Ne Zha 2 is Chinese movie that has already broken records in the animated movie field. Directed by Yang Yu, Ne Zha 2 is the highest grossing animated movie of all time. As someone who had no clue about Ne Zha until the box-office numbers, I was curious to know why this movie has made so much money around the world. Especially when the first movie didn’t make a huge splash like this one has.

Anyway, following the events of the first movie, Ne Zha 2 is about the main character, Ne Zha, goes on a journey to give his friend, Ao Bing, his body back. While the concept is simple, this movie expands on the mythology of the first movie with the characters and the world while having many fights in between.

Starting with the positives, the animation in this movie is a HUGE step above the first movie, the characters and world look so much better. Sticking with the fights and to say how great they look, the fight in the rain looked amazing and better than most animated movies. Next, the character development in this movie is phenomenal, you understand the characters better with this movie and as an example, Shen Gongbao is fleshed out really well in this movie, making one of the best characters in this movie. The world building gets fleshed out really well with all the new characters and trails that Ne Zha has to go through.

With the mixed, the emotional parts of this movie, really didn’t do anything for me. I can understand if they work on other viewers, but for me (At least without rewatches of the original and this movie) they didn’t make me feel the emotion. This movie is two and a half hours long, but this movie feels like its five hours. This is in the mixed because they do soooooo much with that runtime via story, world building, fights, and character development that my opinion could change on that.

Overall, this was a great movie with a few small issues and an improvement over the original. Everything the original does, this movie does it better and then some. I’ll give this movie a 4.5/5 with me now understanding why it’s making so much money at the box office.