Animation as Intertextual Cinema:Nezha Naohai(Nezha Conquers the Dragon King)

Abstract

This article is an intertextual reading of Nezha naohai (Nezha Conquers the Dragon King), the second cel-animated feature produced at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, the major animation film studio in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s until the 1980s. Released in 1979, the story of Nezha Conquers is an adaptation from three chapters of a popular Ming Dynasty 16th-century novel about a rebellious boy-god. The year Nezha Conquers the Dragon King is released, 1979, is a turning point for the hero in PRC cinema. Visual design for Nezha Conquers the Dragon King seems to be a combination of Osamu Tezuka's Astroboy and Chinese Communist sports propaganda. Chief director and screenwriter Wang Shuchen considered the film to be a return to fantastic subject matter after the Cultural Revolution. Nezha Conquers the Dragon King signaled a return to mythological themes in PRC film and ends with an elliptical, open-ended finale, suggesting the propensity for future social and cultural contradictions.

Calling for a Hero: The Displacement of the Nezha Archetypal Image from Chinese Animated Film Nezha Naohai (1979) to New Gods: Nezha Reborn (2021)

“…Meir Shahar ( 2015 ) uses psychoanalysis to map out the development of Nezha's story and examine its Oedipus plot. Sean Macdonald ( 2015 ) performs an intertextual reading of the animation Nezha (1979), arguing that Nezha's defeat of the Dragon King marks the return to mythological themes in Chinese animated films and exposes the propensity of future social and cultural struggles. In their study on the national style in Chinese animation, Cui ( 2006 ) and Du ( 2019 ) argue that Nezha (1979) forms part of the end of the stylistically uniformity or ‘national style,’ but also, the added value of well-crafted and internationally recognized ‘golden period’ (approximately 1950s–980s) within the subsided Shanghai Animation Film Studio and its cooperative model of socialist realism.…”

“…Although the film did not deliberately cater to the atmosphere of the times, the image of ‘breaking free from the shackles’ that the movie portrays coincided with the spiritual consumption of the times and became a visual symbol of that era. Nezha (1979) is a film which was clearly a break away from the ‘politicized cultural production of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)’ (Macdonald 2015 , 206). As Sun ( 2019 ) argues, the 1979 animated version still has a heavy influence on those people who grew up with it: ‘the values […], such as clear boundaries between good and evil, being independent and rebelling against the grown-up world, still heavily influence me today.’ However, Nezha the resister in this story does not yet have a completely individualistic, personal self-consciousness as he does in recent animated versions.…”

“…This is thus a heroic narrative of ‘sacrificing the individual and achieving the greater self’ that was common on the screen of that era, instead of taking the ‘I’ at the center as it appears today, i.e., the heroic story centered on resolving the conflict between the individual and the destiny. As argued by Macdonald ( 2015 ), Nezha (1979) marked a return to mythological leitmotifs in Chinese film and had an ambiguous, open-ended climax, suggesting the partiality for future social and cultural contradictions. Nezha (1979) ‘as a production […] capped the Cultural Revolution and signaled a simultaneous continuation and shift in the representation of the revolutionary hero’ (206).…”

“…Nezha (1979) ‘as a production […] capped the Cultural Revolution and signaled a simultaneous continuation and shift in the representation of the revolutionary hero’ (206). In this animated film version, Nezha can therefore be understood as a premodern politicized figure portraying modern opposing elements of the ‘hyper-politicized’ Cultural Revolution in its widespread supremacy over all segments of Chinese society (Macdonald, 2015 , 216). Nezha (1979) is a prime example of the appreciation and call for a traditional heroic image in a particular era.…”

“…Sangren ( 2000 ) has picked up on this latter point with regards to the original Nezha story, arguing that the mother serves simply as a creator of the son. In Nezha (1979) the emphasis on the struggle between Nezha and the Dragon King further leads to the diminishing of the mother’s role further, and even the father plays a subordinate role in this version (Macdonald 2015 ). Moreover, considering that the film was released in 1979 after the tempestuous times of the Cultural Revolution and on the threshold of China’s economic reform under Deng Xiaoping, the unstable relationship between Nezha and his father is not so much as father–son conflict, but more of an immature nasty boy and a ‘ political father-figure’ (Macdonald 2015 , 210, emphasis in original).…”