NeZha is a protection deity of the Chinese traditional religion. It is believed that NeZha is based on the Hindu methodology, and relate to the son of Kubera. however, as a Chinese, we gain our knowledge of NeZha from a book called the FengShenYanYi, which is a novel about gods-and-demons that is written in the Ming dynasty. The book is set in the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BC), NeZha’s farther Lijing was a military commander in ChengTang and later became the king, NeZha’s mother is Lady Yin, she was pregnant for 3 years and 6 months before her son was born, NeZha was a ball of flesh when he was born. After he was born, his father think he is a demon and attacked the ball of flesh, and then NeZhan came out of the ball of flesh as a boy instead of infant, and he can even walk and speak immediately after he was born. After this, he became the student of the immortal Taiyi Zhenren. At the time, people of Chengtang will sacrifice food to the dragon king Ao Guang for rain, however Ao Guang wants to eat boys and girls instead of food and caught one of NeZha’s friend, in this case, NeZha was mad and fought with the subordinate of Ao Guang, so the dragon king later sent his third son to take care of NeZha but he was eventually killed by NeZha. Ao Guang was mad and threatened his family for flooding Chengtang, NeZha then committed a suicide and ‘carving up his own flesh and dismembering his bones’ to pay back his parent for giving birth to him. However, he was eventually brought to life again by his teacher.
The film that i am introducing today is loosely based on this story and called NeZha (2019) . It is a 3D animation film that actually was the highest grossing film film of all time in China. The plot in the film is slightly different to the actual story, but it helps to have a basic understanding of the original story since in China basically everyone knows the story of NeZha and the film was made with the assumption of people knowing the story.
In the film, NeZha was derived from a chaos pearl that is powerful good and evil at the same times. The pearl was then decided into two parts which represents the good and the evils, and the evil components of the pear was cursed that it is going to be destroyed in three years, Taiyi Zhenren was supposed to give the good part to Lijing to be born as his son Nezha, but accident happens, NeZha is born as the evil part of the pearl and have a demonic nature. The good component of the Pearl was stolen by Shen and eventually reincarnated as the Dragon King’s son Ao Bing. The film revolves around the discussion of whether people should surrender to their fate and stereotype. In this case, because NeZha was born out of the evil, people assume he is demonic, they distance his, scold him, not believe in him regardless of what he does. He was so let down and became friends with Ao Bing who eventually betrayed him. And in the final Battle with Ao Bing, he said that he is the master of his own destiny. The film also showed the heartwarming father and son relationship which is quite different to the original story of the enmity between them.
Overall, the film is definitely a very successful animation film , with a fun twist of the traditional Chinese methodology. People in Chengtang is actually very typical in the real life, they judge people with preconceived notion/ stereotype, and this forms a irrational belief of prejudice and eventually turned into discrimination. I do recommend people to watch this film enjoy this film and to find out what eventually happened between these characters, this film might look quite exotic to the non Chinese audience, but i guess this is the fun part of watching movie, to enjoy different culture.
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