Animation’s all-time box office king Ne Zha II is now in English. It may still confuse you.

Those of us who habitually check box office charts the way normies pore over sports franchise rankings have been seeing a Chinese title perched immovably atop the “Worldwide” tab for most of 2025.

The animated epic Ne Zha II isn’t merely the year’s most blockbustin’ blockbuster, leaving also-ran family flicks such as the Lilo & Stitch remake and A Minecraft Movie in its dust by a margin of $900 million ($AU1.4 billion).

It’s also the highest-grossing movie in both the animated and non-English-language categories — in history.

And now it’s in English.

Some $21 million of this juggernaut’s roughly $2 billion global take came from the limited US release its subtitled version got last winter.

The newly dubbed version getting a wide US rollout marks American distributor A24’s bid to further boost what is already the fifth-highest-grossing movie ever — in any language, live-action or animated.

Ne Zha II was reportedly made for a thrifty $80 million or so, which is to say that anything more it earns stateside will be what Criterion Channel-subscribing, Cahiers du Cinéma-reading sophisticates call gravy.

Think of it as a sort of cultural imperialism in reverse. It wasn’t even a decade ago that American studios were increasingly tailoring Transformers and Fast & Furious sequels for Asian markets, where new entries in these long-running PG-13 franchises reliably bested their US grosses by a hefty margin.

To audiences unfamiliar with its roots in Chinese mythology, Ne Zha II plays like a mash-up of the fairy-tales-and-fart-jokes Shrek franchise and James Cameron’s retina-searing Avatar movies, wherein the human characters play second fiddle to various otherworldly creatures: aliens, ogres, wisecracking donkeys, etc. Or, in the case of Ne Zha II, gods and demons.

The brief spoken narration that opens this sequel won’t be enough to orient anyone who missed 2019’s Ne Zha, which played only 135 theatres in the United States but is available on most streaming platforms.

Screenwriter-director Jiao Zi adapted both Ne Zha films from a 16th-century Chinese novel whose title has been translated as The Investiture of the Gods.

As the sequel opens, an attempt to create new earthly vessels for disembodied spirits Ne Zha and his best pal, Ao Bing — a demon boy and a dragon, respectively, who lost their physical forms at the climax of the previous film — goes awry, forcing Ne Zha to carry Ao Bing’s consciousness along with his own in his still-settling new body.

While the two characters are sharing the same set of organs and limbs, they must complete three demon-hunting trials to attain immortality. (Yes, Ne Zha is a demon who hunts demons, the way Marvel’s Blade is a vampire who slays vampires.)

If they’re successful, they won’t just earn Ao Bing a body of his own; they’ll also . . . prevent his father from dispatching an army of dragons to destroy Ne Zha’s hometown of Chentang Pass, I think?

I’ll just say it: I was confounded from the opening moments, and only sporadically did I ever find my footing.

Admittedly, I could fit everything I know about ancient Chinese legends into a Bluesky post with characters to spare, but I’ve read Joseph Campbell’s mythological survey The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Certainly I recognised, as most viewers will, tropes and themes that have found their way into a couple of centuries’ worth of Western stories that have been exported around the world.

The new English-language voice cast, which includes Crystal Lee and Griffin Puatu as Ne Zha and Aleks Le as Ao Bing, is performing in the same outsize key we expect from American cartoons.

Michelle Yeoh, who plays Ne Zha’s human mother, Lady Yin, is probably the cast member most familiar to US filmgoers, but the Oscar-winner is in the movie for only a few minutes.

We don’t get many other handholds. A hundred minutes into this 143-minute odyssey, Jiao Zi is still introducing new characters, who get bilingual, documentary-style chyrons with their names as we meet them.

By that point, I had long since surrendered my campaign to track the dense latticework of allegiances, reversals and reveals, instead resolving to just let his film’s vibrant, imaginative world wash over me. (That spell was frequently broken by a surfeit of scatological humour, the lingua franca of kiddie-flick hilarity. An extended bit about a wizard and his guests accidentally being served urine to drink was the least disgusting of these. At the packed-with-families screening I attended, these gags absolutely killed.)

There’s no denying Ne Zha II is as visually stunning as it is narratively opaque. The character and environmental designs are both otherworldly in their originality and astonishingly lifelike, even when we’re looking at, say, a military-officer octopus brandishing a sword in each tentacle.

The digital oceans? So convincing you practically smell saltwater. And the way Jiao Zi and his animators re-create the photographic peculiarities of different types of lenses fully seals the illusion that his movie was shot rather than conjured from lines of code.

Alas, Ne Zha II runs about 45 minutes longer than a typical Pixar release, so even that go-with-the-flow posture eventually left me squirming. Your trans-Pacific mileage may vary.

Two and one-half stars. Unrated. At theatres in Australia August 28. Contains intense but not gory fantasy battle sequences and potty humour. 143 minutes.