zha 2 can be something fantastic and memorable, but if there is no bridge across the chasm that separates these different mentalities, there will always be one party missing out on the pleasure of the other.

The big door to understanding between China and the West: video games

Here’s my personal guess for that bridge: Asia is becoming even more prominent in today’s video game industry. In an area where Japan continues to struggle to remain the leading historical development power, South Korea and China are emerging as new contenders to share the pie. Korea has chosen to explore the video game market along with key foreign partners like Japan (in the case of Sony and the launch of Stellar Blade, or the emergence of its competitive side with League of Legends or StarCraft, from U.S. companies Riot and Blizzard, respectively ). But China has chosen to follow a different path. Leveraging their huge capital, the big Chinese companies (Tencent, NetEase, etc.) invested in well-known studios and developers in Europe, Japan and the United States. And for a while, this collaboration worked and flourished.

But with the bursting of the post-pandemic bubble and the current crisis in the industry, China has retreated into an investment of its own homegrown developments, only this time the projection is global. The success of Black Myth: Wukong, with 25 million copies sold worldwide as of August 2024, is proof that such great projects can also succeed abroad. However, I should add that Wukong, in addition to taking a popular genre like the Soulslike ARPG and the most famous Chinese pop culture character outside the country (Sun Wukong, the inspiration for Son Goku and Dragon Ball ) can be a standalone case, despite all the hype it has created. The Dynasty Warriors franchise, developed by Japan’s Omega Force and Koei Tecmo, has never managed to create such an impact, despite being the studio’s best-known (and most lucrative) musou franchise, in its 20 years of telling and reimagining “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” another hugely important Chinese folk tale.

There’s a promising horizon ahead, with other ARPGs like Phantom Blade Zero or Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, but I think I’ll stick to the examples of The Bustling World and Where Winds Meet. While the first two focus more on presenting action and a twisted vision of certain elements of folklore, Where the Winds Meet (which we first met at Gamescom 2023) aims to offer a title closer to myth, and also take advantage of another cultural phenomenon such as martial arts cinema or Wuxia. But if you want cultural immersion and to learn some history, the closest thing to reality is The Bustling World, a simulation RPG that still has no release date, but we should keep an eye on it.

We are in a time when China is very pervasive in our entertainment and therefore in a privileged position to share cultures. Ne Zha 2 may attract media attention in the short term, but I think the big race to the bottom currently depends on how Chinese studios understand the foreign market to present their stories to the rest of the world.