‘Ne Zha 2' review: A spectacular, dazzling feat of animation
Ne Zha 2 is out in India in its original Mandarin with English subtitles. The sequel is a thrilling, propulsive epic saga of filial duty, sacrifice and collaboration against a common enemy, presented through some of the most gobsmacking visuals ever seen in animated films.
The franchise is loosely based on the 16th-century novel Investiture of the Gods. Ne Zha has already inspired a slew of Chinese productions, including the animated Nezha Conquers the Dragon King (1979).
The first movie was the origin story of Ne Zha, who is the result of a divine boon. A celestial pearl is split into two elements, the Spirit Pearl and the Demon Orb, to contain its energies. According to a prophecy, the Spirit Pearl will be born as the child of the warrior Li Jing and his wife Yin.
The Spirit Pearl's bumbling guardian Taiyi is tricked by the wizard Shen into a swap. The Spirit Pearl is born as the underwater Dragon King's son Ao Bing, while Li Jing and Yin find themselves as Ne Zha's parents.
Ne Zha lives up to his demonic reputation. The boy with dark circles under his eyes and oversized teeth is despised in his kingdom, which only pushes him towards further havoc. Ne Zha's uncontrollable anger finds an outlet, and a higher purpose, when he meets Ao Bing.
Ne Zha 2 is vastly more ambitious in every way – the number of events and characters, the scale, the backdrops, the visual effects.
The sequel sees Ne Zha and Ao Bin teaming up against the Dragon King's wrath. Even as the Dragon King wages war on Ne Zha's kingdom, Ne Zha and Ao Bin journey to the heavenly abode of the Immortal sorcerer Wuilang to seek greater powers.
Densely plotted and relentlessly paced, the 144-minute movie pauses only for potty jokes and silly humour. There is so much going on at times that it's hard to take everything in at one go.
In the first film, the fantasy elements were grounded in relatable human characters. Ne Zha was every inch the stubborn, destructive and unreasonable last-born son endlessly running circles around his family, minders and Taiyi.
In Ne Zha 2, Jiaozi dispenses with character building and pulls out all stops for a spectacular display of his virtuosity in the animation medium. The gorgeously detailed frames inspired from Chinese design and the hectic battle scenes rival, if not surpass, big-budget Hollywood productions.
Several sequences linger in memory – Wuilang's jade palace that floats above the clouds, the Dragon King's underwater lair, the motifs of fire and water represented by Ne Zha and Ao Bing, the undulating swarms of rival armies in the extended climax. One of the most poignant scenes in an otherwise action-heavy film sees Ne Zha acknowledge his love for his mother. Jiaozi's ambition is staggering in its scope but eye-watering in other ways too.
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The Hindu
7 hours ago
- The Hindu
'Writing was never an ambition, only an accident': Sumana Roy on her favourite books and authors, and reading life
Published : Aug 17, 2025 10:17 IST - 13 MINS READ Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree (Aleph Book Company) and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford University Press), a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories, works of fiction; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. Her poems, essays, and stories have been published in The Paris Review, Orion, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Minnesota Review, Emergence Magazine, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places. She is now Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. Growing up in Siliguri at the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas, Sumana had access to fewer books and no bookstores except for some textbooks. She was formed, as she says, by the everyday—more by life than books and libraries. Drawn to reading through the kindness of others—books borrowed from teachers, books purchased by her father at his bank job—she also scavenged some magazines like Reader's Digest, National Geographic, and Sportsworld from the kabadiwala (scrap collector). More than reading and being immersed in the world of books, she was learning to listen to the way people spoke around her, and 'the way they spoke about their everyday lives, with humour, anger, joy, affection, and distance'. In her later reading life, she was especially drawn to poetry and essays, which remain central to her reading and writing. Writing, she emphasises, was an accident, a byproduct of circumstance rather than a sole ambition. From How I Became a Tree to Out of Syllabus, her books show her desire and fascination with the 'background': plants, animals, clouds, the architecture of houses and cities. In this interview, Sumana Roy reflects on growing up amid a scarcity of books during her provincial childhood, the joy of serendipitous reading, the books and poems she returns to again and again, staying true to imaginative instincts, and why writers should not follow market-driven literary trends. Excerpts: Also Read | I was writing unwritten history: Easterine Kire Tell us about your relationship with books and reading while growing up in Siliguri. How did your roots in the Himalayan foothills influence your imagination? There were almost no 'storybooks' in our house. There were two reasons for this: my parents had an extremely meagre income; there were no bookstores, none besides the two bookshops called Popular Book Depot and Educational Book Corner, from which our school textbooks were bought. The few books that my brother and I read over and over again came from Mrs Nora Bansal, our English teacher in the second grade, and Kamalesh Jethu, my father's friend, who, when he visited us from Calcutta, carried books in Bangla and music cassettes for us. Occasionally, during the library period in school, we were allowed to borrow a book. Mrs Bansal's children let us borrow the Famous Five and Nancy Drew from their collection. When the Rabindra Rachanabali became available to buy, my father, who worked at United Bank of India—the bank through which one had to buy them—bought the set for us. I began reading them after my ICSE—alone at home, with nothing to do, I first read the stories, which, at that time, I didn't like very much, then the poems and songs and essays. The Sarat Rachanabali had arrived before that, when I was in middle school. It was a very fat book, impossible for children to hold. My father read us the stories of Lalu on Sunday afternoons, after a lunch of rice and mutton curry. I remember another set of books—Tell Me Why, a series of sturdy hardbacks answering questions about the universe. My brother and I read one page over and over again: 'Why does the moon travel with us wherever we go?' That question has stayed with us, as I discovered recently when we were in Kashmir, and both of us looked at the full moon in the Pahalgam sky and then at each other. I was, like most hungry people in such a situation, an omnivore. I'd read everything that came to me. And much of this reading material was foraged from the kabadiwala—old copies of National Geographic, Reader's Digest, Sportsworld, anything affluent families had once read and then sold to him. Having nothing more than my neighbourhood and my town, fringed by the Himalayas, I was formed by the everyday in a way I would come to recognise only much later. I suppose I was formed more by life, its contingency, than I was by books and libraries. How have your reading tastes and preferences evolved over the years—from moving out of Siliguri after college and studying at the University of North Bengal to becoming a writer and academic? I'm sure I've discovered writers and provinces of thought and taste as I've become older. It might have to do with changes in place, friendships, and a recognition—and even coming to terms with—one's self as a thing beyond redemption. The poem and the essay continue to be my favourite homes, both as a reader and a writer. As a teacher—I'm not sure I want to be identified as an 'academic'; the word carries a weight which makes me feel like a fraud—I am now able to teach courses on aesthetic practice that I couldn't before, when I was teaching in Bengal's government colleges, where one has to teach a centralised syllabus. That has given me the freedom to experiment with thought systems through pedagogy. I'm teaching a course on the relationship between the rasas and the elements in the coming term, a subject that has come to preoccupy my thoughts for more than a decade now. Is there a particular memory from your childhood reading life in Siliguri that had a lasting impression on you? That I was always short of reading material, that I read the same things over and over again because of that deprivation—this is my strongest memory of my reading life as a child. To flatter myself, I could say that this made me pay attention to language. I don't know whether that's true. As a teenager, entering college—and its library—would turn that deprivation into gluttony. I read whatever I could find. By accident, I discovered the shelves of literary criticism first, and I took that to be literature. I read these books as one did novels and thrillers. I've stayed addicted to reading about the articulation of the reader or viewer's experience of being immersed in a text. Tell us about the books and authors from your early years of reading and how they influenced you as an aspiring writer? I must clarify that I had absolutely no ambition to be a writer. Like most things in my life—studying literature, coming to love, growing gardens, teaching—writing too was an accident, a byproduct of the circumstances I found myself in, rather than a roaring ambition that had set me on a path. I read everything as literature—all my school textbooks, including, say, mathematics. I wish I could say—like my students often do—that I read a lot as a child. I didn't, and I'm therefore not a good example for writers who've discovered themselves through reading. Also, reading has taken on a moral life today—it's not just the simplistic arithmetic that feeds our understanding of what makes a 'good reader', the assumption that a 'voracious reader' must be, by some kind of alchemy brought about by the reading experience, transformed into an empathetic citizen. My writing has been influenced by the way people around me spoke, the lives they led, and, more importantly, the way they spoke about their everyday lives, with humour, anger, joy, affection, and distance. You write about the natural environment, plant life, and how we interact with our natural world. What draws you to these ideas? I write about the world I live in or want to live in. In this world, the human—a person such as myself—is not at the centre. I'm a minor figure there—it is populated by plants and animals, not as they are in a fantasy novel, but as I see them. When I watch a film, quite often, my eyes are taking in a tree without leaves or, as they did last night, a nasturtium plant outside a house that hasn't been watered for some time. I am drawn to what has come to be called the 'background'—in art, in manuscripts, in public policy, in the architecture of our houses and cities, in everything. This comes from a natural instinct, by which I mean this manner of experiencing the world, noticing walls, doormats, earthworms, flies, clouds, and the shape of the wind. In writing about them, I'm only following my instinct, my curiosity about them. In a world where everyone must be a 'follower', I am a follower of what you're, in shorthand, calling the natural world. As someone who also teaches literature and creative writing, what advice would you give to aspiring writers, especially from small towns and villages who may not have easy access to quality literature or literary mentors and may not be writing in English? I am uneasy about giving and taking advice, and so I can only share what I have tried to live by. It is this—that we should not be bullied by 'literary trends', by what the market wants us to produce. We should give ourselves the freedom to write what we want to, irrespective of the discouragement and neglect we might receive from publishers. Honesty to one's aesthetic, to write what one likes to read, to remain an artist instead of turning into content creators in the demand-and-supply routine—it might be hard to live by this, to survive as a writer in a culture where one is bullied by marketing teams telling you what to write and sales teams telling you that your books don't sell. But it'll be worth it—for yourself. Which books or writers, Indian or international, do you find yourself returning to? What draws you to their work? I re-read my favourite books and poems often. One book that I've been mesmerised by ever since I was four years old is Sahaj Path. I have a soft copy of the first edition on my phone, and I still look at it in wonder when I'm exhausted—the form of the book, of the page in particular, the distribution of word and image on it, and the rhythm of everyday provincial life caught in it by Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Basu. It's a primary school primer, and it would inaugurate a way of thinking about life—and art—in four-year-olds that has now been lost. Who are your comfort reads—books and authors that help at difficult moments? I like to laugh. In the last few years, I've found myself reading two writers who happen to have begun life as provincials. Rajshekhar Basu and Shibram Chakraborty still make me laugh a lot. Could you name a few books you've gifted recently? Two books that I've gifted a few times recently are The Five Senses by Michel Serres and Love's Work by Gillian Rose. I gave a copy of Nandalal Bose's Vision and Creation to my closest friend a few months ago. Have you discovered any lesser-known or overlooked authors or books later in life that you wish you had read earlier? What was unique about their writings? Like many, I did not grow up reading writers around me. In my case, it has been poets writing from northern Bengal. Growing up isolated from any sense of literary culture, pestered by an education system that turned Bangla into a 'second language', I read almost exclusively in the English language. I had no idea about the rich body of literature around me. Only a couple of hundred kilometres away was Amiya Bhushan Majumdar. But I wouldn't begin reading him until my early thirties. There's an elastic intelligence in the experiments he makes as a prose writer. I wish I'd discovered his work before, as I wish I had Manindra Gupta. How does one write such sensuous prose, like he does in Akshay Mulberry? What are you currently reading and enjoying? Are there any contemporary books—fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—you would recommend to others? I've been reading Saswati Sarkar's poetry in Bangla, The World According to David Hockney, and finishing Rob MacFarlane's Is A River Alive? Adil Jussawalla's Soliloquies (Thayil Editions), written when he was eighteen, has just been published. I don't recommend reading lists to anyone, but this book might be of interest to your readers, particularly those who are curious about our literary history—along with Jussawalla's poem/play, there's also an interview with him, and photos I hadn't seen before. Which Indian writers are, in your opinion, brilliantly exploring the inner lives of small towns and provincial life? Any such books recently or previously published that deserve a wider readership and recognition? It's my belief that most of our literature, whether modern or pre-modern, emerged from a provincial temperament. I have not had the opportunity to read literature in languages besides Bangla, Hindi, Nepali, and English. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Adwaita Mallabarman, Manik Bandopadhyay, Indra Bahadur Rai, Amiya Bhushan Majumdar, to begin with. Contemporary Bengali poets writing from the provinces, in northern Bengal, Purulia and Midnapore, have been writing some extraordinary poetry. Also Read | I started writing to challenge patriarchy: Banu Mushtaq In the current literary culture of India, what would you like to see change or get more attention, such as more quality translations of literature originally written in regional languages? I would like 'literature' to get more attention. Any kind of literature that comes with an adjective to announce its distinctiveness, from the need to blurb itself, alienates me at the beginning. It is quite wonderful that our literatures are being translated into English. I wish there was more translation between our languages. And even more than that I wish that the characterisation of translation as a kind of religion, an act of purification, with Anglophone Indians often saying 'I only read Indian literature in translation now' would stop. Literature's been hijacked for various agendas, both by the Right and the Left. I wish for us to be able to read for pleasure alone. Where there is joy, conversion will happen easily. We will no longer have to be spoon-fed worldviews. Imagine if you could invite three Indian writers—living or dead—to a dinner or tea party at your home. Who would you choose and why? And what conversations would you like to have with them? No one. I feel nervous and awkward among writers and academics. I have now become used to eating most of my meals by myself. I listen to music or watch baby videos on Instagram while eating. I think that has helped my digestion in a way I imagine eating with writers might not. Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist and writer based in Kashmir. Bookmarks is a fortnightly column where writers reflect on the books that shaped their ideas, work, and ways of seeing the world.
Time of India
8 hours ago
- Time of India
Netflix has a China problem, and it is called "China's Netflix"
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Hindustan Times
9 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Kseniya Alexandrova: 5 facts about the former Miss Universe contestant
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