Over 4,000 filmmakers and 138 Chinese companies worked together to create the country's animated blockbuster film "Ne Zha 2," which entered the global top 10 club with a milestone 12.12 billion yuan (about 1.67 billion U.S. dollars) in receipts at the global box office as of Monday.
The animated film, which has surpassed the 2015 Hollywood film "Jurassic World" to secure a spot among the top 9 highest-grossing films of all time globally, has been hailed as a landmark achievement in Chinese animation, with its end credits listing 138 companies from across China involved in its production.
Their collective effort and dedication resulted in a visually stunning masterpiece that is captivating domestic and international audiences and has showcased the potential of collaborative animation.
Lumiere, a Zhejiang-based animation company that is part of Zhejiang Huaguoshan Culture Media, contributed to the movies visual effects, lighting rendering, and compositing for scenes inside the Tianyuan Cauldron. The team of over 30 members spent nearly a year perfecting these elements to deliver maximum visual impact.
"The scenes we worked on involved a lot of characters - about 1,000 in total. When Ao Guang unlocks the chains, and they dissipate, the chains and characters together exceeded 300 million polygons. During hardware rendering, the machines were pushed to their limits in terms of response time and duration," said Geng Chengyuan, visual effects director at Lumiere.
Another studio, Gudong Animation, took on the role of co-storyboard design for the film. Due to the confidentiality of the film's early production, the director had to rely on just three text scripts, limited concept art, and partial character designs to create the storyboards, which were then revised repeatedly.
"For the big scenes and the tiny Boundless Immortal casting spells, with incantations flying in the air, we had to consider the trajectory of each incantation. At the time, we used many different angles for the drawings. I thought it would be quick, but it took about two months to refine those four minutes of storyboarding," said Shen Jie, director of Gudong Animation Studio.
The film featured 1,948 special effects shots, accounting for over 80 percent of its total footage, giving audiences a thrilling "game-level challenge" experience and a satisfying "map-unlocking" sensation.
Over five and a half years, more than 4,000 filmmakers worked tirelessly to achieve perfection on screen. New technologies, such as 3D engines, virtual production, and AI-generated content, boosted animation efficiency and enabled seamless collaboration and rapid iteration across departments and roles, providing strong support for the film's creative vision.
"Before 2020, cross-regional online collaboration in the animation and visual effects industry was still an unfamiliar concept for many teams. But since 2023, large-scale online collaboration has become increasingly common, and the tools for it are more widely used. For projects like 'Ne Zha 2,' the advantage is that it can quickly gather significant production capacity in a short time," said Wang Lei, dean of the School of Animation and Digital Arts at the Communication University of China.
138 Chinese animation companies collaborate to make box-office smash Ne Zha 2
