New Gods: Yang Jian spins an intense god-tier fantasy out of a Cowboy Bebop riff

polygon.com:

This review of New Gods: Yang Jian originally ran in conjunction with the movie’s theatrical release. It has been updated for the film’s digital release. See platform availability below.

Fans of Ji Zhao’s terrific 2021 CG animated Chinese movie New Gods: Nezha Reborn might expect something similar from his follow-up, New Gods: Yang Jian. They’ll get part of what they came for, in terms of epic god battles, big operatic emotions, and elaborately beautiful visual design. But in every other sense, the second film is a massive departure from the first — not so much an expansion of the setting as a largely unrelated story in a completely different genre.

Nezha Reborn sets up a structure that seems designed to repeat endlessly, with endless variations: A struggling human protagonist learns that he’s the reincarnation of a mythic god. Zhao (director of the fascinating donghua movieWhite Snake) and screenwriter Mu Chuan give that story impressive specificity, with a sci-fi-tinged post-apocalyptic setting and a lot of complications around bringing ancient powers to a modern world. It’s easy to picture a series of New Gods movies as a Marvel Cinematic Universe-like setup for an eventual crossover, as old gods return to the mortal realm, start to reshape it, and eventually come into conflict.

But Zhao and Chuan’s follow-up largely leaves the mortal world behind, and instead hangs out in the realm of the gods, whose concerns feel much less relevant to a presumably human viewing audience. Yang Jian is a much more traditional Chinese fantasy epic. Its only noticeable link to sci-fi comes in its opening setup: a weirdly thorough pastiche of the anime series Cowboy Bebop. That’s a little bit of a disappointment.

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