Chinese film, television, music

Temstar said:

You're damn right, fresh from Weibo:
View attachment 146877
Someone's daughter and her best friend just switched from cosplaying Elsa and Anna to Nezha and Aobing. This thing has enough of a gravitational pull that I strongly think it will bend the way Nezha's story is told from now on. Like how Nezha 1979 was the de facto canonical image before with the androgynous look and ripping out of tendon, from now Nezha and Aobing are friends and the alternative "he killed Aobing and then killed himself" telling will become the minority.

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TPenglake said:

Spoilers if you haven't seen the movie.

Spoiler

What I find even funnier on Chinese social media is all the parents who took their kids to see the movie and cried their eyes out together when Nezha's mom died, afterwards the parents promised to love their kids more and the kids promised to be more filial. See? The correct way to promote family values!

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Temstar said:

Yeah that too.
I also think it's funny because kids watching Nezha 2 will later in their life ask "Wait a second that cartoon I saw when I was young, were they just good friends or were they something else?"

People a bit younger than me had that same experience with that other Nezha cartoon were Nezha was "best friend" with Aobing's younger sister.

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coolgod said:

who is Aobing's younger sister?

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TPenglake said:

Besides the box offce milestone, the number of children in these photos and also just taking into consideration the Ne Zha franchises' core audience, it highlights another milestone in that now a large chunk of the world's adolescent population has other media characters to look up to besides Disney. I used to think this was trivial, after all childhood is just one part of life. We all get older, move elsewhere, and encounter new things, experiences that we internalize and morph into who we are as adults regardless of how our childhoods were, for better or worse.

And yet, one can't deny that since childhood is our foundational taste of life, the things that made us happy when we were young do in some ways stay with us and continue to influence us in indirect ways. Think about how as an adult you may no longer eat a certain food item you craved when young due to changing tastes or dietary reasons, but its still bound to conjure up good feelings in you if it was given to you by your parents whenever you did well in school or if you felt sad. This goes the same for media, like how I myself how may still have some sentimental feelings for an irrelevant island nation with more sheep than people just because of its association with a childhood favorite, the LOTR trilogy. Or a more obvious example of how Asian Americans carry a romanticism for Japan thanks to anime. Romanticism that lasts into adulthood, so much so most ABCs nowadays consider vacationing in Japan to be right of passage.

The effect that Disney's films have had on the world since their creation needs no explanation. One anecdote I would share is working with a Chinese immigrant engineer a while back who lamented about the lack of options of non-Disney movies to show his children and how familiar he ended up being with Disney characters as a result, eventhough he never watched that stuff back in China. In short, get them while their young and you'll have a stranglehold on their psychology no matter what kind of people they become in adulthood or what their views are. I'm not saying Chinese shouldn't show their children Disney movies, art is art and more exposure to it doesn't hurt. But what is important is to break the hegemony they've had on shaping the formative years of generations worldwide for close to a century.

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