Reanimating the Socialist Child—Queerly: The Sideways of a Chinese Animation Nezha naohai

IN THE BEGINNING—IS SUICIDE,

with a sword, by a child, in an animation, in one of my earliest movie memories.

I was shocked, captivated, obsessed. Four decades later, merely mentally picturing the scene still arrests my heart, undams my tears.

This scene remains so overwhelming because it ambushed me. Growing up in socialist China, going to block-booked movies was a student's obligation. With no trailer, no spoiler, not even offered a poster, I had no interest in a film called Nezha naohai (Prince Nezha's Triumph Against Dragon King, Wang Shuchen, Xu Jingda, Yan Dingxian, 1979). Who is Nezha anyway—a difficult name, sounding odd, barely even sensible as a name. Why should I care about someone with a nonsensible name doing something nonsensical like churning up the sea (the literal meaning of the Chinese title)? Little did I know that this pivotal scene of the child's suicide and subsequent rebirth would become a portal for my appreciation of the queering power within a patently individualistic child hero animated feature.

In the theater, I remained unengaged despite all the spectacular scenes of Nezha fighting and defeating the dragons and other anthropomorphized aquatic animals—until the scene of suicide. The freeze-frame extreme close-up of Nezha's large enraged eyes filling the screen drove into my heart the unbearable intensity of memories, despair, defiance, letting go, and grief, even as life is drifting away from Nezha's body.

Along with that shocking image, also ingrained in my sensorium are Nezha's parting words to General Li: "Daddy, I return to you your flesh and bones. You shall not be responsible for what I have done!" This is followed by Nezha crying out into the universe "Shifu!" (Master!) in a wide-angle long shot. In concert with torrential rain, cracking lightning, and rolling thunder, the child unleashes utmost despair and rebels against the blood lineage that locks everybody into relationships of indebtedness, relationships that demand conformity based on one's status as a descendant. To slash this trap, which conceptualizes one's corporeal body as the evidence of one's debt to progenitors, Nezha turns their back on their father, the audience, and the camera and slits their throat, a scene that ends in a freeze-frame.

With this finite cut and cut-off, time stops, raindrops hangs still, Nezha's companion deer and human family members are all caught suspended in motion, mouth agape in shock. The rushing background orchestration crescendos, then abruptly falls silent as if in mourning—and anticipation. A child has relinquished their "flesh and bones" to the parent and summarily canceled the debt.

Breaking the cosmic silence is a pluck of a Chinese pipa string instrument that cascades into agitated musical notes, as the human-born Nezha gazes at this world one last time. Those mortal eyes fill the screen (in the shot that opens this essay), their one tear congealing rage and grief, electrifying the screen. As the rushing pipa notes give way to mournful violins, Nezha's unrelenting gaze lap dissolves into the companion deer galloping midair in slow motion, followed by a shot of the child's hands groping, oneiric, for huntianling (a long red sash that sweeps the heaven topsy-turvy) and qiankunquan (a gold ring that unsettles the cosmos)—a pair of magic weapons given to them by Shifu. With one last tear rolling down their cheek, Nezha's eyes close. The child-shaped flesh and bones now lie flat, gently licked by the deer who has arrived with the weapons, too late. These magic weapons have enabled Nezha to defeat the dragons and have subsequently been confiscated by their father to forestall more troubles. This scene ends with a lap dissolve, and the child's body is gone, leaving behind a shining bead to be carried by a crane to Shifu.

WHAT COULD A CHILD HAVE DONE—

that requires a life for atonement, or rather, to save the father from being implicated? Per the film's narrative, Nezha has, with their powerful magic weapons, enraged the children...