Where do horns grow from: the main cartoon of the year was released in Russia
The highest-grossing animated film in history. The best fees of 2025 in the world. The highest-grossing film in Chinese history. Fifth (almost fourth) place in the list of the most successful films in history. "Nezha defeats the Dragon King" was released in Russia (Izvestia was the first to announce it back in February) and immediately showed a result comparable to the top Russian releases of the weekend. Whether it is worth going to the cinema immediately for a film event and what to expect from it is in the Izvestia material.
What is Nezha and who is Nezha?
The film's title is colorful, but somewhat mysterious. And the duration of two and a half hours can make you think. It's a phenomenon, but you never know what they're watching in China, what if it's too exotic for a Russian viewer?
A shot from the cartoon "Nezha defeats the Dragon King"
Yes and no. If you want, you can study the Internet and literature, there is a lot said about the ancient Chinese deity named Nezha (there are different spellings) and about how much has been filmed, written and drawn about him. All this will only make it more difficult to "enter" the cartoon, turning the release into an arthouse one, and this is not the case at all. Nezha looks more often than not like a Hollywood animated blockbuster with an oriental flavor, something like Kung Fu Panda, it is completely open to the world audience. Yes, there are too many heroes, you immediately get confused in their names, and the new cartoon is also a sequel to the 2019 hit, which was not officially released in Russia. Even today, it is not even available in online cinemas, although it can be found on the Runet.
But the creators of the cartoon seemed to be aiming at the global market right away, so for those who didn't know anything about Nezha, everything will be clear from the first scenes of the film. There are two ghost friends, the demonic child Nezha and the aristocratic youth, the son of the dragon king. In the prologue of the film, a kind wizard tries to return their bodies to the ghosts, but everything goes badly, so Nezhi's body gets to them alone. Personalities can switch to time.
Next, Nezhi's goal is to go to the gods and undergo a difficult initiation ceremony in order to receive immortality and a new body for a friend as a prize, so that everyone can start living their own way. Nezha is a comic character, much like a typical Jackie Chan character. The son of the dragon king is a somewhat arrogant aristocrat, but also a great warrior. This makes the adventure fun and dynamic, especially since no one should know the secret of two souls in one body.
A shot from the cartoon "Nezha defeats the Dragon King"
Along with this microplane, there is also a macroplane: clouds have literally gathered over Nezhi's homeland, the immortal gods are waging a war, raising the stakes in this battle, also literally, higher and higher, up to the clouds. Nezha will play a crucial role in this war.
That's basically it. If we ignore the dozens of characters, who are also "presented" to us by a separate title, from the intricacies of political intrigue and the subtleties of local rituals, the story here is much simpler than in the average Pixar hit. The evolution of the characters is insignificant, there are not very many nuances in their behavior, there is a lot of convention and little psychology, but there are a very decent number of locations, events and fierce battles, each of which does not repeat the other.
Here is the case when the rating of 12+ roughly corresponds to the content: younger children will not understand anything, and the amount of violence in the frame may be traumatic for them. But the film is quite accessible to teenagers and older. The main message here is about the same as in a Hollywood product: politicians lie, you can't trust anyone, you can rely on your family and friends. It is necessary not to live by lies, to challenge evil, and conscience will tell you what to do and how to do it. It couldn't be simpler.
Chinese viewers in Russia
At a screening in a Moscow cinema near Moscow State University, where I watched Nezhu immediately after its release, all the audience except me were Chinese. There are about twenty people in the hall, students, adults, one spectator with children. They came to watch the film in the Russian dubbing, because the Russian distributor Atmosphere Cinema did not release a version with the original sound and subtitles. Which is probably a mistake, because if the audience goes to the Russian "track" on a weekday, then there would be much more people in Chinese who still do not know the language well.
A shot from the cartoon "Nezha defeats the Dragon King"
The fact is that the Chinese audience is generally special. When it became clear that Nezha was starting to break one record after another in China following the results of the local New Year, a flash mob was launched on the country's online resources. Viewers who went to see the film once were encouraged to go again to help the release collect more. From the outside, it looks somewhat comical, reminiscent of a campaign to destroy sparrows, which crowds of people were not allowed to land on the ground.
And it would even be interesting to know how many viewers bought a ticket again, but did not go to the cinema. But the result is obvious: of its $2.2 billion, Nezha collected almost the entire amount in China, while other territories showed much more modest results. The film's normal collections in European countries are up to a million euros, and Asia outside of China also did not give the film much. The Chinese made Nezha a phenomenon, and it was not the phenomenal Nezha that conquered China and the whole world, this is quite obvious.
This loyalty was taken into account by our distributor.
—The Chinese Cultural Center actively participated in informing the public about the release of the film in Russia on its resources," Nadezhda Motina, president of Arna Media, told Izvestia. — We are especially grateful for the support of Mr. Feng Litao, Counselor-Envoy of the Chinese Embassy and Director of the Chinese Cultural Center. The release was also actively supported by the Chinese news agency Xinhua and other media outlets. After the release was announced in Russia, the producers received a lot of comments from the Chinese diaspora directly. Hopefully, they will be converted into sold tickets.
A shot from the cartoon "Nezha defeats the Dragon King"
The result will be more noticeable at the end of the weekend, but on Friday evening, Nezha was in fourth place in terms of collections, behind the domestic fantasy "Nightingale vs Muromets" and "Kraken 2", as well as another fantasy, just released "Bigfoot". At the same time, the fee figures are still very close to each other, they are approximately equal values in the range from 10 to 14 million rubles, and the leaderboard may change over the weekend. This is also in favor of Nezhi, especially if the Russian audience also tries out the Chinese novelty, and there our flash mob is not far away.
Why not, for example, set a goal to overtake the American collections of Nezhi, thus showing that we are better able to evaluate high-quality animation? The figure is quite impressive, in the United States, the film earned a little more than 1.5 billion rubles with our money, and with the fall of the dollar, the amount will become even more affordable. Jokes are jokes, but phenomena such as "Nezha" do not happen so often, the cartoon has already gone down in history. It's quite realistic to register there with him.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
